April | 2013 | Earthquake Words/Erdbeben Wörter

10/04/2013

Daily Post

Second Week Anniversary

As I did last week on the first anniversary, I will once again make earthquakes the topic of my post. This week I want to mine the idea that earthquakes have different magnitudes to see where it takes us in terms of interpreting the magnitude of particular cross-language differences on the learner. In other words, can we rank words, phrases and grammatical rules in terms of the degree to which they shake up our mental worlds?

Most people are likely to have heard of the Richter Scale for measuring the magnitude of earthquakes. While it is named for one just of its co-inventors, it was born of a collaboration between Beno Gutenberg and Charles Richter. According to Wikipedia, Gutenberg was born in Germany and came to the US in 1930 to take a job at Cal Tech where he met Richter. Although I wasn’t able to find out if Richter had German ancestors (he was born in Ohio which has a large German-American population), in German der Richter means “judge” which seems fitting as a name for a scale that allows one to judge the intensity of an earthquake.

The Richter Scale is a logarithmic one, which is explained by the US Geological Survey as follows: “Because of the logarithmic basis of the scale, each whole number increase in magnitude represents a tenfold increase in measured amplitude; as an estimate of energy, each whole number step in the magnitude scale corresponds to the release of about 31 times more energy than the amount associated with the preceding whole number value.” To put this another way, an earthquake that measures a 4 on the Richter Scale is ten times stronger than one that measures a 3, 100 times stronger than one that measures a 2 and 1000 times stronger that a 1. Now, while I do feel that different challenges in learning German are of different intensities, I am not so sure that the logarithmic part is a good fit!

To rescue comes the Modified Mercalli Magnitude Scale which describes an earthquake in terms of what people experience. I will now proceed to make a tongue-in-check adaptation of this scale to the language learning context.

Level I: Instrumental – small differences between languages can be measured but are only noticed under very, very, favorable conditions such as having the dictionary (the instrument) open to precisely the page which contains the word causing the disturbance.

Level II: Weak – differences between languages noticed only by sensitive people, registered in the mind only (indoors and on the upper stories). Poorly grounded words/phrases/grammatical rules may be most affected (delicately suspended objects such as chandeliers may swing).

Level III: Slight – differences between languages noticed by many more people internally although they may not associate this internal feeling with linguistic interaction in which they are engaged (indoors, especially on the upper stories; many do not recognize it as an earthquake).

Level IV: Moderate – differences between languages noticed internally by many or all (indoors) and a reaction appears on the faces in or in the body language of a few (outdoors). There are some blank expressions of the faces of listeners and they may make disturbing sounds such as Wie, bitte?, however the linguistic interaction suffers no permanent damage (objects shake noticeably, walls make cracking sounds and dishes and windows rattle noticeably).

Level V: Rather Strong – differences between languages noticed internally by most or all and a reaction appears on the face or in body language (outdoors). There may be damage to the linguistic interaction and in a few cases people will be frightened enough to run away (dishes and windows may break, damage to buildings is possible).

Level VI: Strong – differences between languages noticed by all internally and this shows up in facial expressions and body language; many people will discuss these feelings (felt by all indoors and out, many will run outdoors from fright). If the grasp of a word/phrase/grammatical rule was not sturdy to begin with, there may be some damage, however other areas of language competence are slightly or not at all affected (damage slight to moderate in poorly built structures, none to slight in all others).

Level VII: Very Strong – differences between languages become so noticeable that it can be difficult to sustain the linguistic interaction (difficult to stay on one’s feet), books or pens may be set aside, conversation may falter. There is light damage even to words/phrases/grammatical rules that are well-learned and those less well-learned may sustain a considerable hit.

Level VIII: Destructive – differences between languages become so noticeable that while the best learned words/phrases/grammatical rules may not be impacted, there can be partial collapse of some words/phrases/grammatical rules, and, for those that were shaky to begin with, the damage can be extreme (brick buildings receive moderate to severe damage). Pens and books are thrown down, conversation may cease (chimneys, factory stacks, columns, monuments, walls, etc. may fall).

