Zum neuen Jahr
“Wird’s besser? Wird’s schlimmer?”
fragt man alljährlich.
Seien wir ehrlich:
Leben ist immer
lebensgefährlich.
-Erich Kästner
At the turning of the year
Will things get better? Will things get worse?
we wonder every year.
Let’s face it:
life is forever
life-threatening.
Ich hoffe, dass Gedichte übersetzend sich nicht Leben gefährden. Jedenfalls, auf Englisch sagen wir what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger und auf Deutsch “Was dich nicht umbringt macht dich nur stärker.”
I subscribe to a “phrase a day” email service from www.phrasen.com (well, actually it is Phrasen des Tages and there are three phrases per post). Mostly they are idiomatic phrases, which is why I subscribe, but sometimes I have no idea why they believe the phrase is one people might need (or want) to learn. For example, this arrived on the last day of May:
Deutsch: Die Beschaffenheit des Felsens lässt auf einen vulkanischen Ursprung schließen
Englisch: “The nature of the rock implies/suggests that it is volcanic in origin”
Lucky for me, this phrase just happens to be related to earth science and thus is useful given each Wednesday I try to concoct a post that somehow simultaneously discusses learning German and falls under the “earthquake” banner. But for other people without such a particular need, is this a phrase that would make them say, “Gosh, I sure am glad phrasen.com shared that with me!” No, probably not.
Now, I’m assuming that the point of this rather random sentence is to give you meaning for the rather complicated verb form schließen lassen auf – “to be indicative of” or “to imply.” However this feels quite different from expressions such as Probieren geht über Studieren – “The proof is in the pudding” (dict.cc also offers “Suck it and see”) or im Dreck herumwühlen – “to muckrake” – which, while they aren’t things you will be saying each and everyday, are usable “as is” by everyone, not solely geologists, vulcanologists or people whose blogs happen to mention earth science concepts in their titles. Perhaps a little more Studieren is in order at phrasen.com?
Last night I was at my first Irish set dance event in Hamburg (yes, those lower legs are a bit achey today) and was intrigued but not completely surprised to find that the dances were called using the English names for the moves – House, Ladies’ Chain, Advance-Retire, etc. Proper names are for the most part quite arbitrary and translating them may create more problems that it solves, however, as German nouns require a gender or genus (das Geschlecht namely männlich, weiblich and sächlich otherwise known as “masculine,” “feminine” and “neuter”), some conversion is inevitable. Unfortunately in trying to keep up with dances I haven’t done in over a year, I didn’t collect any examples of gender assignment. Therefore, here are some examples from my good friend canoo.net of the (informal) principles by which a genus is conferred.
Principle 1
When the source language has grammatical genders that map onto German, use them.
der Boulevard French “le boulevard”
die Allee French “une allée”
der Pueblo Spanish “el pueblo”
der Cappuccino Italian “il cappuccino”
Principle 2
Use the gender of a German word with the same ending because endings are a clue to the genus (e.g., –er goes with der, –ung goes with die and –chen goes with das).
die Garage like die Blamage, die Passage (contrast French “le garage”)
die Zigarre like die Gitarre an many more in –e (contrast French “le cigare”)
das Duett like das Tablett, das Amulett (contrast Italian “il duetto”)
der Computer like all nouns derived from verbs that end in –er : der Arbeiter, der Rechner (no contrast as English has no genders)
Principle 3
Translate the word and then use the genus of its German equivalent.
der Star via der Stern
das Training via das Trainieren (likewise das Coaching and other English “-ing” words)
der Trafalgar Square via der Platz
Principle 4
Use the genus of other foreign words from the same semantic field, assuming that there is some commonality among the members of this group.
das Marihuana like das Heroin, das Kokain and das Gras
These principles sound good in principle, however, what’s one to do when several of them clash?! For example, how should we award a genus to “grappa” when it comes from a feminine Italian noun but other foreign and native members of this family already take the masculine? This is how we come to find both die Grappa, gendered like the Italian “la grappa,” and der Grappa, gendered like der Whisky, der Cognac and der Schnaps.
