as small as a world and as large as alone

3:53pm October 5, 2014

violsva:

swanjolras:

baldymonster:

molotowcocktease:

marcoereus:

I’m so tired of people telling me German is an “ugly, angry” language. When my German teacher tells us jokes it’s the sweetest, happiest language in the world. When I teach my father the word for daughter he smiles, repeating “Tochter” to himself until he gets it right, and in that moment German sounds like pride. There’s nothing angry or ugly about a language that never says goodbye, only “until we meet again.”

Thank you for this

I think people who say this have only heard German as spoken by movie Nazis. It’s a beautiful language that can sound very soft and sweet. Just because BadGuy McLuftwaffe hisses and barks all those throaty fricatives and glottal stops doesn’t mean they always sound harsh. Go listen to actual German speakers and you’ll see that the stops usually add a melodious rhythm to sentences, and the fricatives are more often like gently rustling leaves than cartoonish loogie hocking. And the vowels are just plain cute.

HELLO, FRIENDS, I AM ABOUT TO GO LINGUISTICS ON THIS

so it’s like the middle ages (post-romans but pre-normans, think beowulf-era) and english is a SUPER GERMANIC LANGUAGE. as in, like, “ofer hronrade hyran scolde gomban gylan”, which admittedly does not look germanic on the page but sure as hell don’t look like english— anyway, it sounds pretty german when you pronounce it

and THEN this dude named william comes in around 1066, he is from normandy, and in normandy they speak FRENCH (or, uh, french-ish) and french is REALLY HEAVILY INFLUENCED by the romans, who conquered that area pretty thoroughly

and so there’s this whole mild culture war between the englisc-speaking native anglo-saxons, who are largely poor peasants, and the françois-speaking norman invaders, who are largely rich assholes (there’s a lot of this in robin hood stories), which is more or less sorted out by a) them having enough sex not to be able to tell who’s who any more b) them being distracted by various crusades and c) probably other things i don’t know

but linguistically what ends up happening is that all the french, latinate words become the words for fancy rich stuff— maison just means “house” in french, but in english mansion means “super fancy rich house”, for example. almost every english word we think of as a “five-dollar word”, with a lot of latinate or greek roots, probably comes from the french.

and this is hugely, hugely reflected by english swearing. the normans are all like, flatulence, buttocks, inferno, and the anglo-saxons are all like FART ARSE HELL. and they also keep their germanic words, with their germanic roots and vowels, for all the crude stuff and the lower-class stuff and the funny stuff and the gross stuff and, yeah, the angry stuff— you’re icily poisonous to someone in long latinate french-derived english, but you yell at them in simple short-voweled germanic english.

someone said we go to work in french, and we come home in german— that’s absolutely true. professional, academic diction is french-derived. casual, intimate, emotional diction is german-derived.

so we hear german as angry and ugly because our ears are used to hearing germanic words in angry or crude contexts— the same way that a lot of us hear french as a “classy” or “posh” language because our ears are used to hearing french-derived words in upper-class contexts! (and also, yes, cultural stereotypes and modern media depictions are quite happy to reinforce this image.)

THIS HAS BEEN: CONSIDER THE FOLLOWING

Actually directly-from-latin/greek-words and latin-by-way-of-french-words in english are two distinct groups, and the former were mostly borrowed from the classics in the 17thc and later in order to make scientists sound smart. but yeah, neat!

French has always sounded very harsh to me, especially the R sound, but other sounds too.

German has always sounded very gentle and mellow to me.

And other people think I’m very weird (or even possibly offensive) when I say things like this.  Even though they say the exact opposite all the time and nobody questions them.

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