Level IX: Violent – differences between languages become so noticeable that panic begins to set in and there is an impact on all language structures not matter how well learned. The mother tongue may not be immune and errors from one language can infiltrate the other (some buildings may be shifted off foundations; walls can fall down or collapse).

Level X: Intense – differences between languages become so noticeable that errors begin to become the norm rather than the exception (large landslides) making the linguistic interaction very difficult to sustain.

Level XI: Extreme – differences between languages become so noticeable that things start to get very quiet, little or no linguistic interaction is possible (few, if any structures remain standing; numerous landslides, cracks and deformation of the ground).

Level XII: Catastrophic – differences between languages become so noticeable that no linguistic interaction is possible (total destruction – everything is destroyed).

I can’t see giving each of my post a rating on this scale, but I can imagine keeping the image of a swinging chandelier at the ready for those times when I get feeling that it would be better to “run outside” – most people won’t be noticing anything, much less thinking that the ground is shifting beneath their feet.

Tagged Beno Gutenberg, Cal Tech, chandelier, Charles Richter, language differences, language traps, magnitude, Modified Mercalli Magnitude Scale, Ohio, Richter Scale

09/04/2013

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Daily Post

Oy Weh!

das Weh – “sorrow, grief, woe – especially psychological/emotional/mental pain;” elevated style (gehoben)
weh – “sore (painful)”

Most of the words that can be formed using Weh are concrete indicators of where it hurts, but there are two that I like a lot that indicate a different sort of pain: das Heimweh – “homesickness” or “nostalgia” and das Fernweh – “wanderlust.” I was intrigued to see that one discussion on dict.cc suggests that these two words opposites. I hadn’t really thought of them that in way before but it makes sense, perhaps even more so because of Weh connection?!

Where weh appears most often though is in the verb weh tun – “to hurt.” It is one of a family of rather tricky verbs where you are required to use the dative case (if you remember English grammar lessons, this is something like the indirect object). This means the personal pronoun ich becomes mir, du becomes dir, er becomes ihm, and so on, for verbs in this category. This results in constructions that seem very natural to native speakers of German and rather odd to those of us coming to the language from English:

Mir tun die Füße weh – “my feet are aching”
Mir tut alles weh – ‘I’m sore all over”

Both of these throw me off but the second is much more challenging as in the translation “I” is the subject (nominative case) but in German it is rendered as mir (dative case – “me” – which is also the accusative form or direct object form in English).

Often in idiomatic constructions that require the dative, translations include a “to” or a “for” such as Das ist mir unmöglich – That’s impossible (for) me – or Das ist mir besonders interessant – “That’s especially interesting (to) me” – or Es fällt mir ein, dass… – “It occurs to me that…” (in this last case, the non-native speaker can run into even more trouble as here the es – it – is optional). Knowing this fact about the translation is a bit of a double-edged sword, however. It makes using the dative feel a bit better as in English prepositions do have objects, but it means that if you are translating in your head before you speak, you may add an unnecessary preposition to go with that mir. And if you were to choose für to represent that “for,” you may sink even deeper into the mire because für requires an accusative object rather than a dative object which for “I” is mich!

I hope your head isn’t aching too much, if so tut mir leid!

Tagged accusative, case, das Fernweh, das Heimweh, dative, I, ich, me, mich, mir, prepositions, to hurt, weh tun

08/04/2013

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Daily Post

Take that!

I came across an interesting quiz the other day. It is designed to help German speakers avoid potential errors when speaking English. The example that made me laugh out loud was:

Was heißt „I am an undertaker“?
a. Ich bin Unternehmer.
b. Ich bin Leichenbestatter?

