Daily Post | Earthquake Words/Erdbeben Wörter

15/05/2013

Daily Post

Week 6 Anniversary

Earthquakes make the earth move and earthquake words create motion (and perhaps commotion!) within our minds. Just as the earth shifts, so do our ideas about our new language and often our mother tongue(s) as well. Sometimes cracks are exposed, sometimes deep, gaping holes. We may have been aware of the fault lines beforehand or we can be surprised. Each change of the landscape alters how we see ourselves and how we use language to share that self with others.

Here’s to being moved in all the splendid and various ways in which that phrase can be taken.

Tagged commotion, cracks, earth, fault lines, landscape, motion, moved, movement

14/05/2013

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Daily Post

Seeing and looking out

For me, one of the best parts of learning a new language is the way it leads you to wonder anew at your mother tongue. In Dialog in Deutsch this morning we were talking about the various compounds that can be formed by adding a prefix to the noun die Sicht – “sight,” “visibility,” “view” and “point of view.” Now this is a favorite word of mine because it was one of the first I learned as part of a compound because Ex, one of the characters in Warum Nicht? the language learning radio program from Deutsche Welle, is an invisible – unsichtbar – elf (and, yes, that this is rather odd really does help to fix the vocabulary in one’s mind!).

The compound that caught my attention today in terms of what it highlighted about English, however, was die Umsicht. This can translated as “circumspection” – the more formal option – as well as “prudence.” I don’t think I ever put “circumspection” together with its relatives “introspection” and “inspection,” nor had a I thought about its connections with “circumnavigate” or “circumscribe.” If you look at the etymology of “circumspection,” you will find a Latin root meaning “to look around” which shows a clear relationship to Umsicht if you pull it apart into um – “around” and Sicht – “view”. (You can also find “*spect” in the “prospect” meaning of die Aussicht.)

Intriguingly, die Vorsicht, is also given as a translation of “prudence” – amazing what one can “see” if one is prudent enough to take the time to “look out!” for beautiful language “sights!”

Tagged circumnavigate, circumscribe, circumspection, Dialog in Deutsch, die Aussicht, die Sicht, die Umsicht, die Vorsicht, Ex, inspection, introspection, invisible, Latin, point of view, prefix, prudence, sight, um, unsichtbar, view, visibility, Warum nicht?

13/05/2013

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Daily Post

And we’re back in a hail of floors

Hello Again! The Earthquake Words hiatus has ended and while I will start back with something on German, there may be some posts on Polish in the offing.

As some of you know, there are different ways of labeling the floors of a building or house in different parts of the world. When I first moved the UK, for instance, I needed to learn that what in the US was referred to as the “1st floor” was the “ground floor” in the UK and thus what was the “2nd floor” in the US became the “1st floor.” In Germany, it is also typical to call the 1st level the “ground floor” or das Erdgeschoss (abbreviated as EG and E or indicated numerically by 0). What is a bit more confusing for me is what happens next. The upper floors are designated das Obergeschoss (abbreviated OG) and mostly have an associated number, OG.1 would be the first floor above the ground floor. There can also be das Dachgeschoss which is either the “top floor” or the “attic” (note that I’m likely not the only person thrown off by this as according to dict.cc, the following words can all mean “attic” – der Dachboden, die Mansarde, das Dachgeschoss,adie Attika, der Speicher, die Dachkammer, der Estrich (Switzerland and Austria), das Dachstock, der Überbau, der Dachraum and der Spitzboden). Moreover, when I’ve been looking at ads for apartments, there can be also a “penthouse” floor labeled die Dachterrassenwohnung (or perhaps das Penthaus). When you go below ground, you enter the realm of das Untergeschoss (abbreviated U, U1 or -1). Again, these can be numbered if there is more than one. There is also a word to designate what in English we would call the “cellar” – der Keller – which I must admit often makes me think of der Kellner – the waiter – going down to change the kegs or to get something from the deep freeze!

