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The German Language - A Baffling Case
“Why the f... can’t the Tuwort come früher (earlier)?” Swearing of this kind is common among foreigners learning German. As common as the disastrous results of trying to use the German that they’ve just learned. “Können Sie mir bitte drei Brötchen verkaufen?” Perfectly normal German. Translated it means, “Could you please sell me three rolls?” But the answer of the baker is an unintelligible one: “Moana Sie Semmeln?” There are three ways of explaining this baffling situation: Either one is in the wrong country, the teachers have taught one the wrong language, or perhaps people don’t speak German in Germany. Of course the Germans do speak German, but at times it’s so smothered by local dialects that a foreigner has a hard time comprehending it. Hence the language sometimes sounds Swabian, sometimes Kölsch (the dialect spoken along the Rhine) and if you’re unlucky sometimes Bavarian, in which case you won’t know what just hit you. As if standard German wasn’t complicated enough.
Even Native Speakers stumble
The genders (masculine, feminine and neutral) seem to follow a whimsical logic of their own. The woman (das Weib) has a neutral gender, while the thing (die Sache) is feminine. And why for heaven’s sake does a brassiere have a masculine gender? These rules of grammar are definitely not easy to understand. But in this country of thinkers and poets, even a native speaker stumbles when it comes to deciding between writing capital or small letters or deliberating the finer points of grammar such as the conjunctive. The bitterly controversial German orthographic reform has only led to further muddles. Even placing commas has become a writer’s nightmare and the unrestrained tendency to nominalise, a fond speciality of the German language, results in monstrously long words such as “Betäubungsmittlelverordnungsänderungsgesetz”. (No attempts at translating that one!) That’s the German language for you – not always beautiful, but definitely exact.
Internet Language
But, the German language lives on and nonchalantly helps itself to words from the English one. What you get is “Denglisch”, considered by many as modern and hip. “Coole Kids surfen durch das Internet”, everyone understands that. After all the internet has fundamentally changed the language of Generation @ in Germany too. “Browser”, “Provider”, “Server”, “Update” – language purists can wrinkle up their noses at that: Like most other languages, German absorbs Internet jargon as soon as it is coined. But sometimes the beautiful new world of technology also leads to strange language formulations: Instead of a mobile telephone, the Germans refer to it as a “Handy”, though the word doesn’t exist in the English language. But you can still live with that. Sometimes things can become much worse. Would you like a little sample? Here goes: Germany’s most famous fashion designer, Jil Sander was said to have remarked recently: “ Mein Leben ist eine giving-story. Für den Erfolg entscheidend war mein coordinated concept. Die audience hat das alles supported”. Loosely translated: “My life is a giving-story. What was decisive for success was my coordinated concept. The audience supported all that.” How horrific!
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