The answer is b. Die Leichen are “corpses” and Leichen- can be a prefix meaning “funeral” or “mortuary” or “cadaveric.” Der Bestatter also means “undertaker” as well as “mortician” and “funeral director” and comes to us by adding the -er suffix to the stem of bestatten – “to bury” or “to inter.” A good translation for option a. would be “I am an entrepreneur” – someone who undertakes to start a new company. (Note that this example also introduces the translation challenge of knowing when an article is needed. In English, to state your profession you must include the article “a” or “an.” In German, to be correct, you must not.) Der Unternehmer is formed in a fashion similar to der Bestatter: you start with the verb nehmen – in this context “to take” – add the -er suffix to the stem to get the nonword *Nehmer – “taker” – and then add the prefix unter-. While *Nehmer does not appear to be a word, it is productive, appearing in 14 compounds. For example, it appears in der Darlehnsnehmer – “borrower – someone who takes out a loan;” in der Zeitnehmer – “timekeeper – some one who takes a measurement of the time something takes;” in der Geiselnehmer – “hostage-taker;” and in der Sicherungsnehmer – “risk-taker” (or “secured party”).

Having seen all these, what they jumped into my head was der Teilnehmer – “participant” or the person who takes part. One meaning of der Teil – “part” – would also to support this. However, we are actually back to the -er plus verb stem as teilnehmen means “to participate” (partizipieren also exists, it is even given the designation gehoben by dict.cc – “an elevated style” – interesting that the loan word is considered the elevated style…) or “to take part.”

I hope there were a few take-aways for you from this discussion of how German compounds can be taken apart as well as a sense of how you can be taken in by this process, which can lead to mis-takes.

Tagged article, bury, entrepreneur, funeral, nehmen, suffix, taker, undertaker

07/04/2013

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Daily Post

Dead satisfied

Yesterday I visited Ohlsdorfer Friedhof. If you weren’t looking carefully, you might miss that this is a cemetery. It is laid out much more like a park or arboretum and is so large that there are bus lines that run through it to take you between different chapels and different sections. It lives up the Frieden part of its name in that it is a place of “peace” and “tranquility” (note that Fried, a delightful false friend if there ever was one, is not word in German as far as I can tell; but when I type the letters F-R-I-E-D, I frequently add an N, which makes sense for English but not for German). I doubt, however, that anyone ever imagined a “yard” or “courtyard” – two of the meanings for der Hof – anything like this size (it is apparently the largest parkland cemetery in the world).

And then, suddenly, into my head came one of the possible translations of “happy” – zufrieden – that I shared in the post Happy-go-lucky. I had learned this as meaning something closer to “satisfied” or “content” than “happy” and the der Frieden connection suggest another possible rendering: “at peace.” Then, I got to wondering about that zu. I started scanning the zu section of the dictionary and before I tired of it discovered only a few adjectives with what looked like the zu– prefix (z.B., zudringlich – “pushy” (dringend – “urgent(ly)” or “strong(l)y” or “absolutely”)and rather a lot of verbs including zufriedenlassen – “to leave someone in peace” or “to stop bothering someone” and zufriedenstellen – “to satisfy, content or sate someone.”

Therefore, I got to wondering if perhaps there was a verb frieden that might have been the source for zufrieden. While I could not find a frieden (apologies to James Taylor for the very bad partial, cross language pun), canoo did offer some interesting insights on word formation via conversion! They explain two sorts of ways in which you can make an adjective from a verb. The first is by suffixation (die Suffigierung). There are five types of suffixation options, I’ll only the simplest option for this post: drop the -en ending and add either -bar, –(e)rig, –haft, –ig, –isch, –lich and –sam. For example, ärgerlich – “annoyed” or “cross” from ärgern – “to annoy.” The second method is even more direct, conversion (die Konversion): you use the present or the past participle. For example, ein überwältigendes ‘Nein” – “a resounding ‘No’ ” – or gefüllte Oliven – “stuffed olives.”

I hope that this leaves you both satisfied (or satt) and hungry for more Earthquake Words.

Tagged adjectives, content, conversion, Friedhof, participle, peace, satisfied, suffixation, verbs, word formation, zufrieden

06/04/2013

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Daily Post

What’s in a Name?

