Category: German (Deutsch)

Nix and Natch

By Simon

The words nix and natch have come up quite a bit in things I’ve read and/or heard recently, so I thought I’d look into their meanings and origins.

Nix as a verb means “to ​stop, ​prevent, or ​refuse to ​accept something” and as a noun it means “nothing or no”. These usages are apparently mainly informal and used in the US [source].

Accroding to the Online Etymology Dictionary, nix comes from the German nix, a dialectal variant of nichts (nothing), from the Middle High German nihtes, from the genitive of niht/nit (nothing) from the Old High German niwiht, from ni/ne (no) and wiht (thing, creature).

I rarely come across this word in British English.

Natch is an abbreviation of naturally, natch – I didn’t realise this until I looked it up. I thought it was some kind of negative, but wasn’t sure what it meant.

Awakening forgotten languages

By Simon

Last night at ukulele club there was a new member from Spain, and I talked a bit with her in Spanish. It’s a long time since I’ve studied any Spanish, and I rarely use it these days, so I thought I’d forgotten most of it, but I found that I can still have a basic conversation, even if I make mistakes. I had similar experiences with German in Berlin last year and the year before at the Polyglot Gathering – I could understand quite a bit and found that when I tried to speak it I could at least make myself understood.

At the moment I have no real need to awaken my Spanish or German, but if I do need them, I’ll try to find ways to bring them back.

How do you brush up, bring back, awaken or revive languages you have forgotten or not used for a long time?

Why Weihnachten?

By Simon

Have you every wondered where the German word for Christmas, Weihnachten, comes from? I have, as it is so different from words for Christmas in other European languages. So I decided to investigate.

Weihnachten comes from the Middle High German wīhenahten ‎(Christmas), from a dative plural ze den wīhen nahten ‎(in the holy nights). The oldest form (1170) is a singular diu wīhe naht (the Holy Night). It came to refer to Christmas Eve and Christmas Day collectively somewhat later.

Source: Wiktionary

Another source states that Weihnachten first appeared as ze wîhen naht in a song by the minstrel Spervogel, who lived in the 12th Century: “Er ist gewaltic unde starc (…) der ze wîhen naht gebórn wárt. (…) daz ist der heilige Krist, (…) jâ lobt in allez, daz dir ist”. It is perhaps a translation of the Latin nox sancta.

More about German Christmas vocabulary and traditions:
http://marathonsprachen.com/christmas-vocabulary-wortschatz-zur-weihnachten/

Untranslatable?

By Simon

Recently I was sent a link to an infographic containing some apparently untranslatable words for love, and this got me wondering if there really is such a thing as an ‘untranslatable’ word or concept.

The words featured in lists of ‘untranslatable’ words are often given poetic-sounding meanings, and other more ordinary and common meanings they have are ignored.

In some languages a single word might represent a meaning that translates as a phrase in other languages, and there are some culture concepts which can be hard to translate – that is the words themselves can be translated but the meanings they represent might be specific to a particular culture.

The Dutch word gezelligheid (“the warmth of being with loved ones”), is an example from the infographic, which has an equivalent in German: geborgenheit, so it isn’t completely untranslatable.

Are there any words in languages you know that you believe to be untranslatable?

Polyglot Conference, New York

By Simon

This weekend I am in New York for the 2015 Polyglot Conference. I arrived yesterday afternoon after an uneventful flight from Manchester. It took a couple of hours to get out of the airport, and another hour or so to Manhattan.

Last night I met up with some other polyglots near the Statan Island ferry terminal – we were planning to take the ferry over to Statan Island, but unfortunately it started raining heavily and we decided to postpone the trip. We explored Lower Manhattan and Greenwich Village for a while, then I went home, while the others went on to a bar.

The conference started this morning at the SVA Chelsea Theater, which is just around the corner from where I’m staying. There were talks all day about a variety of interesting subjects, including Forensic Linguistics, Proto-Indo-European and Lakota language revival. There are plenty of people here who I know from previous polyglot events, and I’ve met lots of new people.

So far I’ve spoken English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Mandarin, Cantonese, Taiwanese, Japanese, Welsh, Irish, Scottish Gaelic, Manx, Esperanto and Toki Pona, and have met people who speak various other languages.

The conference continues tomorrow, and then I have a couple of days of sightseeing before returning to the UK.

Irish and Ndebele

By Simon

Yesterday I went to Global Café, a group for international students which I’ve been going to on and off since I was a student myself. I use it as a chance to meet people and practise my languages, and I got to speak quite a few different languages last night, including Welsh, French, Irish, Mandarin, Cantonese, Taiwanese and German. There were also speakers of Vietnamese, Arabic, Malay, Northern Ndebele, and probably other languages.

The most linguistically interesting person I met there was a guy who grew up in Ireland where he spoke Northern Ndebele at home, and was educated through the medium of Irish. He also learnt English and French at school, and is currently working on Mandarin and Welsh. His parents come from Zimbabwe, and his dad speaks about 10 languages. He had a bit of trouble with my Ulster Irish, but we managed to communicate okay. I don’t think I’ve met anyone else who speaks a Bantu and a Celtic language before.