Finally, in keeping with the general flexibility needed to cope with a new language, there are occasionally different options in German for expressing the same foreign concept and these do not necessarily have the same genus. Because this blog often focuses on the ups and downs of the language learner, I’m delighted to report that one pair is DER Rollercoaster (on the basis of Principle 2, see the last entry above) and DIE Achterbahn (on the basis of Principle 3 above), and furthermore, the equivalent of the figurative use of “roller coaster” is DAS [ständiges] Auf und Ab, giving us that third genus!
Last night a friend told me that he wouldn’t be staying out too late because he had einen Kater – a hangover. Now der Kater is also a “tomcat” and thus when you say that you have a hangover to someone who knows only this latter meaning (perhaps from having read “Puss in Boots” or Der Gestiefelte Kater), he or she might wonder why you are sharing that you have a male cat at home and why this has resulted in the headache and nausea you’d also mentioned. Tantalizingly, although I couldn’t find an etymological connection to cats or die Katzen, one German word for “vomit,” or perhaps more accurately “puke,” is die Kotze and “to puke” is kotzen.
Now mistaking cats and hangovers would be amusing enough on its own, but somehow der Kater also brought to mind Mr Kotter, the teacher played by Gabe Kaplan in the 70s series “Welcome Back Kotter.” (Note: I probably spent too much time last week talking about the bad old days of television in the US: I was trying to explain the word der Hausmeister and the best I could come up with was Dwayne Schneider (Pat Harrington) from “One Day at a Time” which then spiraled off into whether with the name “Schneider” he was supposed to be of German heritage…). Of course der Kater is /katɐ/ and if “Kotter” were a German word it would be /kɔtɐ/ but for most North American speakers of English this contrast is diluted as /a/ and /ɔ/ rarely appear without being elongated – /a:/ and /ɔ:/ – and without this elongation the sound difference between these vowels can be difficult to perceive. Nevertheless, I think this character is now forever re-christened in my mind as Mr Hangover.
Yesterday I encountered a sign that read:
Unbedingt Hygienebeutel benutzen
I was struck by the economy of words, nothing wasted in this discussion of what to do with your waste. My sense is that in the US we would be likely to say something much more like “Don’t flush sanitary products, please put them in this container” which, in addition to having many more words, also feels significantly less direct.
The word unbedingt is one which I first encountered on another sign; there it was used to leave people in no doubt that dogs must be on leashes/leads. Various sources render its meaning as “absolute(ly),” “unconditional(ly),” “imperative(ly),” “obligator(il)y,” categorical(ly)” and “without fail.” In other words, it’s strong stuff. With these meanings, and given it appears on signage, it also feels that little bit formal to me. It would seem that this intuition is perhaps incorrect, though, as DWDS.de lists some lovely synonyms in umgangssprachlich (ugs.) or colloquial usage and their translations into English are also quite colloquial:
allemal – “every time”
hundert Pro – “sure as the sun rises” or literally “one hundred per[cent]”
ey Alter, ich schwör – “Hey dude, I swear”
todsicher – “dead sure; a dead cert”
auf Gedeih und Verderb – “completely and utterly; for better or for worse” or more literally something like “spanning success and decay”
DWDS also includes the expression ganz und gar – “utterly and completely” – a combination I’d wondered about given the ability in German to verstärken almost everything, including superlatives. What, is that ganz genau, I hear you say?!
I came across two interesting errors today, one in English by a German speaker and one in German by a Spanish speaker. The first error was an error in word choice in spoken speech and the second was a spelling error in jotting down a word that was heard.
Error 1 “If it stops, will you please turn it off?”
The intended sentence was “When it stops, will you please turn it off?”
