Author Archives: kwhirsh

17/04/2013
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Third Week Anniversary

This week the volcano will replace earthquakes as the metaphor for language learning. In my German children’s book on earthquakes and volcanos, there is a section with the heading Aktive, schlafende und tote Vulkane – “active, sleeping and dead volcanos.” (Later on they introduce the term “extinct,” erloschene, which as a noun das Erlöschen refers to the “expiration” of patents and the like. (Interestingly, the –chen doesn’t appear to mean “small” here but the noun still fits the pattern and takes das.) As a verb, erlöschen refers to something that “stops burning” or “goes out” or “fizzles out” or “expires.” They also introduce ruhende which means “dormant.”)

The book goes on to say that in interior of dormant volcanos, there is lava seething and boiling and no one can say when the volcano will erupt again. All this sounds quite a bit like active and passive vocabulary or grammatical knowledge. The British Council gives this definition of passive vocabulary (which a grammar maven would disparage for the use of “a learner” and “they” especially here when a plural subject would not have been at all odd):

A learner’s passive vocabulary is the words that they understand but don’t use yet. This can be compared with active vocabulary, which are words that learners understand and use in speaking or writing. The active and passive vocabulary of a learner changes constantly. They start using words, try new meanings, forget words, abandon words that have no use, revise words, etc.

An active volcano is spewing a lot of stuff, a passive or dormant one is not. The words in your active vocabulary and the structures in your active grammatical knowledge-base get used a lot. And just like geological systems, our vocabularies and grammatical knowledge are constantly in flux: the words and structures that are held passively may not yet have reached the “boiling” point where they ready to spew out of our mouths or fingers/pens/pencils.

The following expression, like the swinging chandelier of last week, gives me a nice picture to focus on when I get a bit frustrated with my progress: wie auf einem Vulkan leben – “like sitting on a powder keg/time bomb” or literally “like living on a volcano.” It seems that there is hope that at some point the passive will become active and I will experience an explosive growth of expressive ability.

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16/04/2013
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The little word that could

I’ve been finding myself struggling with how many words seemed to be formed from the stem –Zug. As a word on its own der Zug is most commonly used by new speakers like myself to mean “train” and this is also far and away the winner on dict.cc (1182 give this as the translation, the second most common translation, with 84 votes, is “tug” as in “he straightened the tablecloth with a little tug”).

The two examples giving me the most grief, because they seem so completely unrelated, both to each other and to der Zug, are der Anzug – “the suit” as in clothing – and der Aufzug – “the elevator/lift.”  It turns out that they are related, if you stretch that notion a bit, but not directly via der Zug.

Zug is very productive – canoo.net lists 241 forms – but neither der Anzug nor der Aufzug is among them. The –zug portion of all three forms comes from the verb ziehen – “to pull” (and also “to tug” making that connection back to der Zug). For those of you scratching your heads trying to see a connection between zieh and zug, it is via zog, one of the craziest past tense forms around (see my description of it and some of its buddies here in the post First Anniversary). Yup, you say ich ziehe and ich zog and all that changes is when the action happened!

Der Anzug was born when the prefix an was added to make anziehen whose meanings “to put on” or “to dress” best fit this context (apologies, unconscious punning in action). Likewise for der Aufzug, the prefix auf has been added to make aufziehen whose meanings “to raise” or “to bring up” are most relevant here. The nouns forms are created by converting the forms derived from these prefix + zog combinations by subjecting them to ablaut. Ablaut exists in both English and German and involves the signaling of a grammatical change by a change in vowel. For example, ablaut gets us from “sing” to “sang” to “sung” (and from singen to sang to gesungen) and also to the derived noun “song” (unfortunately, while der Song is a word and means “song,” what you will hear people say is das Lied).

Given how funny it must be for German speakers when I confuse der Anzug and der Aufzug, not to mention forgetting that gezogen is the past tense of ziehen, it is interesting to note that one meaning given for aufziehen is “to tease somebody” and another is “to hoist” – perhaps I should just laugh rather than allowing these forms to “wind me up?!”

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15/04/2013
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Both a borrower and a lender be

Imagine waking up and finding it’s okay to say “Hey, will you borrow me some money?” Well, you might just be in Germany!  On dict.cc, leihen is the translation most commonly given for “to lend” and ausleihen for “to borrow.” Keep looking, though, and “to borrow” shows up under leihen and “to lend” shows up under ausleihen. Moreover, if you look up leihen or ausleihen in ein Wörterbuch you will find both translations given as possible meanings . When I saw a translation of Shakespeare’s line as Kein Borger sei und auch Verleiher nicht, I began to hope that borgen, which looks and sounds quite a bit like “borrow,” might mean this and only this. In turns out, however, that it can also mean “to lend.” (Interestingly, the Online Etymology Dictionary shares this gem in the entry for “borrow” – Old High German boragen “to beware of” – perhaps Shakespeare had this meaning in mind when he put those words in Polonius’ mouth?!).

