Schwabische Dialekt -- Ha-ha!

So könnte Obama sprechen, wäre er im Schwarzwald geboren ..



Verstanden?  Er spricht von einem ganz lustigen Verbot.  Ist nur lustig gemeint.
Habt ihr etwas davon verstanden?

Hier etwa ist der Text am Anfang:

Danke liebe Miteigentümer (coop-resident owners, along with me),

fürs Erscheine (for attending), heut middag hier, zur alljährlichen (annual)
Eigentümervollversammlung des Wohnblocks (meeting of the residents in  ... this neighbor-block) Willhelm-Straße 48. Danke.

Was mii echt nervt isch des Thema: Fahrräder abstelle im Hausgang.
(What my biggest gripe ist ....  bikes that are parked in the front hallway.)

Bei uns stellt jeder Dackel grad wies ihm passt sein Drahtesel innen Hausgang nei!
(Where we live, every single dachshund sets his wired donkey wherever it pleases him -- just inside the front entrance)

TROTZ VERBOTSSCHILD!
(Despite the Forbidden sign!)

Und die ällermeischte sind so roschtiche Gäbbel mit Granatemäßig dreckige Roife. SAUEREI! 
(Not to mention that most of them have such rusty handlebard and granite-heavy, filthy tires.  Filthy!)

 

Some Rules of Language are Wired in the Brain

Danke, Caethe, fuer diesen interessanten Artikel; es ist mir ganz neu.

Scientific American

In fascinating study involving synesthesia, people make good guesses at meanings of foreign words

October 20, 2015

Human languages are rich in words that sound like what they mean and the sound-meaning associations, or sound symbolism, are surprisingly similar across languages. But how does our brain link phonetics with meaning?

Credit: JLGutierrez ©iStock.com

Here’s a test. Without looking them up on Google, try to guess the meanings of the foreign antonyms tobi and kekere. They are words in Yoruba, a widely spoken West African language that has its roots in the Old Stone Age. The words are equivalent to the English antonyms big, small. Now, take another guess: which one’s which?

The majority of us will arrive at the same answer. In fact, if we repeat the exercise with antonyms for shapes, sound intensities or even brightness in other foreign languages, we will still agree more than half the time. The trend holds even for non-existent words. In a famous linguistic test, subjects almost always gravitate to the non-word baluma to describe rounded shapes and takete for more angular objects. If you think about it, there appears to be something inherently rounded about baluma,and sharp and pointed about takete. Likewise, in the Yoruban example above, tobi seems like an apt choice to depict bigobjects whereas kekere is more fitting for smaller entities. In other words, the dimensions are ostensibly encoded in the sound of the words.

Human languages are rich in words that sound like what they mean and the sound-meaning associations, or sound symbolism, are surprisingly similar across languages. But how does our brain link phonetics with meaning? In a recent study, psychologists at the University of Rochester, NY and the University of Sussex, United Kingdom, showed that people with synesthesia – a condition where a stimulus, such as sound, can evoke unusual perceptions of color, taste, or odor – are especially adept at matching unknown, foreign words with their meanings. Their work offers clues to the origins of sound symbolism, and explains why we develop intuitions about the meanings of words we have never heard before.

Synesthesia, which occurs in about 1% of the population, arises when an increased number of nerve fibers interconnect discrete regions of the brain, causing more than average “cross-wirings.” Synesthetes, as these individuals are called, lead normal, healthy lives except that they experience additional sensations to sensory stimuli, viz. colors or tastes for words, touch for sounds, and so on. For 56-year old British synesthete James Wannerton, for example, words and names spontaneously evoke distinct taste sensations in his mouth. He coined his own version of the London underground map, in which the stations are named after the tastes they trigger on his tongue – King’s Cross to him tastes like a moist Dundee cake. Wannerton’s name-taste associations, which have lasted all his life, presumably arise from a cross-talk between word processing and taste centers of his brain.

In sound symbolism, the sound of words can bring images to our mind – think ofpequeño, petit, or kleine (meaning small) as opposed to grande, grand, or gross(meaning large). Although sound symbolism is more implicit and less involuntary than synesthesia (we need clues to be able to make the right guesses), it can still be thought of as a process that cross-activates multiple – auditory and visual – areas of the brain.

In the present study, psychologists Kaitlyn Bankieris and Julia Simner tested the assumption that sound symbolism stems from similar cross-wirings in the brain as seen in synesthesia. The scientists recruited native English-speaking controls and grapheme-color synesthetes, who see colors in letters or numbers (graphemes) – for example, yellow for the letter c, red for the number 4, and so forth. They asked the subjects to listen to an audio recording and guess the meanings of hundreds of foreign words, given two alternatives. The words spanned four semantic groups, big/small,bright/dark, up/down and loud/quiet, and included vocabulary from ten different languages – for instance, jhiinu (Gujarati, for small), olimikka (Tamil, for bright),neerwaarts (Dutch, for down), among others.