It wasn’t difficult to figure out the intended meaning, given the “it” being discussed was a dishwasher and in the unlikely event that it never stopped there would be more to worry about than turning it off. So, what was interesting for me was not that I could understand this sentence after only a brief re-parsing, but rather that I had a very good idea of the source of this error, an intuition that I would not have had before learning some German and making a similar error in the reverse direction. Here are the relevant word pairs:
wenn – if
wann – when
Wenn and “when” sound very much alike (/ɛ/ and /e/) but they have different meanings (our old enemy the “false friend”) and this sound similarity gets in the way for the language learner. The German-speaking English learner thinks /wɛn/, this activates both the German word, wenn, meaning “if” and the English word “when” as this is the intended meaning. However, the connection between the sound /wɛn/ and the word wenn is more firmly established and pushes the speaker in the wrong direction. In a bit of reverse action, the English-speaking German learner, namely me, sees or hears the word wenn and this also activates two things, the English word “when,” which has the wrong meaning in this context, and, more weakly, the meaning “if” which is associated with the actual form heard or seen, wenn. The latter association is weaker and I may misunderstand what I read or hear (the effect is stronger when I am reading as there is the additional spelling similarity to push me toward the “when” rendering of wenn because at least in speech you get the /v/ vs. /w/ cue to help you).
Error 2 im Unterbewurstsein
The intended phrase was im Unterbewusstsein
The intended phrase means “subconsciously” and was introduced by a native German speaker in the context of discussing how people “talk” with their hands and the fact that we are often using gestures automatically and without being much aware of the extent to which the movements we are making are intrinsic to speaking. The Spanish-speaking German learner was pleased to learn this new word and attempted to write it down in order to research it further at some later point. While what she wrote down is not a real word in German, adding the “r” does make some sense for a Spanish speaker. First, you really don’t have to learn to spell as a Spanish speaker because the connection between spelling and sound is almost totally reliable – because in almost all cases there is just one possible spelling, if you know how a word sounds then you know how it is spelled. German, while being much, much more rule-governed than English, still has a number of options for how particular sounds can be spelled.
Secondly, there are a number of words that end in with “vowel+r” that to the non-native speaker sound pretty much identical to words that end with the same vowel on its own (i.e., with no “r”). For example, the final sounds of Die Liebe and lieber are very similar, the first ends in /ə/and the second in a /ɐ/, and neither ends in /r/. In addition, when the “r” appears before a consonant, as it does in die Wurst, the articulation is much softer, with none of the rolling of the tongue that you hear before vowels or when the “r” is in the syllable initial position (to get a feel for this reduced “r” sound, compare die Wurst and die Wüste). These sorts of reduced /r/ situations could lead to the overgeneralization that “vowel+r” is an alternative spelling for “vowel.”
Of course, I must admit that this second error stood out not because of what it showed about changes in pronunciation of the letter “r” across contexts (this video does nice job of delineating them). Instead it was commingling “sausage” and “consciousness” that caught my attention!
Heute habe ich viele interessante Information über wie man isst Schlangen gelernt. Da ich gerade “isst” geschrieben ist mir aufgefallen, dass das Wort “isst” sehr ähnlich wie die Stimme der Schlange auf Englisch klingt. Nämlich, hissssss. Natürlich will ich wissen, wie klingt eine Schlange auf Deutsch? Wie eine englischsprachige Schlange oder nicht? Und auch hat die deutschsprachige Schlange aus der Schweiz einen Akzent?
Also, suche ich im Internet. Mit den Schlüsselwörter “welche Stimme hat die Schlange.”
Erstmal ist eine biblische Geschichte, ich denke “nein.” Die zweite hat den Titel “Schlange stehen für warmes ein Essen.” Perfekt! habe ich gedacht, Stimme und Essen zusammen! Knapp daneben ist auch vorbei! Hier sind die Deutsche lauthals lachen. Warum? Das Wort “die Schlange” bedeutet beides snake und queue (oder line). “Schlange stehen” ist nicht Snake is, sondern stand in line. Der ganze Satz meint Stand in line for a hot meal.
Endlich habe ich die Stimme der Schlange gefunden: “sss.” Und in Schweizerdeutsch? Ich weiss nicht, aber vielleicht kann ich in Basel überprüfen, weil diese Stadt den Basilisk wie Symbol hat. Ich muss offensichtlich viele warmes ein Essen zu essen bevor ich kann sagen: “I’ve translated more German than you’ve had hot (snake) dinners!”
