Thursday, 9/1

Oh, those Germans and their wacky, wacky language.

It's now September, which means we're within the calendar month that Loraine and I (hopefully) get to head back to Germany. That means two things--one, I'm not allowed to injure myself or do anything so stupid as to preclude us from going. That's fairly easy. The other? That our designated "language person" brush up in his or her slight knowledge of the language of the country wee'll be visiting. I do French, Loraine does German.

So it's her turn to study up. And boy, has she been.

She'll be the first to tell you she's not fluent in the language or has grasped all of its nuances, but she's been immersing herself in some of the...peculiarities of German. And many of those peculiarities don't make much sense to a native English speaker, even though English is an offshoot of German (with a whole bunch of French rebelliousness thrown in for good measure). One of those peculiarities would be that of a compound word, the German tendency to combine parts of smaller words to form a bigger word.

For instance, we might say "I have to catch the train", while in German you combine all of those into one big multi-syllabic masterpiece. Believe it or not, that even happens with smaller phrases, as exemplified when Loraine discovered how the Germans say "speed limit". You'd figure that it would be fairly straightforward, right? In English, it's two short words, yet if you want to say "speed limit" in German, here's what comes out of your mouth--

erlaubte Höchstgeschwindigkeit

I've said before, and I'll say it again--oh, those Germans and their wacky, wacky language.

I don't know much German, so I couldn't actually tell you what all those syllables actually say. If I had to guess, I'd say it's a compound word meaning, and I'm guessing here, something like "the speed which you can not exceed or you will be punished for it", but I would probably be incorrect. I'm sure there's a fine and simply elegant explanation for it--it IS German, after all--but just staring at it makes an English speaker's jaw drop to the floor in wonder and amazement.

That's just one example of what Loraine's trying to figure out in the next month. Thankfully, almost everyone in Germany speaks a little English (in some cases better than people in the US, believe it or not) so this immersion is more for her own edification than anything. But still, the more she comes across words like "erlaubte Höchstgeschwindigkeit", the more I'm amazed that English and German are in any way related.

After all, German IS a wacky, wacky language.

(jim@wmqt.com)