First, the scientists found that both groups of participants were remarkably good at deciphering the meanings of the foreign words albeit only in the big/small andloud/quiet semantic domains. Their performance was barely better than chance in theup/down or bright/dark categories.

To some extent, this discrepancy reflects how our mind maps sounds to meanings. In domains such as big/small, sound symbolic words translate aspects of size to physical aspects of the vocal tract, a linguistic feature termed iconicity. When we say grand(French, for large), for example, our mouth expands as if to mimic the size of the object we refer to, whereas, when we say petit,the vocal tract constricts, and the word plants an impression of a tiny object. Sound symbolic words similarly capture sound intensities but it gets trickier to maintain iconicity when denoting directions or brightness. As one theory has it, words in these domains are encoded by such facets of speech as intonation but because the playback in the study consisted of words spoken in a neutral tone, the subjects faltered in the latter areas.

The scientists next arrived at a more intriguing finding. In the former word categories, where both participants excelled, they discovered that the synesthetes outshone the controls in guessing the meanings of the unknown words.

This was certainly not because they had a stronger vocabulary per se or a superior IQ – the synesthetes were just about as good as the controls in an English word power test. Instead, they seemed to have the edge because of their better grasp of sound-meaning associations in the foreign words. It is tempting to postulate that their increased sensitivity to sound symbolism, a process that links auditory and visual senses, emerges from the cross-wirings seen in synesthesia.

Indeed, psychologists Romke Rouw, Vilayanur Ramachandran and others have unveiled unusual cross-connections in synesthesia. Using a technique called diffusion tensor imaging, scientists have traced the course of nerve fibers in grapheme-color synesthetes and found surprisingly dense connections near the fusiform gyrus, a tubular brain structure that sits just above the ear. The fusiform gyrus contains a site, where graphemes are perceived, abutting the color processing area V4. The consensus is that the dense connections in the synesthetes are fibers transgressing the boundary between adjacent grapheme and color areas. On a behavioral level, these extraneous wirings cause a mix-up of perceptions, inducing colors for letters and numbers.

In synesthetes, scientists in fact observe multiple hubs of such cross-connections in various other parts of the cerebral cortex. An exciting avenue for future research is to find out whether sound symbolism, like synesthesia, taps into one or more of these cross-connections.

Of course, sound-meaning maps are not exclusive to synesthesia. If we recall the experiment, the synesthetes surpassed the controls in the same word categories in which the controls fared better than chance. This implies that if the synesthetes made their choices by pursuing certain word-meaning associations, perhaps by virtue of their cross-wirings, the non-synesthetes made similar associations but based on their gut. They were only less efficient than their counterparts. This leads us to the fascinating speculation that the cross-wirings seen in synesthetes are but an extreme version of a cross-talk that is in fact ingrained in all of us.

In support of this idea, an expanding trove of evidence from child psychologists and linguists suggests that as infants, we all start out with cross-wired brains, much like synesthetes, and are equally alert to sound symbolism in all languages. But as we specialize in our native language, these cross-connections wither away and we grow out of our sensitivity to foreign languages. Scientists postulate that in synesthetes, on the other hand, the cross-wirings persist into adulthood, due to genetic mutations that interfere with the pruning process.

This so-called “childhood synesthesia hypothesis” is compelling because it means that we all retain an indelible imprint of the early cross-wirings, which is why we make the same kind of associations in later life. And just as we are able to guess the meaning of foreign words today, we may have used these shared intuitions to help invent language. Perhaps a nascent vocabulary of sound symbolic words was mutually intelligible among our ancestors. This may have in turn sealed a language’s “first words” and passed on to the successors, before it eventually developed along all manner of creative trajectories.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)

Madhuvanthi Kannan is a postdoctoral scientist in neurobiology at Yale University. Her interests include synaptic plasticity and genetic engineering of voltage indicators for imaging brain activity. You can follow her on twitter @mkannan3112 or atmadhukannan.com.

How lovely German sounds compared with other languages!

Here, the shoe is on the other foot!  Danke, Easy Languages!



Ha-ha!

How the language you speak changes your view of the world

Raw Story:  The Conversation  27 Apr 2015 at 10:24 ET                 

Bilinguals get all the perks. Better job prospects, a cognitive boost and even protection against dementia. Now new research shows that they can also view the world in different ways depending on the specific language they are operating in.