There are also several other floor naming systems, two that are commonly encountered are das Stock (plus the older term which you will still see das Stockwerk) and die Etage. For example, when I registered my new address, I forgot to include the floor and was asked Welches Stock? to which I replied Erste – 1st (or second in the US!). In this system the “ground floor” is still das Erdgeschoss, however the “attic” or “top floor” may become der Dachstock. In the Etage system the “ground floor” can also be das Parterre or 1. Etage. The “attic” can be der Dachboden or die Mansarde. The underground level in the Etage system can be der Souterrain or das Tiefparterre (the translation for the English euphemism “garden flat” could use these words or the more straightforward die Kellerwohnung). You can also have das Hochparterre which appears to be a level half way between the ground floor and the 1st floor (which might also be das Mezzanin, although this can apply to any in-between floor not just the first one above ground level)

Now, if isn’t enough to make your head spin, it is also the case that das Geschoss is ein Teekesselchen or homonym. Das Geschoss can also mean “missile,” “bullet,” or “projectile” and like in English there is a direct parallel for a “hail of bullets” – Hagel von Geschossen. I think I can feel them zinging around in my upper story just now, let’s hope the target is not a bit of hard-won German vocabulary or I could end up with roof damage (einen Dachschaden haben – “to have a screw loose”)!

Tagged apartment, attic, building, bullet, das Geschoss, das Stock, der Dachschaden, die Etage, Erdgeschoss, floor, Hagel, hail, homonyn, numbering system, penthouse, story, Teekesselchen, to have a screw loose, UK

02/05/2013

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Daily Post

Is that an S I hear?

In English we tend to form our plurals with “s,” which sounds simple but needs a bit of explaining because while the letter “s” may appear, its pronunciation is governed by the final sound in the word.

We add an “s” and say plain old “s” /s/ when the word ends in the unvoiced (you don’t feel a vibration if you touch your throat while you say them) sounds /p/, /t/, /k/, /f/ and the /th/ in “path.”

We add “s” but say it like “z” /z/ with the voiced (check your throat, you should feel vibrations) sounds /b/, /d/, /g/, /v/, /l/, /m/, /n/, /ng/, /r/ or a vowel sound. (It would also apply to the /th/ in “writhe,” however I was unable to find a noun with this final sound as there is another phonological pattern in English where the noun forms of related words end in the unvoiced /th/ – “bath” and the verb forms end in a voiced /th/ – “bathe.”)

Finally, if the word ends in a sibilant /s/, /z/ /ʃ/ as in “wish,” /tʃ/ as in “pitch,” /dʒ/ as in “ridge” or /ʒ/ as in “mirage,” we add an “es” and say either /iz/ or /uz/.

One way to test these rules for yourself is to make up non-words that end with sounds of each of the three types, and then create plurals. Try it with “•geck,” “•gring” and “•gitch.” You should find, in line with Jean Berko, that your pronunciations vary even though you’ve never had to form these plurals before.

As I learned to speak English before I could read or spell, the challenge was to associate multiple sounds with a single letter – “s.” Because I only began learning German as a literate adult, I can be confused by spelling patterns that map onto multiple sounds as the plural “s” does in English. At least I can take comfort that I not alone in this. Here is a small portion of a party invitation that one 7 year old boy sent to another:

Sak mir ob du kome konnst which I think is a rough sound-based rendering of Sag mir ob du kommen kannst “Tell me if you can come”

I hope after reading this you will say that you can come and enjoy the party here on Earthquake Words. Unfortunately, however, the blog will be on a short hiatus as I travel to Poland and will be “unplugged” for a week or so. I look forward to sharing more with you after my trip – tschüss and “bye for now.”

Tagged Jean Berko, non-words, party invitation, phonological conditioning, plural, spelling, spelling patterns

01/05/2013

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Daily Post

Week 5 Anniversary

It’s an anniversary post and thus the theme once again is loosely related to earthquakes. The most active areas for earthquakes are at the join between two tectonic plates (die tektonische Platten), each of which is in motion either toward to away from the other. As it turns out, the plate is an apt metaphor for language learning in several ways.

First of all, satisfaction with progress in learning a new language is also something where things can feel as though they are coming together or that they are getting further and further apart. It can even feel that both things are happening at the same time, you suddenly have new vocabulary that you can use rather naturally and directly (rather taking an indirect route through your native tongue), and, at the same time, perhaps you struggle with a sentence structure about which you once felt similarly confident.