After spending yesterday with das Glück, I became a bit curious about the name of the street where I live – Gluckstrasse – because to the non-native ear this sounds like it might be Glückstrasse. Instead, it is named for the composer Christoph Willibald Ritter von Gluck (1714-1787). One contextual clue that Gluck rather than Glück was involved, is that to get to Gluckstrasse you make a turn off Wagnerstrasse. Now it could be der Wagner, the “cartwright” or “wainwright” but I’m guessing it isn’t because even in 1881 Wagner (Wilhelm Richard, 1913-1883) was better known as a composer than as a profession! (In fact, this site claims that he is the most influential composer who ever lived.)

This led me to do a bit of research on my own family name, Hirs(c)h, which happens to be German. I found several interesting origins in the Duden Lexicon der Familiennamen: Herkunft unde Bedeutung von 20 000 Nachnamen (and no, I’m not getting a commission but perhaps I should look into this…). The first entry indicates that the name comes as a result of being a hunter by profession. From what I can understand of the additional information given, the deer is considered both curious and equipped with secret knowledge (for more on the deer as a symbol see this site on “the sacred hart”). I’m not sure hunter is a good fit for me, but if I think about hunting in the metaphorical sense and then add to it this bit about curiosity and secret knowledge, then I do see a resemblance. The second entry suggests that the name dates back to 1304 when a Bürger from Worms called Jacobus took this name. Which in a roundabout way is related to the third entry which offers what is most likely the source of my name, the Bible.

Der Hirsch appears in Genesis 49:21, one verse in the Blessings of the Sons of Jacob:

“Naphtali is a deer let loose;
He uses beautiful words.” – New King James Version

Naphthali ist ein schneller Hirsch
und gibt schöne Rede. – Luther Bible 1912

As a writer, I like the reference to words here (especially coupled with the curiosity and secret knowledge from above!). According to this Jewish encyclopedia site, there are a number of variations on Naphtali: Cerf, Harris, Harrison, Hart, Herschell, Hershkovitz, Hertz, Hertzen, Hertzl, Herz, Herzl, Hirsch, Hirschel, Hirschkovitsch, Huzka, Zewi. I wonder if my grandfather had had this encyclopedia to hand when he was searching for a name change in order to appear less German (his metal-plating factory did 100% war work in WWII), he might have chosen Harrison or Hart?

Tagged Bible, Christoph Willibald Gluck, deer, family names, Hirsch, last names, Naphtali, origins, Richard Wagner, stag, street names

05/04/2013

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Daily Post

Happy-go-lucky?

If you pull out your German-English dictionary and look up “happy,” you will find both fröhlich and glücklich. You will also likely find zufrieden, unbeschwert, freudig and glückselig. I must say that the last of these, glückselig, jumped out at me because of Martin Seligman’s pioneering work in positive psychology, it seems that he might be aptly named in that he was one of the first psychologists to explore “happiness” (he has now shifted to talking about “flourishing” – more on the motivations for this transition here). In addition, happy itself may appear because for reasons I still can’t fathom, it is fairly common to sing the song “Happy Birthday” – in English – on someone’s birthday?!

As I noted in What’s the Point? –lich is a German suffix. When we pull off the –lich, we get froh and das Glück. Something goes wrong, however, if we try to remove the -“y” from “happy.” Although -“y” is a perfectly good suffix in English (e.g., “snowy” and “snow”), removing it from “happy” results in the non-word “happ.” Interestingly, though, “happ” – “chance, fortune” – is the source word for “happy” as well as for “happen” and “happenstance” and “perhaps” and “haphazard.” That these are relatives of “happy” makes me more content (yes, bad pun intended) with what I find when I look at the entry for das Gluck and find “fortune” and “luck” and “chance” and “auspiciousness” and “luckiness” and when checking glücklich find “fortunate” and “lucky.”