Psychedelic brain image (Shutterstock)

The past 15 years have witnessed an overwhelming amount of research on the bilingual mind, with the majority of the evidence pointing to the tangible advantages of using more than one language. Going back and forth between languages appears to be a kind of brain training, pushing your brain to be flexible.

Just as regular exercise gives your body some biological benefits, mentally controlling two or more languages gives your brain cognitive benefits. This mental flexibility pays big dividends especially later in life: the typical signs of cognitive ageing occur later in bilinguals – and the onset of age-related degenerative disorders such as dementia or Alzheimer’s are delayed in bilinguals by up to five years.

Germans know where they’re going

In research we recently published in Psychological Science, we studied German-English bilinguals and monolinguals to find out how different language patterns affected how they reacted in experiments.

We showed German-English bilinguals video clips of events with a motion in them, such as a woman walking towards a car or a man cycling towards the supermarket and then asked them to describe the scenes.

When you give a scene like that to a monolingual German speaker they will tend to describe the action but also the goal of the action. So they would tend to say “A woman walks towards her car” or “a man cycles towards the supermarket”. English monolingual speakers would simply describe those scenes as “A woman is walking” or “a man is cycling”, without mentioning the goal of the action.
The worldview assumed by German speakers is a holistic one – they tend to look at the event as a whole – whereas English speakers tend to zoom in on the event and focus only on the action.

The linguistic basis of this tendency appears to be rooted in the way different grammatical tool kits situated actions in time. English requires its speakers to grammatically mark events that are ongoing, by obligatorily applying the –ing morpheme: “I am playing the piano and I cannot come to the phone” or “I was playing the piano when the phone rang”. German doesn’t have this feature.

Research with second language users shows a relationship between linguistic proficiency in such grammatical constructions and the frequency with which speakers mention the goals of events.
In our study we also found that these cross-linguistic differences extend beyond language usage itself, to nonverbal categorisation of events. We asked English and German monolinguals to watch a series of video clips that showed people walking, biking, running, or driving. In each set of three videos, we asked subjects to decide whether a scene with an ambiguous goal (a woman walks down a road toward a parked car) was more similar to a clearly goal-oriented scene (a woman walks into a building) or a scene with no goal (a woman walks down a country lane).

German monolinguals matched ambiguous scenes with goal-oriented scenes more frequently than English monolinguals did. This difference mirrors the one found for language usage: German speakers are more likely to focus on possible outcomes of people’s actions, but English speakers pay more attention to the action itself.

Switch languages, change perspective

When it came to bilingual speakers, they seemed to switch between these perspectives based on the language context they were given the task in. We found that Germans fluent in English were just as goal-focused as any other native speaker when tested in German in their home country. But a similar group of German-English bilinguals tested in English in the United Kingdom were just as action-focused as native English speakers.

In another group of German-English bilinguals, we kept one language in the forefront of their minds during the video-matching task by making participants repeat strings of numbers out loud in either English or German. Distracting one language seemed to automatically bring the influence of the other language to the fore.

When we “blocked” English, the bilinguals acted like typical Germans and saw ambiguous videos as more goal-oriented. With German blocked, bilingual subjects acted like English speakers and matched ambiguous and open-ended scenes. When we surprised subjects by switching the language of the distracting numbers halfway through the experiment, the subjects’ focus on goals versus process switched right along with it.

These findings are in line with other research showing distinct behaviour in bilinguals depending on the language of operation. Israeli Arabs are more likely to associate Arab names such as Ahmed and Samir with positive words in an Arabic language context than in a Hebrew one, for example.

People self-report that they feel like a different person when using their different languages and that expressing certain emotions carries different emotional resonance depending on the language they are using.

When judging risk, bilinguals also tend to make more rational economic decisions in a second language. In contrast to one’s first language, it tends to lack the deep-seated, misleading affective biases that unduly influence how risks and benefits are perceived.

So the language you speak in really can affect the way you think.

By Panos Athanasopoulos, Lancaster University
This article was originally published on The Conversation.

Pun control: China bans wordplay

FoxNews.com  World 

Published November 29, 2014

The Chinese language is filled with puns and other humorous wordplay, but the country's print and broadcast watchdog does not believe it has a place in the newsroom. The watchdog has panned wordplay for the media citing that it breaches the law on spoken and written Chinese and if they promote puns, it will make teaching China's cultural heritage harder and could mislead the public, including children, The Guardian reports.  Cultural idioms could create a "a culture and linguistic chaos.

“Radio and television authorities at all levels must tighten up their regulations and crack down on the irregular and inaccurate use of the Chinese language, especially the misuse of idioms,” the State Administration for Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television said in a statement.