Perhaps a better metaphor for language learning than the tectonic sort of plate is to imagine the circus act where someone is keeping lots of plates (die Teller) spinning (I managed to find one source with something close to this phrase and there it was translated as viele Teller in der Luft zu halten – “to keep many plates in the air.”) Like this performance, speaking a foreign language requires you to do many things at once and give all of them at least a bit of your attention to prevent the whole thing crashing down around you.

Alternatively, one might say that when learning a new language, you “have a lot on your plate,” a phrase which dict.cc translates as both viel/genug am Hals haben and eine Menge/genug um die Ohren haben. Both of these have parallels in English in terms of being “up to your neck” or “up to your ears” in work (note that dict.cc also gives the first phrase, with the reference to Hals, as a translation for “to have many balls in the air”).

One thing is for certain, though, unless you are a child or a very unusual person, a new language is not something handed to you on a plate or auf den silbernen Tablett servieren!

Tagged der Teller, die Platten, earthquakes, genug am Hals haben, genug um die Ohren haben, idioms, keeping a lot of plates spinning, metaphor, neck, plate, tectonics, tektonische, to be up to your ears, to have too many balls in the air, viele Teller in der Luft zu halten

30/04/2013

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Daily Post

Hair-raising

This post was prompted by getting my haircut yesterday (and, no my German is not up to this task, I was lucky enough to find a stylist who spoke wonderful English to give me a trim). The name of the salon I went to is FON which is both an abbreviation and a bit of word play: the word for “to blow dry” is fönen and this small chain calls itself Friseur Ohne Name. They have a very good value option where a wash and cut are included and then you do the fönen yourself with their dryer and brush. This isn’t something I’ve seen in the US, although perhaps I’d simply not been looking for it!

A haircut also turns out to be a good change to practice what for English speakers is a fairly subtle vowel difference between the German u and eu/ö because die Frisur is “hairstyle” and der Friseur / Frisör is “hairdresser.” Yes, you can probably be a tiny bit lax because the grammatical genders are different, but where’s the fun in learning German if you aren’t challenging yourself to get your tongue around some new vowels?!

I also discovered that the idiom “Tell it to the Marines!” has as its German counterpart “Das kannst du deinem Friseur erzählen!” I’m not sure what it says about the view of either hairdressers or the Marines that when you want to suggest you don’t believe what someone is saying, you tell them to share it with either of these groups, perhaps the idea is that they’ve heard it all?! Interestingly, there were quite a number of phrases that at least one website categorized as having related meanings in German.

One final interesting aspect of talking about haircare in German is that you use a reflexive verb and don’t refer to “your hair.” So you “to brush your hair” you say something like “oneself the hairs brush” – sich die Haare bürsten. Different yet again is when you want to say “to comb your hair,” here you say – sich kämmen, something like “to comb oneself” where the hair isn’t even mentioned.

I wish I’d found some way to fit “hair-splitting” into this post, but I’ll have to settle for remarking on how “hair-raising” – haarsträubend – being a compound of das Haar – hair – and sträubend -“bristling” – makes me think first of a porcupine or a wild boar and then the metaphorical meaning takes over and places them on a giant roller coaster…

Tagged blow dry, brush, comb, das Haar, Das kannst du deinem Friseur erzählen, der Friseur/Frisör, die Frisur, fönen, hairdresser, hairstyle, porcupine, roller coaster, sich bürsten, sich kämmen, Tell it to the Marines, unbelievable, vowels, wild boar

29/04/2013

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Daily Post

Sometimes less is more

Last week I had an interesting experience to do with pronunciation (die Aussprache) in a Dialog in Deutsch group with two Spanish speakers. One of these women was trying to explain that she was working as a volunteer – eine Freiwillige – but it came out sounding like •Freibillige because the relationship between the /v/ and the /b/ sound in Spanish. Both frei and billige are words in German and they appear together online in the context Versandkosten frei billige <etwas> – “free shipping [on] cheap <somethings>” so I am guessing that this added to the comprehension issue for the native speakers present. For me, with only a bit of German to interfere, and some knowledge of Spanish, it was clear what she was trying to say. Indeed, I am not even sure that I would have noticed the error but for the blank faces and the fact that they instantly cleared up when I said Freiwillige with a strong emphasis on the pronunciation of the /v/ sound.