A Practical Dictionary of German Usage, while confirming the substitutability, did offer a bit of help. When “lend” is the intention, there is often a dative pronoun indicating the recipient – Kannst du mir bitte Hamlet leihen? When the sense is “borrow,” there is often a dative pronoun but in this case it is reflexive, referring back to the subject who is doing the borrowing, and the sentence can include a von or a bei – Ich habe mir Hamlet von dir geliehen.

Two other family members intrigued me. The first is verleihen which is used when it is the figurative sense of “lend” that is intended.  DWDS.de gives as an example die dicken Wände liehen dem Raum angenehme Kühle – “the think walls lent the room a pleasant coolness” – and from the Practical Dictionary comes Der Hopfen verleiht dem Bier den bitteren Geschmack – “The hops lent the beer its bitter taste.” The other, pumpen, which is the familiar version of leihen (and like it can be either “lend” or “borrow”), makes me giggle because I see someone “pumping” someone else for a loan: könnte ich mir bei dir etwas Geld pumpen?

Speaking of loans, to add to the fun, there is der Lohn which means “wage” or “pay” as opposed to “loan,”  which makes your “income tax” die Lohnsteuer. I imagine some of you reading in the US have the feeling that the taxman is “pumping” you for money today!

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14/04/2013
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A crackin’ good evening

Today I was at a Stammtisch whose reason for being is speaking English. You may remember Stamm  (in the form of der Stammbaum) from the post Are We Related? Noticing the similarity between these two words, der Stammbaum and der Stammtisch, led me to poke around on dict.cc because “trunk table” didn’t really feel like a good match for der Stammtisch. And indeed, Stamm not only has the meaning “stem” or “trunk” but also is a prefix with the meaning “regular.”  This made me rather curious about the root of der Stammbaum, could it be a combination of “regular” and “tree?” To check on this, I thought I’d look at another volume in the Duden series, namely Duden 7 Das Herkunftswörterbuch which is subtitled Etymologie der deutschen Sprache.

Let’s unpack that title a bit before checking up on der Stammbaum. As I dissected die Herkunft, it appeared that •Kunft is not a word on its own, however it does appear in a number of words that gave me another set of insights into the way compounding can work in German:

Ankunft – “arrival”
Zukunft – “future”
Abkunft – “descent” or “parentage”
Auskunft – “information”
Heimkunft – “homecoming”
Unterkunft – “accommodation” in the sense of shelter
Herabkunft– “descent of the Holy Spirit”

It seems that there are quite a few meanings for die Herkunft: “origin” or “source” or “provenance” or “descent” or “ancestry” and “background” (as in “ethic background,” for instance).  Her gets translated by dict.cc as “fro,” which tends only to appear in English in the phrase “to and fro” – hin und her.  (In the lovely synchronicity that is writing and research, I came across the verb herstammen whose meaning is given as “to originate” or with von “to hail from” or “to spring from.”)

It would seem that der Stammbaum springs from Isaiah (Jesaja), 11:1 as a translation of a word from Middle Latin (mittellateinisch): arbor consanguinitatis, Wurzel Jesse. 

A shoot will come up from the stump of Jesse;
from his roots a Branch will bear fruit. – New International Version

This left me unsatisfied but fairly certain that the “stem” or “trunk” were more likely than “regular” to be the basis for the der Stammbaum compound . Duden 7 didn’t offer an entry for Stammtisch, however. Ever persistent, I kept looking and learned that there is an English word that supposedly means Stammtisch and that word is…”cracker-barrel.” Yes, dict.cc tells me that “cracker-barrel” is a translation of (der) Stammtisch!  The other meaning given is the “regulars’ table” which fits with the meaning of Stamm as a prefix described above and the regular meetings that any self-respecting Stammtisch will have. Having a bit of trouble seeing what was in common between your average Crackerbarrel restaurant and your average German Stammtisch, I did a search for the origins of “cracker-barrel.” The online Merriam-Webster entry me helped to see why the restaurant name might have been chosen: “Origin of the word cracker-barrel – from the cracker barrel in country stores around which customers lounged for informal conversation.”

Perhaps a box of saltines is in order to honor this connection at my next Stammtisch outing?