The statement also said programs and advertisements must abide by the rule and avoid changing characters, phrases and meanings. “Idioms are one of the great features of the Chinese language and contain profound cultural heritage and historical resources and great aesthetic, ideological and moral values."

"(Wordplay) is so much part and parcel of Chinese heritage," David Moser, academic director for CET Chinese studies at Beijing Capital Normal University told The Guardian.

The statement from the administration cites rather small complaints about

• a tourism advertisement to a medical commercial. The tourism advert must now change a slogan from "Shanxi, a land of perfection" into "land of splendors" 
• and the medical commercial turned "brook no delay" into coughing must not linger,"

the Guardian says. 

“It could just be a small group of people, or even one person, who are conservative, humourless, priggish and arbitrarily purist, so that everyone has to fall in line,” said Moser.  “But I wonder if this is not a preemptive move, an excuse to crack down for supposed ‘linguistic purity reasons’ on the cute language people use to crack jokes about the leadership or policies. It sounds too convenient.”

English and German: Plural Forms

Language development (thanks to the Vikings)



Foot  -->  Feet
Book -->  Beek  (!)

Genders .... and Plural forms                       German                                 English
der Loeffel -- the spoon (masculine)   PL:  die Loeffel  (you're good)      spoons
der Tisch -- the table                           PL:  die Tische  (add that 'e')         tables
die Gabel -- the fork (feminine)          PL:  die Gabeln  (add that 'n')        forks
das Messer -- the knife (neutral)         PL:  die Messer  (you're good)  --  the knives (wot-wot?) 

ED TED: The History of Languages

How Languages evolved.

HOW MANY LANGUAGES ARE THERE?

Stolz (--Proud--), Amerikaner zu sein

ECONOMIST   Johnson Language    Feb 7th 2013, 2:19 by R.L.G. | NEW YORK
 
THE debate around immigration in America often touches on language. The fear of nativist Americans is that immigrants do not learn (and maybe do not want to learn) English. If many of them speak the same language (say, Spanish) and cluster geographically (in, say, Los Angeles or San Antonio) they threaten to make America de facto bilingual. If this happens, so goes the concern, they will inevitably make demands for more legal recognition of other languages, threatening English's status as a unifying force behind America's motto, e pluribus unum, "out of many, one".

Americans know that this is an immigrant country. So why, in this narrative, did previous waves of immigration not threaten English, while today's does? In the traditional story, immigrants back in the good old days wanted to, and did in fact, learn English. But this is not really so.

Immigrant languages probably persisted longer in America a century ago than they do today. And one language in particular persisted in large, coherent pockets in America for more than half a century: German. German immigration to America peaked from around 1840 to 1880. Like most immigrants, Germans came to towns where their co-nationals had settled, so they built up big communities in cities like Milwaukee, Cincinnati and St. Louis.

So what did this immigrant community look like? Hard-working English learners who quickly dissolved in the great melting pot? Hardly. This fascinating short paper by Miranda Wilkerson and Joseph Salmons looks at just one town in southeastern Wisconsin, called Hustisford. They focus on the year 1910; German-speaking plunged fairly quickly in America after the first world war (1914-1918), for the obvious reasons. But before the war, German monolingual communities persisted for many decades after immigrants' arrivals.

Almost a quarter of Hustisford's population (over ten years old) was monolingual in German in 1910. Of that share, a third were born in America. Of the German monolinguals born abroad, a majority had been in America for more than 30 years, having immigrated during the height of the German wave. In other words, in small-town America a century ago, it was perfectly possible to grow up, or to live there for decades after immigrating, without learning English.

Was this because Germans were isolated, in pockets in town or perhaps on the outskirts? No; Ms Wilkerson and Mr Salmons' map shows them interspersed among Anglo-Americans. Were they simply undissolved lumps in an Anglo-American pot, though? No again: the scholars find many mixed households, and English and Irish names among the parishioners at German churches. Perhaps the Germans still felt somehow really German, not American? Here, the story is nuanced; German-Americans were certainly proud of their German heritage, but a 1917 cover of Die Deutsche Hausfrau, a ladies' magazine, featured prominent flags and the lyrics to the "Star-Spangled Banner"—in German translation. This was just before America's entry into the war.

German was the single biggest and most concentrated foreign language on American soil after independence—until today. Almost five decades of immigration from Spanish-speaking countries has recreated something like the German situation. Some people, like the late Samuel Huntington, a political scientist, feel that America's "Anglo-American core" is threatened like never before. But for many reasons (hard to rank in importance), it is nearly impossible today to grow up in America without learning English. One study of more than 5,000 children in the Miami and San Diego areas (thick with Spanish-speakers) found that 94.7% of Latino middle-schoolers who had been born in America spoke English well. The authors concluded that "knowledge of English is near universal, and preference for that language is dominant among most immigrant nationalities. On the other hand, only a minority remain fluent in the parental languages."

