Category: German (Deutsch)

Polyglot Gathering

By Simon

I arrived in Berlin yesterday for the Polyglot Gathering, which starts today. I flew here on KLM via Amsterdam, and unfortunately my luggage stayed in Amsterdam. It should arrive today though, and I’ve coped without it so far. This is only the second time this has happened to me – the last time was when I went to Cuba via Madrid, and my luggage stayed in Madrid for a few days.

Last night I met some of the other polyglots, some of whom speak even more languages than I do. I spoke lots of Esperanto, French and English, and some German, Dutch, Mandarin, Italian, Welsh and Spanish.

The next few days are packed with talks, language lessons and other language-related activities, and lots of polyglottery. A few people I’ve met so far are even familiar with Omniglot, which is great as I rarely meet people who know the site.

Going through the motions

By Simon

In German there are two main verbs that mean ‘to go’: gehen, which is used in expressions about going in general, and particularly going on foot / walking; and fahren, which refers particularly to going/travelling in a form of transport (car, train, bus, boat, etc).

So I could said, “Am Samstag gehe ich nach Berlin” (I’m going to Berlin on Saturday) and this would indicate that I was walking there – which is possible, but would take rather a long time from Bangor. I am actually going to Berlin on Saturday for the Polyglot Gathering – getting the train to Manchester Airport, then flying to Berlin via Amsterdam, and getting the bus into Berlin from the airport – so I could say, “Am Samstag fahre ich nach Berlin” (I’m travelling to Berlin on Saturday).

In Dutch similar verbs exist – gaan and varen – however they are used in different ways. Varen as a verb means ‘to go, to travel, to sail, to navigate, to ride’, and as a noun means sailing. Gaan is the generally word for to go, which also means to travel, to ride and to go on foot (te voet gaan). So in Dutch I could say, “Op zaterdag ga ik naar Berlijn.” (I’m going to Berlin on Saturday), and this wouldn’t necessarily indicate that I was going on foot. If I said, “Ik vaar naar Berlijn.”, that might indicate that I was going there by boat / sailing there – at least that’s how I understand it.

There’s also my favourite Dutch verb lopen (to go, walk, run, march, step, stride, stroll), which seems to be cognate with the German verb laufen (to run, go, walk), and I’m sure there are other verbs of motion in both languages.

Do other languages have separate verbs for different kinds of going?

Stockungen

By Simon

While listening to Deutschlandradio this morning one word that kept on coming up and that I didn’t understand was Stockung. It appears mainly in traffic reports, so I assume it meant something like delays or traffic jams.

According to Reverso, Stockung means:

– interruption, hold-up; congestion, traffic jam, hold-up
– breakdown (in negotiations)
– slackening or dropping off (in trade/business)
– break, lull (in speech); pause, hesitation
– thickening; curdling (of milk)

Related expressions include:

– Verkehrsstockung = traffic jam
– der Verkehr läuft wieder ohne Stockungen = traffic is flowing smoothly again

A related verb is stocken, which means: to miss or skip a beat; to falter; to make no progress; to flag; to grind to a halt; to stagnate; to be held up or halted; to thicken; to curdle, to go sour; to become mildewed, to go mouldy/moldy.

Stockung and Stocken come from Stock (stick), which comes from the Old High German stoc, from the Proto-Germanic *Stukka (floor, beam, tree stump), from the Proto-Indo-European *(s)teu- (to push, stick, knock, beat), which is also the root of the English words stick and stock [source].

What are traffic jams / hold-ups called in your country?

Logoburroo and other place names

By Simon

If an Australian visitor to the UK asked you for directions to somewhere they called Logoburroo [lɔgɜʉbəˈrʊː] would you know what place they were referring to?

A friend of mine heard an Australian pronouncing Loughborough, a town in Leicestershire in central England, in this way and thought it was an interesting attempt at the name. The usual pronunciation is [ˈlʌfbərə] (luff-buh-ruh) or [ˈlʌfbrə] (luff-bruh).

Loughborough features in the Doomsday Book of 1086 as ‘Lucteburne’, which possibly comes from the name Lehedeburh, “the town of Lehede” (named after someone called Lehede) [source].

Burh is variant form of the Old English word burg (city, town, fort, stronghold, dwelling place), which comes from the Proto-Germanic *burgz (fortification, stronghold, fortified city), from the Proto-Indo-European *bʰərgʰ- (fortified elevation), from *bʰerǵʰ- (to rise; high, lofty; hill, mountain) [source].