I’m sure it isn’t unusual for one non-native speaker to be able to understand another non-native speaker better than a native speaker who is part of the same conversation because both non-native speakers are struggling. In addition, there is a sense of community among non-native speakers that centers around the desire to communicate and the frequent sense that the right word is just out of reach. If you can search your own word bank and pull out something that might help the other person express him or herself, you get a nice jolt of satisfaction from being helpful. And as many models of learning stress, helping someone else is a great well to build your own skills. I don’t think I’ll be forgetting the meaning or the pronunciation of Freiwillige, frei or billige any time soon, at least not voluntarily.

Tagged /b/, billig, Dialog in Deutsch, die Aussprache, die Freiwillige, frei, helping others learn, interference, pronunciation, Spanish, V

28/04/2013

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Short and sweet

My first hurdle in writing emails in German is that you do not capitalize the first word of the sentence after the greeting. My second is that it is very, very common to abbreviate the closing. To choices I see regularly are MfG and LG. The first is short for Mit freundlichen Grüßen – “Sincerely yours” or “Yours truly.” The second is short for Liebe Grüße – which I have seen translated as “Love” but I think that that might only work for British speakers (I can recall the first time a male colleague from London closed his email with “love” – after checking with a native speaker I was able to relax). In the US, we tend not to end emails or letters to acquaintances or colleagues with “love” and might instead use something like “Kind Regards” or “Warm Regards” or even “Fond Regards.” All of these feel friendlier than “Yours sincerely” but nowhere near as intimate as “love” and I suspect that friendliness is what is intended by the people sending me LG. I believe that intimacy would require the addition of viele to liebe Grüße (perhaps at some point I’ll have a close enough relationship with a German speaker so that notes close with VlG?!)

One thing you will may have noticed is that abbreviations in German respect the fact that nouns are capitalized. Compare the way a German-English dictionary would indicate that a preposition is followed by a noun in the dative case in the two languages:

+Dat. gefolgt von Dativ
“+dat.” followed by dative

My favorite example of this is – you’ve guessed it, perhaps – “for example” – z.B. which is the abbreviation for zum Beispiel. For some reason we abbreviate the Latin exempli gratia to” e.g.” when we want to briefly say “for example in English.

To get a feel for the variety of abbreviations used in German, listen to this rap and read the glossary of their meanings: http://www.pauljoycegerman.co.uk/abinitio/alphabet/alphamfg2.html (perhaps unsurprisingly a number of the abbreviations have become the names of bands!).

MfG and bye for now.

Tagged abbreviations, capitalization, Dat., dat. love, exempli gratia, Latin e.g., LG, MfG, rap, Warm Regards, Yours Sincerely, z.B.

27/04/2013

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Daily Post

Uh-Oh, a Stop!

I was very happy when I finally had my residence permit, die Aufenthaltserlaubnis, so happy in fact that I was telling everyone and in doing so, getting some strange looks (well, more strange than I usually get when I am attempting to speak German). I realized quickly that the problem was where I was breaking this word up into syllables. The correct break, so that the different pieces that make up this compound word stay intact, is like this (the • indicate the breaks between syllables):

Aufent•halts•erlaubnis

But I was breaking it like this:

Aufent•halt•serlaubnis

Now there are two things that happen when you change the breaks in die Aufenthaltserlaubnis. The first is as mentioned, the integrity of the words forming the compound is compromised, there is no word or stem *serlaubnis. The second issue is with the pronunciation. If you are trying to say *serlaubnis, you begin with a /z/ and if you are trying to say halts, you finish with an /s/.

A second word that threw me off in terms of syllabification is the verb sich beeilen – to hurry (oneself). Was I to put the second e with the first e or with the i or was this a new vowel sound composed of all three? The answer is that you put the second e with the i and add a glottal stop (the sound you make when you say “uh-oh” or include all over the place if you speak certain British dialects) to make doubly sure your listener knows where the boundary falls, indicated here by underlining the vowel that is preceded by the glottal sto:p sich beeilen. This is in part because eilen is itself a verb that means “to hurry” or that something “is urgent” and thus be– is a prefix. The glottal stop (der Stimmritzenverschlusslaut) also is used because it commonly precedes vowels when they are the first letter of a word or a stressed syllable. In the one piece of linguistic research I looked at on this point, there is evidence the you see a glottal stop most often with a content word (rather than a function word(, when the initial vowel is stressed (rather than unstressed) and with a slow speech rate. Thus many native speakers of German may be unaware of them popping up regularly in speech – one example those of you who are native speakers might try is der Arm (“arm”) and arm (“poor”), in the former the tendency is to begin with a glottal stop.