As with most stories of "the good old days", the stories of the "good old immigrants" who learned English in contrast to today's layabouts are just that: stories. Their point is emotional, not educational. The purpose is to elicit fear of change, through reminiscence for an age that never existed.

(Wilkerson-Salmons paper via Mr. Verb. The headline is "Proud to be an American" in German. I'd quite like to see Lee Greenwood sing it in German.)

Featured comments

MKE_Hornet Feb 8th 2013, 15:42
As a native Milwaukeean and German-American myself, I can certainly vouch for the persistence of German culture and language even to this day in a city that used to be called the "Deutsch-Athen". It's considered quite the gig to play a show at Turner Hall downtown, and there are monuments not far from the Germania building to the Iron Brigadiers of the Civil War, many of whom could hardly speak English beyond announcing proudly that "they were going to fight mit Sigel!" (General Franz Sigel). Frankly I don't think current nativist nonsense directed at Hispanic Americans and Arab Americans holds much more water than the kind that said America would be overwhelmed by socialist Germans 100 years ago.

Michael Watsonin reply to Ingenieurwissenschaftler Feb 8th 2013, 02:17
Lieber Ingenieur, Isn't it extraordinary what nonsense and ignorance is so often expressed in so many of these comments in The Economist?  Most Americans fail to realise that citizens of acknowledged German ancestry are the largest, measurable group in the US at about 50 million, i.e. more than Irish or African-American. (I understand that it is problematic to determine the number of citizens of English ancestry since they have been there so long that they consider themselves 'indigenous'.) It is in official records that significant numbers of Germans began arriving in America from 1670 onwards, initially mainly in New York and Pennsylvania (the so-called Pennsylvania Dutch were not Dutch but Deutsch, i.e., German).  They brought with them the traditions of the Christmas tree, the hot dog and the hamburger.  There are innumerable famous US citizens of German ancestry, e.g. Herbert Hoover, Albert Einstein, President Eisenhower, John Steinbeck, Meryl Streep, etc. What seems not to be realized by a great number of Americans is that there is no official language in the US - English is simply its de facto language.  Today, Illinois State publishes a driver's manual in German just as Cincinnati does in Ohio.  I mention these facts to counteract the absurd xenophobia concerning citizens, or potential citizens, whose mother tongue is Spanish.





The pattern is always pretty much the same, especially since radio and talkies and TV and the Internet came along to homogenize and distribute the language everywhere. The first people, who came here as adults, will almost never be fluent. Their children are truly bi-lingual. The next generation is monolingual, and the only words you can be sure they know in the old language are foods and swears.

The Most Common Language In Each US State —

Besides English And Spanish

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In 43 of the 50 United States, Spanish is the most commonly spoken language after English. But if we remove Spanish from the mix, which language turns up most in each state?

Using data from the Census Bureau's American Community Survey, Ben Blatt at Slate has created several language maps of the US that go beyond just English and Spanish. There are only seven states in which Spanish is not the second most commonly spoken language: Yupik in Alaska, Tagalog in Hawaii, German in North Dakota, and French in Louisiana, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Maine.

The map above tells a somewhat different story about languages in the US than his map showing the prevalence of Spanish, but Blatt doesn't stop there. He also creates maps showing the most common Native American language, Scandinavian language, Indo-Aryan language, and African language in each state. Individually, the maps are interesting, but together they create a much richer picture of the linguistic and cultural makeup of the US.

Tagalog in California, Cherokee in Arkansas: What language does your state speak? 

Zum Karneval: ,,Ich habe dich narrisch gern"

 Ludwig Hirsch singt, ich lieb' dich -- in vielen Sprachen, auch in Bairisch (Bayerisch) !

Understanding Dialects: Let's Start by exploring dialects in the USA!

Joshua Katz at NC State has put together dialect maps in the USA.

On his website, you can learn where you best fit in as an English speaker.  (I found it interesting.)

A link at the top of this site 
JOSHUA KATZ MAPS USA DIALECTS
brings you to 122 questions from a Harvard study on pronunciation, the results of which are illustrated by Katz.

HERE'S THE LINK TO THE NEW SURVEY OF DIALECTS

One surprise for me was to learn that several phrases I thought I'd picked up north of Boston were attributed primarily to speakers in Madison Wisconsin. 

Duden -- mit Englisch

NY TIMES 25 Sept 2013  

By ANNA SAUERBREY  OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR

How Do You Say ‘Blog’ in German?