This example from pons.eu allows me to connect to the earthquake theme and to discuss a concept that can make the German learner feel as though the very foundations of her or his knowledge base are shaking. The example is
nach dem Erdbeben waren nur ein paar Häuser stehen geblieben – “after the earthquake, only a few houses were left standing”
and it uses one of the verbs, stehen (well actually a verb with stehen as its base, stehen bleiben) from a family with some interesting features. Here are eight (or seven depending on how you want to count) of its members.
stehen – stellen – “to stand, to be situated” – “to put (in a standing position)”
liegen – legen – “to lie, be situated” – “to put (in a lying position)”
hängen – hängen – ” to be hanging” – “to hang something/someone”
sitzen – (sich) setzen – “to be sitting” – “to sit down”
The first verb in each pair is a “strong” verb, which means that the stem changes with the tense (and in some cases, although not for the four here, it changes with the person and number). The second verb in each pair is a “weak” or regular verb (there are also mixed verbs, perhaps I’ll cover them at some point.) that can be conjugated without a stem change.
The first verb in each pair is also one that is used to describe where something is located. The second describes movement of something somewhere. I’ve seen this described many times as the first set answering the questions Wo? and the second the question Wohin? but my sense is that this would only make sense to someone who already knows German as the distinction between Wo? and Wohin? feels more subtle than the distinction between something being in a place or being moved to a place. Thus I find it more helpful to call the second set the Exercise or E-words. In two of three that have different forms (hängen is conjugated two ways in the past tense but the infinite is the same), the movement-describing (or exercise-describing!) words have “e” as their initial vowel. I also find this helpful because the verbs in the second group require an agent that can “exercise” its right to move things. The remaining pair, stehen–stellen feels the simplest to me as an English speaker since “staying” contraindicates movement (or exercise).
If one knows a bit of grammar, one can also differentiate between the first and second members of each pair in terms of transitivity. The first member of each pair is intransitive and the second member is transitive. The best English example that I know comes from “The Language Instinct” by Steven Pinker (A WONDERFUL BOOK, the year it came out in paperback I gave it to almost everyone close to me for Christmas):
“Melvin dined” – “dined” is an intransitive verb, it cannot take an object
“Melvin ate the pizza” – “ate” is a transitive verb, it can take an object or it can stand along “Melvin ate”
“*Melvin dined the pizza” is therefore ill-formed (although you native speakers did not need me to tell you this!)
The final layer of complexity is that these verbs take the so-called “two-way prepositions” whose objects can be in the dative case – the first member of the pair – or in the accusative case – the second member of each pair. One often hears the dative compared to the indirect objective in English and the accusative to the direct object but as you will see below, these word pairs made me rethink the value of this analogy!
Okay, let’s look at some examples, courtesy of a page at the University of Michigan:
stehen, stand, gestanden – stellen, stellte, gestellt
(infinitive, 3rd pers. sing. preterite (simple past), past participle)
First look at the stem change: steh becomes stand when you conjugate stehen in the past tense. Then look at how stell keeps its form. Next look at the table below and notice the meaning difference between the two columns, the location verb is on the left (cyan/turquoise) and the movement or exercise verb is on the right (green).
| Eine Mumie stand mitten in ihrem Wohnzimmer (dative: location). | Sie stellte die Mumie (accusative: direct object) in die Ecke (accusative: motion). |
| A mummy stood in the middle of her living room. | She put (stood) the mummy in the corner. |
These examples also show the different cases that are triggered by the preposition in for the two members of the pair. You use in+dative for the location verb stehen and this is where the indirect object comparison breaks down. No one is receiving a living room as they would be if this were a traditional indirect object, as in for example, “She received a mummy from the British Museum.” You use in+accusative for the exercise verb stellen . Using the accusative for the object being moved fits the direct object (or patient role, to use the linguistic term) but one also uses the accusative for the place to which it is being moved, which is where the analogy with the direct object breaks down unless you want to say that the corner changes from a state of being empty to one of being full.