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13/04/2013
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The Keys to The Kingdom

Just recently, I was listening to a German language CD and heard the word die Schüssel – “the bowl.” That’s the word that was said anyway, what I heard was der Schlüssel – “the key.” Keen observers will notice right away that like Dorothy and her ruby slippers, I had the key to unlocking this misunderstanding with me all along: “bowl” is a die word and “key” is a der word. But as David Bergmann so elegantly and succinctly captures in the title of his book about wrestling with the German tongue – Der, Die, Was? (or in his own English translation “Take Me to Your Umlauts”) – we don’t have grammatical genders in English (although see my thoughts on at least one occasion where we do have intuitions about gender) and thus this useful key to correct word recognition is one we fail to take advantage of all too often!

Those of you who know about some of my past experiences will know that the main impact I had on the world of experimental psychology was to show that the earlier you learn something, the easier that something is to retrieve from memory and in many cases the more likely you are to continue to be able to retrieve it following a stroke or other event that compromises your cognitive abilities. This suggests that the later you learn about grammatical gender, the slower you will be retrieve it. Thus, the downside of not having learned about grammatical gender early in life is that even when I do know a word’s gender (as I feel do with der Schlüssel), it is relatively hard to retrieve and thus it can be hard to make use of this information to help me understand what I am reading or hearing. The upside is that unlike a speaker of French, or many other languages, I don’t need to displace the le from chat when I learn die Katze – “the cat” – as I don’t have any competing gender designations to distract me. An additional implication of the earliest things being easiest to retrieve is that early learned words within a language can compete with each other. As I learned der Schlüssel quite a long time ago (when I was first learning German in 1989), it competes very effectively with die Schüssel which I only learned the other day. In the struggle to make any meaning from what I read and hear, the early learned words simply come into mind unbidden with a minimum amount of evidence to support their presence.

And don’t get me started on the competition that arises in my head between different meanings for the same word, for example das Schloss (“the palace” and “the lock”), or I may have to be locked away!

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12/04/2013
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Having a past

The majority of German verbs use haben “to have” to form the compound past tense (das Perfekt), the remainder use sein “to be.” To help the learner keep track of which words take sein, these words are often characterized as describing a change of state or indicating motion. And indeed a lot of the sein verbs do fit this characterization. For example,

To fall asleep – einschlafen, ist eingeschlafen
To wake up – aufwachen, ist aufgewacht
To get up – aufstehen, ist aufgestanden

Makes sense. “Falling asleep” and “waking up” involve a change of consciousness and “getting up” involves motion. The more you examine the SLEEP family, though, the trickier it gets. For example, there is a closely related word that takes haben:

To sleep – schlafen, hat geschlafen

Now sleep could be considered a steady state like leben – “living” – another verb that surprises me by taking haben. Confusing, but still somewhat logical. Enter aufbleiben, ist aufgeblieben – “to stay up” – which as far as I’m concerned need not involve any motion and is a steady state much like sleeping or living. Moreover, it is a prefixed word which happens to inherit the sein status of its verb stem bleiben, unlike our friend einschlafen which has gone over to sein. And I am almost afraid to discuss stehen, the root of aufstehen, which pons.eu informs me takes haben here in Germany but sein Austria and Switxerland.

Perhaps sleeping on it will bring a bit of clarity!?

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11/04/2013
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Does that ring a bell?

Meet das Handy – the German word for “mobile phone” or “cell phone.” It’s a false friend. One that makes me shake my head. First of all, in English “handy” is an adjective and that das and the capital “H” indicate that the German Handy is a noun. This means it behaves like “candy” or “party,” neither of which make sense when broken down into “stem + y” the way an adjective with this form would (even if, as in the case of “hand + y,” the derivation feels a bit forced). The fact that it is a noun in German also means it has a plural form, in this case it is one on the ones that was affected by spelling reform (more on this in future posts) – previously, you could write die Handies but now you have to write die Handys.

Next, although we do have the word “handset” in the world of communication devices, the word  “handy” doesn’t bring to mind “handset” or even “hand held,” it brings to mind “useful” or “nice to have” or “convenient.” Yes, a phone that you can take with you is certainly “handy” but then so are so many things, for instance, the pocket tissues called “Handy-Andies.”

Finally, there is the issue of pronunciation. I want to say Handy the way I would say “handy” but that could get me looks almost as odd as if I asked for someone’s “*Handy number” in the US.  Das Handy is [ˈhɛndi] and “handy” is [ˈhændi]. Thank goodness that the stress is on the same syllable at least, which cannot be said for Psychologie and “psychology” or Autorin and “author,” both of which I regularly stumble over when I try to talk about my professional life in German.

Perhaps I should simply relax and take Handy as a back-handed compliment about the versatility of English?!

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10/04/2013
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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.

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09/04/2013
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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!

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08/04/2013
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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.

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