WE Germans owe the English language a debt of gratitude. If English didn’t lend us one or two little words every once in a while, we would probably call blogs “digitale Netztagebücher” and apps “Anwendungen für mobile Endgeräte.” Even for German speakers, those don’t exactly roll off the tongue.

Such linguistic borrowing has been increasing, as technology both creates its own new words and facilitates the global spread of newfangled cultural terminology. Recently the editors of the Duden dictionary, the German equivalent of the Oxford English Dictionary, added 5,000 new words to its 26th edition, many of them English or of English origin, including “digital native” and “flashmob.”

The Duden has been around since 1880, and this isn’t the first time English words have been added. But the new edition has caused an uproar among linguistic conservatives. After the additions were announced, the German Language Society, an unofficial organization that has tasked itself with protecting the German language, voted the editors of the Duden the “language adulterers of the year,” accusing them of legitimizing the demise of German.

Most Germans are more liberal in their linguistic views and generally agree that the idea of protecting a country’s language is as megalomaniacal as it is futile.

It certainly doesn’t represent the view of the majority of my generation, the 20- and 30-somethings, who generally have a relaxed relationship with both languages. Our parents associated German music with Nazi propaganda and opted for Springsteen-only musical diets, but we embrace the renaissance of German pop and rap lyrics. At the same time, we see no harm in integrating English words into our language.

But the society’s stance has nevertheless touched a chord across German society, particularly among people you might call anti-cosmopolitans: those who feel unable to keep up with an internationalization they feel is being imposed on them.

That the reaction should come now, in a rapidly homogenizing Europe, is unsurprising. The feeling of speaking increasingly marginalized languages is vivid in many parts of Europe, even in countries with large populations of native speakers like France and Germany.

Of course, the motives for defending one’s language differ from country to country. In France, it is part of a quest to bolster the country’s self-perception as a still-functioning colonial power. It is government policy that radio stations must play a certain minimum amount of French music.

In Germany, the driving force comes from the opposite direction. Refusing to accept the internationalization of the German language is a way of rejecting internationalization as a phenomenon. It is a nativist attempt to stand up to globalization.

Walter Krämer, the president of the society, articulated this point of view when he lambasted the Duden for including Anglicisms commonly used by “braggers” — what in previous generations might have been called yuppies. There is some truth in that. The frequent use of English words has become a status symbol, not unlike a pair of pearl earrings or shopping at Whole Foods, a way of showing off your education. A way of saying that your world is bigger than that medium-size country in the middle of Europe that doesn’t even have the guts to support military action in Libya or Syria.

In Germany as in America, it is easy to make fun of such people. But as the German sociologist Ulrich Beck noted recently, cosmopolitanism is a reality, not a willfully chosen identity. There are those who will continue to embrace it and those who will see it as a threat, but it can’t be turned back, even if one insists, as the German Language Society does, on calling a laptop a “Klapprechner.”

As any English speaker fond of the term “schadenfreude” knows, German has its own share of wonderful, untranslatable words. One of those, “Zeitgenossen,” is particularly apt for the moment. If you look it up in a German-English dictionary, you will find that it means “contemporaries,” those who happen to live in the same day and age. But it means more than that. The German word “Genosse,” meaning “comrade” or “associate,” also implies a mutual responsibility.

Thus “Zeitgenossen” share a responsibility toward one another as well as toward the age they live in. It is an attitude that sees languages as complementary, not competitive, and sees the world as a continuum of cultures, rather than a set of distinct borders. It is an attitude I wish more of my fellow Germans would adopt.

Again, English, thanks for “digital natives.” In return, you can have “Zeitgenossen.” It’s yours. Take it. It is a wonderful linguistic paradox that one of the nations that currently struggle with the idea of cosmopolitanism should be able to express it best.

Anna Sauerbrey is an editor for the opinion page of the daily German newspaper Der Tagesspiegel

Poldi spricht auch Englisch -- Poldi's "Noise"

 Poldi's "Noise" = Das Geräusch vom Poldi

Leider spielt Lukas Podolski nicht mehr in Köln bei FC Köln, sondern in London.
Wer kann auch Englisch sprechen, wie Poldi?  (Ist er immer noch beim Lernen?)

German dialect in Texas is one of a kind

 and it's dying out
BBC  NEWSMAGAZINE
14 May 2013  Last updated at 20:02 ETHelp

The first German settlers arrived in Texas over 150 years ago and successfully passed on their native language throughout the generations - until now.

German was the main language used in schools, churches and businesses around the hill country between Austin and San Antonio. But two world wars and the resulting drop in the standing of German meant that the 5th and 6th generation of immigrants did not pass it on to their children.