What about froh and fröhlich, do they also incorporate this connection with “chance?” This seems to depend on where you look – dict.cc does include “lucky” in its entry for froh, but PONS includes it in neither fröhlich nor froh and canoo.net only connects froh indirectly by giving glücklich as its superordinate (Oberbegriff). To spend a moment on canoo, one of the things that I find especially useful about this site are the connections it makes – superordinate and subordinate terms, as well as to synonyms and antonyms, the word forms that can be built from an entry and the forms from which an entry is composed (froh has 25 of the former but none of the latter as it cannot be decomposed) and information about a word’s morphology (there are 22 inflected forms of froh). Upon re-discovering all of these lovely bits of data that canoo offers, I thought I’d look at the antonyms (Gegensatz) for all four of our friends.

froh & traurig
fröhlich & ernst
glücklich & traurig and glücklich & unglücklich
das Glück & Kummer and das Glück & Pech

Now the traditional antonym for “happy” is “sad” and on this criterion, froh and glücklich seem the best bets for translating “happy.” Ernst is “serious” or “grave” (the adjective) or “seriousness” and fits with fröhlich meaning “cheerful.” Das Glück is of course a noun, so the comparison is “happiness”and its traditional opposite “sadness” and here der Kummer seems too strong – “misery” or “grief” – and das Pech is either “bad luck” or unrelated – “pitch” as in the black substance that was used to make ships watertight (which gives us a phrase that is translated as “thick as thieves” – zusammenhalten wie Pech und Schwefel – which is literally “to stick together like pitch and sulphur”).

Given “happy” goes with “lucky” in German, I hope you will wish me Viel Glück! when attempting to discern which meaning is intended!

Tagged -lich, -y, antonyms, chance, fröhlich, froh, glücklich, happiness, happy, luck, Pech, Schwefel, suffix, superordinate

04/04/2013

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Daily Post

Excuse me, can you translate?

I had a visit to the Zollamt today as a package of my own things had been mislabeled as merchandise by the friend who so kindly sent it and I needed to explain why the “merchandise” arrived with no receipt or pay duty if that explanation was not satisfactory. I took along a native speaker because interacting with public servants often requires the use of das Papierdeutsch, a term used seriously in dictionaries to represent the language of government and bureaucracy (hence the variants das Amtsdeutsch – “the German of a government bureau or agency,” das Beamtendeutsch – “the German of an employee of a government bureau or agency” and das Kanzleideutsch – “chancery or office German”) and used more lightheartedly (scherzhaft – “facetiously, playfully, humorously” to take another dictionary term) to mean “gobbledygook.”

To get a feel for Papierdeutsch, imagine taking a fairly abstract concept and expressing it with a cumbersome compound noun rather than a simpler combination of noun and verb: die Nichtbefolgung – “noncompliance” rather than nicht befolgt “not followed.” And to make sure that you further obscure your point, try to use a passive sentence construction (z.B. Es wird darauf hingewiesen, dass… “It should be noted that” Wir weisen darauf hin, dass… “Please note that”) and substitute as many simple prepositions as you can with more complicated ones (z.B. betreffs – “regarding” – instead of wegen – “about”)! Thanks to http://www.werbewolf.ch/News-Inhalte/Sammel%20Duden/dujuni.html for these wonderful examples.

I came away happy because with my German speaking friend’s help, the explanation of my US friend’s mistake was accepted, and while I can’t say I feel much more confident navigating Papierdeutsch, it was a great example of how language learning helps us recognize when we need to be humble and ask for help. I was also put in mind of the “Jive” scene in the film Airplane where a little translation is required and wondered if perhaps Monty Python had done any sketches poking fun at Papierenglisch?!

Tagged Amtsdeutsch, bureaucratic English, complexity, cumbersome, formality, Papierdeutsch, passive, translation

03/04/2013

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Daily Post

First Week Anniversary

I thought I’d return to earthquakes for inspiration in this first post of the second week of the Earthquake Words blog. To help me, I checked out a children’s book on volcanos and earthquakes (just the sort of thing I devoured as a young girl). One of the first things that struck me was that I found it quite a bit easier to read this piece of non-fiction than to read fiction aimed at roughly the same age group. I see two reasons why this might be so. First, and perhaps obviously, non-fiction mainly sticks to a theme. When you know the theme, your guesswork is simplified. For example, if a word has multiple meanings, some of them are excluded by the context. In a book about volcanos, you are on relatively safe ground assuming that der Ausbruch means “eruption” rather than “outburst” or “escape.”

