Linguistic Curiosities (and Embarrassments)

Last Thursday, Amanda's "Thursday 13" at her blog listed 13 Indonesian words she'd run across that she thought were interesting enough to share. It was a very cool list, and got me to thinking that it was perhaps time I did something interesting, if not particularly useful, with that degree in Linguistics I've been hauling around for the last 35 years. And so, here are a few stories and linguistic nuggets dredged up from the cobwebby recesses of my vast store of useless, but interesting knowledge...

All languages borrow words from each other freely (except French, which does it, but doesn't like to admit it). A fun example: the Russian word for "pencil" is karandash, which derives from the Turkish words kara dash, meaning "black stone." It also was adopted as the pen name of the French satirist and political cartoonist Emmanuel Poire, who called himself "Caran d'Ache;" that name eventually was adopted by a Swiss company which manufactures fine writing instruments.

The famous American writer Mark Twain had his problems with German - his essay "The Awful German Language" is as funny today as it was when he wrote it in 1880...unless you are studying German, in which case it makes much more sense than he may have realized. My German is pretty fluent, although not as good as it was when I was living in Germany and using it every day...Agnes's English is so good that I've gotten pretty linguistically lazy. Nevertheless, German offers many unique pitfalls for the unwary...

Dialects. The German you learn in an American language course is spoken only on the TV news in Germany, if there. People in Berlin speak something totally different from what they speak in Frankfurt, which is radically different from Bavaria or extreme northern Germany. And forget Austria and Switzerland...we visited one of Agnes's friends in Switzerland one time and I didn't understand a word anyone said for three days.

The Dangers of Direct Translation: One evening Agnes and I went to a dinner in honor of a visiting Air Force general, and she met the commander of one of the large units in Berlin. He fell in love with her (easy enough to do) and spent all evening fussing over her, much to the chagrin of his wife. The following week I drove across town to have lunch with her at the Officers' Club at Templehof Air Base, and while we were eating, this particular Colonel came in. He spotted us and zoomed over to our table...ignoring me, he looked warmly at Agnes and asked how she was. She smiled sweetly at him and said, "Good, till now!" You could hear the crash of his face hitting the floor from across the room. Agnes had translated directly from the proper German expression bis jetzt, gut; in German, it means "up till now I'm fine, but I don't know how I'll be in another 20 minutes." In American English, of course, it means, "everything was fine until YOU showed up." I salvaged my career by explaining it to the Colonel; many years later I ran into him again, and he was still laughing about it.

It works the other way, too. One evening I was relating the day's events to Agnes, and told her that one of my friends had asked about her. He'd asked "how's it going with Agnes;" I translated it directly - So-und-so hat mir gefragt, wie's mit dir geht. She was horrified...it turns out that by expressing it that way, I was telling her my friend had asked what it was like to have sex with her. For the record, it's great...but it took a while to sort out the fact that we hadn't been discussing what she was like in bed...

Untranslatable Words. Amanda wrote about the Indonesian word dong, which gets tacked onto the ends of sentences to add emphasis, but doesn't seem to have a meaning of its own. In linguistics, we'd call this a particle, and German has one too - gel (pronounced with a hard g, like "gong"). You don't learn this in school, and it drove me nuts for months as I tried to figure out what it meant and why it was being used all the time.

Idiomatic Meanings. In German, the Dative (indirect object) case is used more frequently than in English for many different things. For instance, if the temperature is too high, you might say, mir ist warm (literally, "it's warm to me"); you learn this in school...but what you don't learn is that if you literally translate the English "I'm warm" as ich bin warm, you're announcing that you are gay (ein warmer Kerl - a warm fellow - is a euphemism for a gay man). Oops.

Well, I could go on in this vein, but the Sunday paper is waiting to be read, dance practice awaits in a few hours, and a brand new upscale grocery store - Wegman's - is opening not far from us later this morning. Yee, hah!

Have a good day. More thoughts tomorrow.

Bilbo