Still the biggest ancestry group in the US, according to Census data, a large majority of German-Americans never learned the language of their ancestors.

Hans Boas, a linguistic and German professor at the University of Texas, has made it his mission to record as many speakers of German in the Lone Star State as he can before the last generation of Texas Germans passes away.

Mr Boas has recorded 800 hours of interviews with over 400 German descendants in Texas and archived them at the Texas German Dialect Project. He says the dialect, created from various regional German origins and a mix of English, is one of a kind.

"We have found no two speakers that speak roughly alike," Mr Boas told the BBC at his office in Austin.

The BBC's Franz Strasser went to Weimar, New Braunfels and Austin to find the last speakers of this dialect.

From an accompanying video:  There was a need to accommodate various German dialects into a comprehensible language.  There are also many English influences, developing a unique language.  Here are two of Boas' favorite sentences from his recording:

1.  "Die Kuh hat ueber die Fence gejumpt."  

                  (The cow has over the fence jumped.)

2.  "Gestern sind wir nach Fredericksburg rauf gemovt."

             (Yesterday did we to Fredericksburg up move.)

NOTE:  Some German culture that's preserved includes a (seemingly very busy) 9-pin bowling alley = Kegeln.

Die Prinzen: Be Cool, Speak Deutsch With Me

Werden wir dieses Lied in Lincoln-Sudbury am Samstag singen?

European Migration to Germany

Why learn German?  Check out this week's Economist:  

Sprechen Sie Job? More southern Europeans are going where the jobs are.   -- But not enough     

Feb 16th 2013 | BERLIN 

DANIEL GÓMEZ GARCIA, aged 23, is the sort of person Europe’s leaders may have had in mind when, on paper at least, they turned the European Union into a single labour market like America’s. Mr Gómez, from Andalusia in Spain, learned a smattering of German in school -- and passable English, while studying in America. But when he came back to Spain he saw that hardly anybody in his class of 80 had a job. “Nothing to do, so let me go to Germany and get the language,” he recalls thinking. In autumn 2012 he took an unpaid four-month internship at his embassy in Berlin and paid for his tiny flat-share by helping a local holiday-rental firm with its Excel spreadsheets. Last month that turned into a low-paying but permanent job as an accountant.

That is how the single market is supposed to work. Spain has a youth unemployment rate of 56%. In Greece it is 58% (see chart). By contrast, Germany has negligible youth unemployment (8%) and a shortage of qualified workers. Theoretically, people should be willing to move from the “crisis countries” to the boom towns, just as the Okies once flocked to California.

To some extent this migration is indeed happening. New arrivals in Germany in the first half of 2012 grew by 15% over the same period in 2011, and by 35% net of departures. And the numbers of newcomers from the euro crisis countries increased the most—Greek arrivals were up by 78%, Spanish by 53%, for example. But the absolute numbers (6,900 Greeks and 3,900 Spaniards during those six months) are still modest.
It is “astonishing how astonishing it still is that they are coming”, says Holger Kolb, at the Expert Council of German Foundations on Integration and Migration. Some things are beginning to work as intended, such as the elimination of bureaucratic hassles for moving within the EU. Yet it seems that the EU can never become a truly integrated market. That is mainly because of language.  Mr Gómez finds life in Germany challenging— “Germans seem to always nag about recycling, or noise, or whatever,”—but the language is “the hardest part”.

Thus language has replaced work visas as the main barrier to mobility. When the euro crisis began, the branches in southern Europe of the Goethe Institute, the German equivalent of the British Council, were overwhelmed by demand for German courses, says Heike Uhlig, the institute’s director of language programmes. That demand was also different, she adds: less about yearning to read Goethe’s “Faust” than about finding work. So the Institute retooled, offering courses geared (more) to the technical German used by engineers, nurses or doctors.

Language, besides proximity, explains a lot of today’s movements in the EU, says Klaus Bade, another migration expert. For example, the largest group of new arrivals in Germany is still from Poland, which is poorer, though not a crisis, country. But its schools often teach German alongside English.
...
 

COMMENTS:   

Your comments merely patronize those who do not want to learn a second language. It is indeed a disadvantage that should be remedied and not promoted as a plus. 

One needs to understand one's place in the world in order to start speaking foreign languages.  

I am now in Greece and I am absolutely shocked by the almost complete lack of recycling effort  here - apart from the other problems - after spending six years in the Czech Republic - it really is horrible!  Young Greeks don't even understand why they should think about it. Their heads are full of nonsense about international conspiracy - about how it's all someone else's fault - and yet in the small simple ways that they could be making a difference they make none. This is not modern thinking.  PS Czechs are excellent at recycling! 