Borough, burgh, brough and bury, which all come from the Old English burg, are common elements in English place names, e.g. Loughborough, Canterbury and Middlesbrough; and are also found in Scottish place names as burch and burgh, e.g. Edinburgh and Jedburgh. Related words are also found in Dutch (burcht, burg, borg – castle, borough), French (bourg – market townn), German (burg – castle, fortifcation), and the Scandinavian languages (borg – castle, city).

The Proto-Indo-European root *bʰerǵʰ- (hill) is also the root of the Proto-Celtic word *brixs (hill), from which we get the Brythonic word *brigā, which is part of the name Brigantī, the Celtic tribe that occupied a large part of northern Britain at the time of the Roman invasion (43 AD). The element briga also appears in Gaulish place names; and from the same root is bre, an obsolete word for hill in Welsh, Cornish, Breton and Scottish Gaelic (also bré/brí in Irish).

Hill is usually bryn in Welsh, cnoc in Irish and Scottish Gaelic, and torgenn in Breton; and the elements brae/bray/bre appear in some English, Irish and Scottish place names.

Incidentally, Leicestershire is pronounced [ˈlɛstəʃə] (lestuh-shuh).

Schurrbart

By Simon

Schnurrbart

I came across the wonderful German word Schnurrbart [ˈʃnʊrba:ɐ̯t] recently and just liked the sound of it. The Bart part means beard – you can see the connection – and the Schnurr part comes from schnurren (to purr).

According to Wikipedia: “Ein Schnurrbart ist ein über der Oberlippe wachsender Bart.” or “A moustache is an beard growing over the lip”, and it is also referred to as an Oberlippenbart (overlipbeard). A large moustache is called a Schnauzbart (Schnauze = lip, muzzle, snout).

Other words used for moustache in German include Bürste (brush), Schnauzer (a type of dog), Schnorres, Schnorrati, Sör, Rotzbremse (“snot brake”) and Popelfänger (“bogie catcher”). Do you know/use any others?

Other words for moustache in English include tache/tash, whiskers, face fungus, tea/soup strainer, snot catcher/mop, lip rug, and crumb catcher.

The English word moustache comes from French, from the Neapolitan word mustaccio.

Do moustaches have interesting names or nicknames in other languages?

Sources: bab.La dictionary, PONS dictionary, Wikipedia, howtogrowamoustache.com, OED

Voices and calls

By Simon

After writing yesterday’s post I was thinking about the Czech word hlas [ɦɫas] (voice, vote) and realised that it is quite similar to the Welsh word for voice, llais [ɬais]. I wondered it they share the same root.

Hlas comes from the Proto-Slavic *golsъ (voice), from the Proto-Balto-Slavic *galsas (voice), from the Proto-Indo-European *golHsos, from *gels- (to call)

The words for voice in other Slavic languages come from the same root: Old East Slavic: голосъ (golosŭ); Belarusian: голас (hólas); Russian: голос (gólos) and глас (glas – archaic/poetic); Ukrainian: голос (hólos); Old Church Slavonic: гласъ (glasŭ); Bulgarian: глас (glas); Macedonian: глас (glas); Serbo-Croatian: гла̑с; Slovene: glas; Kashubian: głos; Polish: głos; Slovak: hlas; Lower Sorbian: głos; Upper Sorban: hłós.

Also from the same root are the Latin gallas (cockrel); Romani glaso (voice); Romanian glas (voice, vote); Old Norse kalla (to call); English call, Dutch kallen (to chat, talk); German kallen (to scream, talk loudly, talk too much); Lithuanian galsas (sound, echo); Welsh galw (to call) and llais (voice); and possibly the Irish and Scottish Gaelic glaodh (to cry, shout).

Sources: Wiktionary

Pfeife

By Simon

The other day I came across the wonderful German word Pfeife, which means whistle or pipe, and comes from the Middle High German pfife, from Old High German pfiffa, from the Vulgar Latin pipa (pipe; tube-shaped musical instrument), from the Classical Latin pipare (to chirp; to peep), which is of imitative origin, and is also the root of the English word pipe, and related words in other European languages.

I particularly notice this word because the initial pf in Pfeife just appeals to me for some reason. It’s one of the consonant shifts (p > pf) that happened in High German, though not in other varieties of German.

