kwhirsh

07/04/2013

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

2 Comments

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

2 Comments

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

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

1 Comment

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

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

2 Comments

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

31/03/2013

2 Comments

Daily Post

Hare-y stories

Today’s post is in honor of our shared cultural symbolism that connects small mammals with long and sometimes floppy ears with Easter and the delivery of eggs, especially the chocolate kind. Now, you ask, why didn’t I say “rabbits” given we refer to the “Easter Rabbit” or even the “Easter Bunny” in English? Well, in German it is der Osterhase or “Easter Hare,” while the word “rabbit” (or as it was described to me by a German acquaintance “that smaller animal with spoon-shaped ears that children have”) is translated in my Pons dictionary as das Kaninchen – which to my ears sounds like it should be a small canine – and the word “bunny” is translated as das Häschen!

Well then, what is there to say about hares? It turns out that they appear in a number of German expressions. But before I get to the examples, I wanted to say a little bit about idiomatic expressions. To get some background, I looked at a paper that analyzed the ways in which idioms were arranged in Italian-English dictionaries. In addition to reminding me of the features that make idioms idioms, I also came away with a deeper appreciation of the challenges we languages learners face when trying to use dictionaries to learn idioms (the more linguistically-minded among you might enjoy perusing this article). In particular, there is the challenge that not every content word in an idiomatic phrase gets an entry under that word, therefore advance apologies if your favorite German expression about der Hase isn’t mentioned here!

Here’s the lowdown on idioms:

You may not be able to say why a phrase means what it does, but you only get the idiomatic meaning when you use the phrase as a whole, or to use an idiomatic expression, the whole is greater than (or different from) the sum of its parts
You may be able to change words or rearrange them, but only certain changes are allowed or the phrase loses its meaning
You may be able to connect some of the words to their literal meanings, but then again you may not

Let’s dig into some examples which feature der Hase.

In German you can say wissen/sehen, wie der Hase läuft and this can be rendered as “to know/see which way the wind is blowing.” The literal translation of “knowing/seeing how the hare runs” does have a connection to the meaning of the set phrase as it is about knowing, but it is unlikely that anyone (other than perhaps someone seeking those Easter eggs) would have much interest in how or where the hare is running. I loved the way this page explained the origin of the English idiom and made reference to Bob Dylan: http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/222050.html. What it suggests by saying that sailors needed to know the direction of the wind, is that this phrase is about understanding something important, however in our modern age of ships powered by motors rather than sails, this does seem a bit quaint.

Clearly, there is or was something quite significant about hares running as they also feature in so läuft der Hase or “that’s the way the cookie crumbles” which means something to the effect that “bad things can happen and it’s often best to accept them and move on rather than mope.” (Or if I were to quote a musical line to illustrate this it might be from the John Lennon tune Beautiful Boy: Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.)

To take us in a different direction, in German you can say Mein Name ist Hase and mean something like “I haven’t got a clue.” I’m not sure where this would leave someone whose name really was Hase, but I am guessing that he/she would have been teased as a child. The English phrase seems pretty literal – “I don’t have any idea (sorry)” – however, if you replace “clue” with “piece of evidence” people very likely wouldn’t have a clue what you meant.

And somewhat poignantly, apparently der falscher Hase is “meatloaf.” I wonder what you’d find in the Easter basket he delivered?!

Tagged animals, Easter, hares, holiday traditions, idioms, Oster, rabbits

30/03/2013

2 Comments

Daily Post

Is it Mother Sun in your mother tongue?

We don’t have grammatical genders in English – we say “the” for all of our nouns (at least the countable ones) – but even where there is no obvious connection to gender, there are some words with gender-based associations . For example, “the sun” and “the moon.” Although we have the expression “the man in the moon,” I would suggest that the common association for the moon itself is with the feminine and for the sun it is the masculine. In learning German, though, one has to go against this and learn der Mond and die Sonne. Even worse, if you also know a bit of Spanish, Italian, Portugese or French, all of which do have grammatical genders, you have a further challenge as “moon” takes a feminine and “sun” a masculine pronoun in each of these languages! And in my limited understanding of Chinese symbolism, I believe that the moon is associated with the feminine/yin/dark and the sun is associated with the masculine/yang/light.

Indeed, there is enough interest in the gender associated with the moon and sun that when you type [sun masculine] into Google, one completion it provides is [moon feminine]. The story that resonated most with me was that the further north you went, the more the sun came to be associated with giving life by giving light and thus with the feminine through the connection with giving birth. Now since arbitrary things are hard to learn, and most of the relationships between German nouns and their grammatical genders are arbitrary (or even misleading, to give the famous examples of das Mädchen – “the girl” or “the maiden” – and das Fräulein -“young lady” or “miss” – where the nouns follow the rule that diminutives with –chen and –lein take das), having a somewhat meaning cue for sun and moon feels helpful.

Therefore while Die Sonne scheint still doesn’t sound quite right to me (and not just because it seems such a rare event here in Hamburg), some light has been shed!

Tagged artbitrary, China, das, der, der Mond, die, die Sonne, feminine, grammatical gender, masculine, Romance languages, yin-yang

29/03/2013

5 Comments

Daily Post

Are we related?

In one of my German language learning books there is an exercise that involves filling on a family tree (der Stammbaum – Oma, Opa, Mutter, Vater, Schwester, Bruder, Nichte, Neffe, Cousine, Cousin, Enkelkind) and while completing it, I noticed both how relationships between words in other languages may stand out in ways that they do not in our own and how we use relationship words to talk about languages.

The first ‘aha’ came from reflecting on:

die Verwandtschaft – die Verwandte – verwandt
“relationship” – “relatives” – “related”

I was already familiar with die Verwandte from previous lessons but die Verwandtschaft – “relationship” or “kinship” or “affinity” or “relatives” – was new. And as I looked at it, I had a blinding flash of the obvious, namely “relationship” is related (pun intended) to other words in English like “relative” and “related.” I had never really thought about how saying “I’m in a relationship” means in some sense “This person is my relative” because I guess I tend to see “relatives” as givens – you are born into them – and “relationships” as choices. This narrative makes sense as I grew up with my biological parents and my biological siblings around me. At the same time, as the child of divorced parents and a step-parent myself, I’m surprised by my own surprise when seeing the way these words form a family (yes, sorry, another pun).

Which brings me to the other thought that this Stammbaum exercise prompted, the use of kin terms to describe language. We say that German and English come from the same “family.” We talk about our “mother tongue” or unsere Muttersprache. These metaphors feel normal and safe to English (and I’m going to guess German) speakers. What about the case where two languages don’t come from the same family, though? Does this encourage us to see the speakers of those languages as more different or perhaps even less than, just as we might forgive something in a family member that wouldn’t be acceptable in an acquaintance? Could such metaphors engender the belief that we might not ever be able to understand each other because the relationship between speaking and thinking seems so tight? Moreover, think about how language enforces power (think of Animal Farm or 1984): some mother tongues have been wiped out as speakers were prevented from using them, economic opportunities may be restricted to speakers of particular languages, exercising the right to vote may be made more difficult by creating literacy tests. Like in many families, the German-speaking context perhaps offers an example of how family members may also face particularly bad treatment – there is a close relationship between German and Yiddish

Tagged English, family, family tree, German, mother tongue, Muttersprache, power, pun, relatives, Yiddish

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Earthquake Words/Erdbeben Wörter

Let's Shake Things Up A Bit!

Author Archives: kwhirsh

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?

Hare-y stories

Is it Mother Sun in your mother tongue?

Are we related?