So, I hear you saying, while stehen–stellen seems rather complex, at least you have the clue of two different verb stems. But what about the two forms of hängen? Let’s take a look!
hängen, hing, gehangen – hängen, hängte, gehängt
(infinitive, 3rd pers. sing. preterite (simple past), past participle)
This makes it look pretty easy, one must simply remember that for the location version of this verb, you make a stem change when you conjugate it in the past tense and for the exercise version, you don’t.
| Der Kronleuchter hat im Keller (dative: location) gehangen. | Wir haben den Kronleuchter (accusative: direct object) ins Wohnzimmer (accusative: motion) gehängt. |
| The chandelier was hanging in the basement. | We hung the chandelier in the living room. |
However, creating an example in the past tense conveniently hides the fact that in the present tense BOTH versions are conjugated in exactly the same way, for example in the 3rd pers, sing. both would be er/sie/es hängt. Thus you need to look at the other clues such as the case taken by any prepositional objects and how the verb fares on the “dined” test to make sure you have understood which meaning/verb is intended. Are those chandeliers swaying pretty violently or what?!
One last tidbit that I loved from this page was this explanation of the use of sitzen and sich setzen: “unlike the English “to set,” [sitzen and sich setzen] can only be used with things that have knees and can thus actually sit: people, dolls and puppets, and certain animals, but not, for example, worms, fish, or inanimate objects other than dolls and puppets.” [bold in original] I haven’t found any other sites that confirm this and thus I’d love to hear from native speakers: does this rule fit with your intuitive grasp of Deutsch/German? Meanwhile, I’ll be pondering which leg joints in the animal kingdom might safely be counted as knees!
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.
Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
This famous first line begins with the comparison “best and worst” and goes on to weigh up “wisdom and foolishness,” “belief and incredulity,” “Light and Darkness,” “the spring of hope and the winter of despair,” “everything and nothing,” “Heaven and the other way,” and “good and evil.” What struck me on reading this anew is the fact that the nearly all of polarities Dickens presents are the not the traditional adjectives and adverbs one sees in textbook lists of opposites – although those are represented through “best” and “worst” – but instead are abstract nouns. Yet, he ends the sentence by mentioning the notion of “superlative,” a notion, along with “comparative,” that applies only to adjectives and adverbs and in most cases, at least for one-syllable words, involves morphological changes, for example “early, earlier, earliest” or the irregular “good-better-best.”
We are fascinated by superlatives, the Wikipedia has 251 lists of the biggest, the longest, etc., particularly in the US where it is quite easy to find a diner advertising “The World’s Best Coffee,” a roadside attraction that is the largest you-name-it and where we watch two teams play in the “Superbowl.”
While the people in German speaking countries might not make as many superlative claims, German does offer you a prefix, aller-, to express that something is “the X-est of all” or “the single most X.” One might call it the “superlative of superlatives!” Thus the Allergrößte is “the mother of all…” or “the biggest/greatest/largest of all.” The Allerschönste is “the most beautiful of all.” The Allererster is “the very first [ever]” (typically describing the first person to do something). With allermeisten you can say “the vast majority” in just one word. In addition, aller– is the only prefix that can be used to form adverbs from adverbs; canoo.net lists six such words, three of which are allerbesten “the best of all,” allerfrühestens “at the very earliest” and allerwenigstens “at the very least.”
I also like this trio of words which give you a way to modify verbs: gern, lieber, am liebsten.
Ich höre gern Klassik – “I listen to classical music with pleasure”
Ich höre lieber Folk – “I prefer to listen to folk music” or “I get more pleasure when I listen to folk music”
Ich höre am liebsten Blues – “I get the most pleasure when I listen to Blues”
or, in other words, meine Lieblingsmusik ist Blues – “My favorite music is Blues!” I hope that one of your favorite things is reading about learning German on Earthquake Words.
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