A great many (if not most) Greek kids live at home until they're older than this study, and therefore may not be actively seeking for employment. 

 

Ein frohest Chanukka Fest!

 Hier in Yiddisch und Englisch gesungen, aber wie ähnlich ist Yiddisch mit Deutsch!?

"lo mir"  = "lassen wir"... (let us) 



Happy Hannuka!

Songtext, dank Kollegin, Susie Sommovilla   (Bold text = German cognates)
A yontev a sheyner  Oh Hanukkah, oh Hanukkah, A holiday, a nice one,
A lustiger a freylicher  A happy one, a joyous one
Nito noch azoyner  Not another like it.
Ale nacht in dreydl shpiln mir    Every night we play dreidl
Zudig heyse latkes esn mir   we eat boiling hot latkes.
Geshvinder tsindt kinder    Quickly the children light
Di dininke lichtelech on  The dimming candles
Zogt "al ha-nisim," loybt G-t far di nisim   Say-O, the miracles-praise G-d for the miracles
Un kumt gicher tantsn in kon    And come dance with laughter in a circle.


-- Chanukka wird auch am Brandenburger Tor in Berlin gefeiert!

25 German "Loan Words"

Thanks to Lutz S. for sharing this post from:
Daily Writing Tips <info@dailywritingtips.com>      Posted: 25 Jul 2012 09:46 PM PDT

The German language has provided English with a huge inventory of words, many of them pertaining to music, science, and politics, thanks to the influence of German-speaking people on those areas of human endeavor. 

Here are some of the more useful German terms "borrowed" into English.

1. Achtung     (“attention”): an imperative announcement used to obtain someone’s attention
2. Angst         (“anxiety”): a feeling of apprehension
3. Blitz           (“lightning”): used only literally in German, but in English refers
to a sudden movement, such as a rush in a contact sport
4. Carabiner   (“rifle”): an equivalent of the English word carbine, this truncation of karabinerhaken (“riflehook”) refers to a metal loop originally employed with ropes in mountaineering, rock climbing, and other sports and
activities but now widely employed for more general uses
5. Delicatessen (“delicate eating”): a restaurant or food shop selling meats, cheeses, and delicacies  NOTE: --? this sounds like it ends in a German word: "essen" does mean "to eat".... but should it really be on this list? 
6. Doppelgänger (“double-goer”): in German, refers to a look-alike, but in English, the primary connotation is of a supernatural phenomenon — either a spirit or a duplicate person
7. Ersatz       (“substitute”): refers to an artificial and/or inferior imitation or replacement
8. Flak          (acronym): an abbreviation for “air-defense cannon” used figuratively to refer to criticism
9. Gestalt      (“figure”): something more than the sum of its parts, or viewed or
analyzed with other contributing phenomena
10. Götterdämmerung (“twilight of the gods”): a catastrophic event
11. Hinterland (“land behind”): originally a technical geographic term; later, in both German and English, came to connote undeveloped rural or wilderness areas, and in British English has a limited sense of “artistic or scholarly
knowledge,” as in “Smith’s hinterland isn’t very impressive”
12. Kitsch        -  something of low taste and/or quality, or such a condition 
13. Leitmotiv   (“leading motive”): a recurring theme, originally applied to music and later literature and theater but now in general usage
14. Nazi          (truncation of “National Socialist”): originally denoted a person,thing, or idea associated with the German political party of that name and later the national government it dominated; now, by association with Adolf Hitler and the tyranny of the party and the government, a pejorative term for a fanatical or tyrannical person
15. Poltergeist  (“noisy ghost”): a mischievous and/or malicious apparition or spectral force thought responsible for otherwise inexplicable movement of objects.
16. Putsch        (“push”): overthrow, coup d’etat
17. Realpolitik (real politics): the reality of political affairs,as opposed to perceptions or propaganda about political principles or values
18. Reich         (“realm”): in German, usually a neutral term for “empire” or part of a name for a nationalized service, such as the postal service, but in English, because of the link to the Nazis, “the Third Reich,” connotes tyranny
19. Schadenfreude (“harm joy”): enjoyment of others’ misfortune
20. Sturm und drang (“storm and stress”): turmoil, drama
21. Verboten     (“forbidden”): prohibited
22. Weltanschauung (“worldview”): an all-encompassing conception or perception of existence
23. Weltschmerz (“world pain”): despair or world-weariness
24. Wunderkind (“wonder child”): a child prodigy
25. Zeitgeist (“time ghost”): the spirit of the time, or a prevailing attitude, mentality, or worldview
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 Original Post: 25 German Loanwords