I’ll kip learrrrning ontil Ei veinali get it rrrreit!

One of the most blatant gaps, to my mind, is a proper, unambiguous expression for “scharf”, as in food. Neither “hot” nor “spicy” nor even “hot and spicy” makes the cut, since food may be fresh out of the oven, and spiced well, which should go without saying (to be honest, Germans are not known as the most creative spicers, but let’s leave this aside), without necessarily being “scharf” at all. True, “scharf” is ambiguous too (a knife can - and should - be “scharf”, as well), but not in context, as there is no way for “scharf” as applied to a meal to be misinterpreted, you see?

(On a related note, an amusing but also annoying Anglicism is when people call a person “heiß”, given how “warm” or “kalt” would not be compliments, but “cool” would be one. Of course, what they do is mistranslate “hot”, as what they really mean is “scharf”, which seems to become alarmingly rare as opposed to the blatantly incorrect “heiß”. There is even a beautiful “Steigerung” of “scharf”, namely “rattenscharf”, while I do not know of one for “heiß”. By the way, it seems that in this context, “scharf” originally referred to the onlooker’s turned-on state of mind, or rather hormonal status, whence the “rattenscharf”.)

For this reason, Germans should much more liberally borrow words into their English, i. e. simply leave them untranslated (and perhaps italicise them, which looks “très chic”, after all), whenever they stumble upon such a deficiency of the English language, once they realise that it is not so perfect after all, and it’s not their own fault that they can’t find a neat translation.

Even “Fachsprachen” (technical jargon) could greatly profit from this, for example, terms such as “Lautlehre”, “Lautung” and “Lautstand” neatly conflate phonetics and phonology, which makes them very handy whenever such a pedantic distinction is unnecessary (in this case, it is actually the English rather than the German language which is overly technical and pedantic). Of course, linguistic terminology such as “Ablaut” and “Umlaut” has already been borrowed, so precedents are well-established and it would not look out of place at all to borrow even more.

“Fach-”, by the way, is itself a useful prefix that has no unitary equivalent in English, and must clumsily be translated as “non-fiction”, “technical”, or “specialised”. Why not simply say “fach book”, for example? Moreover, at least to musicians, “Fach” is already well familiar as a Germanism.

See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_German_expressions_in_English

It was no-one’s native language really, but in the Middle Ages, it was actually used actively and fluently by the educated, even as a spoken language. Medieval Latin would continually be developped to suit the changing needs of its speakers. Some think that it was the purism of Renaissance Humanist Latin that spelled doom for the continued use of Latin and eventually led to its downfall.

Latin as an “Ausbausprache” enriched with neologisms for modern life would indeed provide an excellent solution to the problem of a neutral international language for Europe and the world at large. While many language reformers and planners of international auxiliary languages in the 19th century sought to simplify Latin and get rid of its noun inflections to increase its appeal, I think they did it a disservice. Speakers of (most) Slavic, Baltic or Finno-Ugric languages do not consider the noun inflections of Latin particularly daunting as their native languages have even more cases and more complicated inflections. Even if it would seem that in some aspects, speakers of Romance languages are at an advantage learning Latin, in this respect it is not so and it is the Eastern Europeans who can be expected to find the grammatical structure of Latin, with its rich inflections and absence of articles, more familiar. And of course, the national languages not only of Europe are still replete with Latinisms of all kinds.

Given the richness of the Latin heritage and the fact that it is still comparatively well-known to many Europeans, and keeps being studied by students throughout the continent, its tremendous potential as an alternative global lingua franca deserves the highest attention.

PLEASE DON”T TRY TO CORRECT WHAT HE HAS SAID YOU SIMPLY MAKE HIS JOKES ALL THE MORE HILARIOUS, FOR INSTANCE WHEN HE TALKE ABOUT GERMAN LANGUAGE CHANGING ALL THE TIME SOMEONE REPLIED…..”How did you come to the idea, that “daß” does not exist anymore? It’s just spelled “dass” now”.

GOLD!!!

How did you come to the idea, that “daß” does not exist anymore? It’s just spelled “dass” now.

I’ll just have to remember to roll my Rs.

(But won’t that make Americans think of Rammstein? Not that I mind them, personally …)

Henning, in fact German was the lingua franca of Central, Northern and Eastern Europe 100 years ago, and German-speaking communities scattered all over both North and South America. There are still plenty of traces of the influence German has had on other languages - even Japanese! If it weren’t for the world wars, German would most likely compete with English as the global lingua franca now, and it is still going strong in Europe in fact.

In many ways, German is a strikingly conservative language indeed, especially compared to English, now that I think of it. Most regarding grammar, as mentioned, but also the largely Germanic-derived vocabulary.

It is mainly the High German sound-shift that has made a mess of the German consonants and introduced weirdos such as “pf” - but even in Northern Germany and many dialects, “pf” does not even exist (typically being replaced by “f”, as the sound is as alien to speakers of Low German as to speakers of English, but in the West of Germany, also “p” is found instead). Another example demonstrating that people should not be afraid of German - if you can’t manage “pf”, it’s not a big thing, many Germans can’t either.

John, Esperanto is suitably neutral and multicultural, but there are reasons why I do not favour it especially. Generally, I favour more naturally grown (organic ) languages. There’s a compromise-Germanic language called Folkspraak, but it looks quite similar to Dutch and Low German. There is a website that humourously advocates Viennese as world language - as good as any proposal!

But there is something to be said for Afrikaans, with its regular pronunciation, almost-creole structure and multi-continental vocabulary, with borrowings from English, German, Malay, Portuguese Creole, Bantu and Khoisan languages. Moreover, it has greatly simplified verb morphology: it is the only Germanic language to have lost ablaut in verbs. Nor is there grammatical gender in nouns.

On the other hand, Spanish has inspired creators of international auxiliary languages forever, and seems to be on the rise currently.

Bird of Prey: German (and indeed Russian, too) doesn’t have the sound that is spelled “w” in English. It has English “v” in English, but spelled as “w”. This is very confusing to Germans: When they see “w”, they will intuitively pronounce it like the German “w”, leading to pronunciations like “vinter”, but as they are taught to pronounce the English “w” at school, they sometimes tend to mix both sounds up and may end up using English “w” to pronounce a written English “v”, leading to pronunciations such as “viz witamins”!

I will tell you how Ami’s really hear it: I vunder vat aszociations natif schpeakers off Anglisch haf mit Cherman ahkzents!

But you bring up a curious point. When Ami’s think of “nice” Germans, we think of Bavarians and a thick, messy, rolling-your-r’s accent is okay. When we think of “bad” Germans, we think of stiff-back Prussians with clipped and precise German accents.

I had not thought about this before, but I think this image is Hollywood fostered - the bad Germans are always protrayed as hissing, insidious, skinny, clinically clean guys, and the good Germans are fun-loving, beer-drinking, overweight, singing Gemutlichers who are barely understandable.

Personally, the bad Germans are pretty scary, especially when they are dentists or the owners of multi-national corporations. I much prefer the distantly-related, midievel-city-dwelling, festival-going good Germans.