The second thing that I have noticed about children’s fiction is that it tends to use the simple past tense rather than using the compound tense that is more commonly heard in speech. And in German, for many irregular verbs the simple past tense is is anything but simple…as a couple of examples will illustrate.

SEHEN – “to see”
Friendly compound tense: Ich habe das gesehen
Scary simple tense: Ich sah das

GEBEN – “to give”
Friendly compound tense: Ich habe ihr es gegeben
Scary simple tense: Ich gab ihr es

KOMMEN – “to come”
Fairly friendly compound tense: Ich bin gekommen (this is a compound formed with sein “to be” rather than the more common haben “to have”)
Scary simple tense: Ich ging

I chose the words above for their relatively straightforward form in the compound tense (in fact, they might be a misleadingly easy because their past participles are irregular in that they keep the –en ending rather than replacing it with a t as happens with regular verbs: SAGEN “to say” past participle – gesagt, simple past – ich sagte). But to give German its due as a source of word forms that really shake things up, here are a few other examples in the form INFINITIVE “translation” – simple past form where the infinitive and the simple past tense diverger greatly: DENKEN “to think” – dachte; ESSEN “to eat” – aß; GIEßEN “to pour” – goss; LEIDEN “to suffer” – litt; and SITZEN “to be sitting” – saß.

My favorite, though, is ZIEHEN “to pull, to draw, to move, to go” – zog (past participle gezogen). It is an incredibly productive verb that enters into a large number of set expressions and can be coupled with a large number of prefixes. As a result, you see and hear words and phrases built from this irregular base all over the place.

In researching this post, I not only rekindled my love for the earth sciences, but also discovered that my struggles when trying to read children’s fiction in German are not that surprising given it is a general rule that written language uses the simple past and spoken language the compound past (for more on forming the past tense in German, click here).

Tagged children's books, der Ausbruch, fiction, irregular verbs, non-fiction, past tense, volcanos

02/04/2013

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Daily Post

A Job or a Calling?

Last week in Are We Related? I wrote about how seeing the connection between the words die Verwandte and die Verwandtschaft -“relatives” and”relationship” – in German provided me with some new insights into English. Today I want to discuss the connection between two other German words, der Beruf and anrufen, whose English translations do not sound alike.

Very early in most books and classes you learn both der Beruf – “job” or “profession” – and anrufen – the verb that means “to call” (on the phone)- because it is highly likely you will want or need to share your profession and to get in touch with people by phone. You also learn an•rufen, because as I’ve indicated with the • notation, it is a separable verb and thus you need to pull off the an and shuttle it to the end of the sentence: Ich rufe ihn an – “I’m calling him.” (You also create the past participle in a special way with separable – trennbar – verbs, anrufen becomes angerufen, with the past participle indicator ge inserted between an and rufen – more about these verbs in a future post.)

Fine. Important and practical words and a key grammar point. But it wasn’t until the other day that I noticed the family resemblance between der Beruf and anrufen and began to think about English. In English we can say that someone has been “called” (perhaps most commonly followed by the phrase “by God”) or that someone who loves their job has found her/his “calling.” The German word das Rufen is one way to translate “calling” in this sense. There is another German word from the ruf family that translates as “the calling” or “the call” (to a profession or office), die Berufung. This appears in a number of phrases with parallels in English: eine Berufung spüren – “to feel a calling,” seine Berufung finden – “to find one’s calling,” seine Berufung verfehlen – “to miss one’s vocation” (which with “vocation” gives us a lovely link to Latin and the Romance languages) . For someone “to be called” or “appointed” is berufen. While “appointed” moves us to a different set of sounds, in English we do have a secondary meaning for “to call up” which is used to describe actions like a government or other organization drafting people into service (hmm, perhaps there is a post on “service” and its many meanings) which could be said to be a “job assignment.”