Words and expressions related to Pfeife include:

– pfeifen = to blow a whistle; to sough; to whistle; to hoot; to pipe
– Ich pfeife eben darauf = I couldn’t care less about it.
– nach jds. Pfeife tanzen = to dance to sb.’s tune
– jdn. nach seiner Pfeife tanzen lassen = to lead sb. by the nose
– Pfeifkonzert = catcalls
– Er pfeift aus dem letzten Loch = He’s on his last legs (“He pipes from the last hole”)
– Da pfeift es aus einem anderen Loch = That’s a horse of a different color (“He/she pipes from a different hole”)

Sources: bab.la Dictionary, myEtymology.com, Online Etymology Dictionary

Towns, gardens and fences

By Simon

Last week I went to Denbigh, a small town in the north east of Wales, to sing in a concert. On the way there there was some discussion about the origins and meaning of the name Denbigh. So I thought I’d find out more. The English name of the town doesn’t mean anything, but the Welsh name, Dinbych, means ‘small fortress’ – din is an old word for fort or castle related to the word dinas (fort; refuge; city), and bych is a variant form of bach (small). Related words include dinasfraint (citzenship), dinasol (civic, municipal), and dinaswr (citizen).

Din comes from the same root as the Irish dún (fort), the Scottish Gaelic dùn (fortress, heap), the Manx doon (fort, fastness, stronghold, bastion, earth fort, dun, fortified rock), and din (fortress) in Breton and Cornish – the Proto-Celtic *dūnom (stronghold) [source], which is cognate with the Proto-Germanic *tunaz/*tunan (fortified place), the root of the Old English tuun/tūn (an enclosure; farmstead; village; estate), from which we get the word town; and of the Dutch tuin (garden), and the German Zaun (fence, hedge).

The element -dunum in Gaulish/Latin places names, such as Lugdunum (Lyon) and Acitodunum (Ahun), comes from the same root, as does the element -ton in English places names such as Workington, Ulverston, Dalton and Warton.

The root of all these words is the PIE *dhu-no- (enclosed, fortified place, hill-fort), from *dheue- (to close, finish, come full circle) [source].

Here’s a Glossary of Welsh Place-Name Elements, and a Key to English places names.

Schrijfrichting / Scriptpath

By Simon

Script direction in Mongolian

Last week a visitor to Omniglot asked me whether there is a single word in English that means writing direction, i.e. the direction in which writing systems are written. The Latin alphabet, for example, is written from left to right in horizontal lines, as are many other writing systems, while writing systems like Arabic and Hebrew are written from right to left in horizontal lines, and a few writing systems, such as traditional Mongolian and Manchu, are written from top to bottom in vertical columns running from left to right – other directions are available.

On Wikipedia I found the word directionality, and I found that there are more precise words for this concept in German and Dutch: Schreibrichtung / Schriftrichtung and Schrijfrichting. On the W3C site I found the term script direction.

The lack of a single-word term in English is partly because in English noun phrases are usually written as separate words, unlike in German and Dutch, where they are often written as single words.

I came up with some alternative possible terms for this phenomenon: scribeway / scribe way, scribepath / scribe path, script direction, script path, script way, script course, script orientation, or using Greek rather than Latin/Germanic roots: graphodromos, or grammadromos (dromos = road in Greek), or mixing Latin and Greek roots: scriptodromos / grammadromos.

What is writing direction called in other languages? Are there any others which use a single word.

Smoking Funky Radio

By Simon

Radio / Rundfunk

The word radio is based on the verb to radiate, which comes from the Latin radius, which means stick rod; beam, ray (of light); shuttle (of loom); rod for drawing figures (in mathematics), radius of circle; long olive (plant); spoke (of wheel).

Radio or radiotelegraphy, the wireless transmission of signals through space by electromagnetic radiation of a frequency below that of visible light, was originally called wireless telegraphy, which was abbreviated to wireless in the UK. The word radio was first used in the sense of wireless transmission in 1897 by Édouard Branly, a French physicist, as part of radioconductor. The first commercial broadcasts in the USA started in the 1920s and radio was the word used for them.

The word radio, or something similar is used in many of the world’s languages, however there are some exceptions: in German, for example, radio is Rundfunk [ˈʀʊntfʊŋk], although in Swiss German Radio is used. Rund means around or round, and Funk means radio or wireless, and funken means to cable; to radio; to send; to transmit (via radio). A related word is Hörfunk [ˈhøːɐ̯fuŋk], which means broadcasting: Hör comes from hören (to hear/listen),

In Mandarin Chinese radio is 收音机 [收音機 – shōuyīnjī] (‘recive sound machine’), in Hmong it’s xov tooj cua, in Icelandic it’s útvarp (‘out throw’ ?) and a radio is viðtæki (‘wide machine/apparatus’ ?).

Are there other languages in which the word for radio is not a variant on radio?

The English word funk, as in the style of music, or the unpleasant smell, comes from the Norman French funquer/funquier (“to smoke, reek”), from the Old Northern French fungier (“to smoke”), from the Vulgar Latin fūmicāre, an alteration of the Latin fūmigāre (“to smoke, fumigate”).

Sources: Wikipedia, Collins Latin Dictionary, Wiktionary, bab.la Dictionary, Icelandic Online Dictionary