In some cases, the presence of a glottal stop affects the meaning, compare these two verbs which you can hear pronounced at this site:

vereisen – Die Scheibe vereist schnell “The window pane gets icy quickly”

verreisen – Er verreist morgen nach Polen “He travels to Poland tomorrow”

In the first case the prefix ver– has been added to the noun das Eis and then the new form is converted to a verb (according to Canoo this is a fairly common word formation process and so likely deserves a post all its own at some point). Verreisen is formed from adding the prefix ver– to the verb reisen. Using the glottal stop helps to indicate that the break is between the ver and eisen. Not to include it would be a bit like my combining the s from halts with Erlaubnis.

With that return to where we started, thus beendet this post!

Tagged beeilen, beenden, die Aufenthaltserlaubnis, glottal stop, speech rate, stress, syllable boundaries, vereisen, verreisen, vowel

26/04/2013

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Daily Post

Nearly food?

While fast looks exactly like “fast,” it doesn’t mean schnell (which those of you who watched Hogan’s Heroes as a kid may remember as a frequently given command, often in the same breath as raus). Instead the most common meanings for fast are “almost” and”nearly.” In fact, you can use fast and schnell together such as when you want to say something is “almost as fast” or goes “almost as quickly” as something else – fast als schnell. Interestingly, or perhaps confusingly depending on whether I am wearing my amateur linguist or my amateur German speaker hat, rather than saying a clock or watch “is fast” you use the verb vorgehen and say Die Uhr geht vor.

In English, “fast” can also be a verb. In this case, we have found a partial friend as there is a German verb fasten with the meaning “to fast” and also two German nouns die Fastenzeit and das Fasten with cognate meanings. The partial part is that there is also an English verb “fasten,” which is closer to another meaning of “fast” – “firmly fixed.” This meaning is one which is captured by multiple words in German:

schliessen “to fasten” (you may remember this from the discussion of bowls and keys in a previous post as it also means “to lock”)
zumachen – “to fasten up a dress or coat” (zumachen is worth a post of its own as it has a host of meanings)
zuknöpfen – “to fasten up buttons” (what do you do if it is a dress or coat with buttons?!)
miteinander verbinden – “to fasten together”
zusammenheften – “to fasten together pieces of paper”
sich anschnallen – “to fasten one’s seatbelt”

And if there is a word in German that approximates the “firmly fixed” version of the adjective “fast,” it would be fest: something can “be fast” – fest sein – or “made fast” – festmachen. This would quite a happy situation if it wasn’t for the English noun “fest,” the short form for “festival” because the meanings for the German adjective fest – “fixed,” “firm,” “stable,” “permanent.” “tight,” “unshakeable,” “solid,” and “strong” (as well as the corresponding adverbs) – are a good fit for English terms like “color fast,” “fast friends,” “hard and fast” and “fast asleep.”

I find particular delight in the fact that the word das Fastfood has made it into German. Although, as I learned in working on yesterday’s post, there are not many nouns formed by adverb and noun combinations, there are a few, thus I will choose to interpret das Fastfood as meaning “nearly” or “almost” food and I “stand fast” on that!

Tagged almost, bowls, buttons, coats, color fast, das Fastfood, die Fastenzeit, die Uhr, dresses, fast, fast asleep, fast friends, fasten, fest, firmly fixed, hard and fast, miteinander verbinden, nearly, partial friend, pieces of paper, raus, schliessen, schnell, seatbelt, sich anschnallen, vorgehen, zuknöpfen, zumachen, zusammenheften

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Earthquake Words/Erdbeben Wörter

Let's Shake Things Up A Bit!

Category Archives: Daily Post

Week 6 Anniversary

Seeing and looking out

And we’re back in a hail of floors

Is that an S I hear?

Week 5 Anniversary

Hair-raising

Sometimes less is more

Short and sweet

Uh-Oh, a Stop!

Nearly food?