Finally, let’s consider another form of “calling” – “name-calling.” Although dict.cc gives die Beschimpfungen as the translation, name-calling can certainly impact sein Ruf – “one’s reputation” – and perhaps even make you verrufen – “notorious.”

Tagged anrufen, Beruf, calling, job, name-calling, phone call, sound-alike, vocation

01/04/2013

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Daily Post

How far does the apple fall from the tree?

In both German and English we have the proverb Der Apfel fällt nicht weit von Stamm – “The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree” – which I understand to mean that parents and children are often alike. This got me thinking, when we talk about words, we can sometimes say that they have a fairly transparent relationship – like apples and the trees from which they fall – but many times this proverb is violated, with words straying from their roots or being dramatically changed when they form compounds. To explore this, I took the German words fallen, die Falle and das Fallen.

fallen – “to fall” or “to drop”
die Fallen – “pitfalls” or “traps”
das Fallen – “descent”

The relationships here seem relatively transparent and indeed in English we have expressions that use both “fall” and “trap.” Of course, “fallen” itself is an English word. Unlike German where it is the infinitive, “fallen” is the past participle of “to fall” (gefallen auf deutsch) and can also be used as an adjective as in “fallen arches” (to describe a foot problem).

What about compounds? My favorite, given the topics of this blog is Sprachfallen or “language traps.” They come in many forms, including the false friends like punktuell , and to keep with the connection to “falling,” we might say that you need to take care not to “stumble” over your words or that you must take care as some words can really “trip you up” (as one website said, you need to learn these Sprachfallen to avoid peals of laughter – um schallendes Gelächter zu vermeiden).

There are also a number of combinations in English that use “fallen” where it is not used in German such as “fallen asleep” – eingeschlafen; three ways of saying “fallen out with someone” – 1) entzweit (which has a literal meaning, “split in two, as you might expect from breaking it apart), 2) zerstritten sein (mit) and 3) jemand. hat/hatte sich mit jemandem verkracht; and “fallen short of” – unterschritten.

Moving to German compound verbs, an interesting relative for me is the verb ausfallen – “to fail (harvest, machine, power, etc.)” – because “fall” and “fail” are only one phoneme apart in English, and, if my experience with German word pairs of this type is anything to go by, these two are likely to be a “trap” for the non-native speaker. Another prefix+fallen verb is zufallen – “to shut.” Its membership in the family helps make the phrase jemandem natürlich zufallen – “to come naturally to someone” – make more sense to me (and to link it back to the tree, you could say that for such a person something “is as easy as falling off a log”)!

But probably more common than any of these are a set that leave me feeling out on a limb:

einfallen
beifallen
auffallen

All three can take the meaning “to occur to somebody.” Of the three, as far as I can see only the first, einfallen, has a meaning that is related to “fallen” – it can mean “to collapse” or “to dip.” For beifallen dict.cc gives only the meaning “to occur to somebody” and says that it is both humorous and more elevated in tone. Auffallen has as its most frequently given meaning “to strike” in the sense of attracting attention. Now I suppose an idea could literally strike you – take the perhaps apocryphal story of Newton, the apple and gravity – but for my money we have wandered away from “fallen”

And since we’ve come right back around to speaking of apples, I wonder if it means anything that der Apfel is one of the few fruits (the only other I could find was der Pfirsich) with the masculine gender?!

Tagged apples, der Apfel, fallen, language traps, peals of laughter, proverbs, Sprachfallen, to fall, trees

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Earthquake Words/Erdbeben Wörter

Let's Shake Things Up A Bit!

Monthly Archives: April 2013

Second Week Anniversary

Oy Weh!

Take that!

Dead satisfied

What’s in a Name?

Happy-go-lucky?

Excuse me, can you translate?

First Week Anniversary

A Job or a Calling?

How far does the apple fall from the tree?