What is the most unusual combination of languages you’ve come across?

Súilíní

By Simon

Súilíní

I discovered an interesting word in Irish yesterday – súilíní [ˈsˠuːl̪ʲiːn̪ʲiː] – which is a diminutive form of súil [sˠuːl̪ʲ] (eye) and means literally “small eyes”, and actually means eyelets, an aperture-sight, or bubbles. For example, uisce gan súilíní is still water (“water without bubbles”) [source].

More common Irish words for bubbles are bolgán and boilgeog.

The word súilíní is also used in Hiberno-English to mean “bubbles of fat floating on top of a stew or clear soup”, and is also written sooleens [source].

The word súil (eye) comes from *sūli, an alteration of the Proto-Celtic *sūle (suns), the dual of *sūlos, which is the genitive of *sāwol (sun), from the Proto-Indo-European *sóh₂wl̥ (sun). Apparently in Irish mythology the sun was seen as the “eye of the sky”, and the word for sun came to mean eye [source].

The words for sun in other European languages come from the same root, and most start with s, e.g. saũle (Latvian), sol (Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Catalan, Spanish, Portuguese), Sonne (German), etc. There are some exceptions though, including haul (Welsh) heol (Breton), howl (Cornish) and ήλιος (ḗlios – Greek) [source].

Gleann Cholm Cille

By Simon

This week and next week I am in Gleann Cholm Cille (Glencolmcille) in Donegal in the north west of Ireland. I’m doing courses at Oideas Gael, an Irish language and cultural centre: a harp playing course this week, and an Irish language and culture course next week.

This is my 11th visit to Gleann Cholm Cille, and the second year I’ve done the harp course. On the harp course page of the Oideas Gael site there are pictures of the harp group from last year – I’m third from the right in the first one, and in the middle at the back in the second one (see also below).

2014 Oideas Gael Harp class
2014 Oideas Gael Harp class

This year we have a different teacher – a music student called Elsa Kelly, who also plays the flute. We’re learning some O’Carolan tunes and some other traditional Irish tunes, and it’s great fun.

I’ve been speaking plenty of Irish with people here – locals and students – and have also spoken bits of German, French, Scottish Gaelic, Dutch, Russian and Czech. People come here from all over the world to study Irish language, music and related subjects, so there are plenty of opportunities to practise languages.

So far the weather has been very mixed – cloudy and windy one minute, warm and sunny the next, then the rain starts, and it can go on all day and all night sometimes and be rather heavy. This is fairly typical for this part of Ireland, but local people are complaining that they haven’t had much of a summer this year yet.

Quatschen

By Simon

I came across an interesting German word today – quatschen – which means to gab; to piffle; to talk rubbish; to chew the fat; to shoot the breeze; to blab; to yak; to squelch; to squidge [source].

It appears in a blog post in the sentence:

Aber da fragt auf dem Gathering auch niemand mehr, ob Esperanto ok ist, da wird einfach losgequatscht.

This means something like “But at the Gathering nobody asks any more if Esperanto is OK, they simply start yakking in it.” The Gathering in question was the Polyglot Gathering in Berlin, which I went to last week, and the post is about the languages most commonly used there. It mentions that apart from English, many people there spoke German, French, Spanish, Italian and/or Portuguese, and Esperanto, and that we switched between them frequently. This was certainly my experience – those were the most commonly-spoken languages there. I also met quite a few speakers and learners of Welsh, Dutch and Mandarin.

The related word (der) Quatsch means nonsense or rubbish, and the LEO dictionary gives a long list of English synonyms for this word:

folderol/falderol/falderal; balderdash; blah; blatherskite; flubdub; jabberwocky; malarkey; nonsense; nuts; punk; rubbish; taradiddle/tarradiddle; tommyrot/tommy-rot; guff; hoke; poppycock

I’ve come across some of these before, but not blatherskite, hoke, taradiddle, tommyrot or flubdub, and I haven’t heard punk used in this sense. According to the Oxford Dictionaries, a blatherskite is “a person who talks at great length without making much sense.”, and is referred to as a Quatschkopf in German, and a taradiddle is a petty lie.

There are also some related quatschian expressions:

– Quatsch! = My chin! Balls! That’s all my eye and Betty Martin.
– So ein Quatsch! = My eye! My foot!
– Das ist Quatsch! = That’s hokey!
– Mach keinen Quatsch! = Don’t be silly!
– Red keinen Quatsch! = Don’t talk nonsense!
– So ‘n Quatsch! = My ass!

Polyglot Gathering Berlin 2015

By Simon

I got back from the Polyglot Gathering in Berlin about an hour ago. I took the train all the way from Berlin to Bangor, via Cologne, Brussels, London, Crewe and Chester, leaving Berlin just before 7am this morning, and arriving in Bangor just after 9pm this evening. On the way there I also travelled by train, though I had to stay in Brussels for one night, and continued the next day. It cost slightly more than flying (only about £20 more) and took a bit longer (about 2 hours – more on the way there), but I saw so much more, and went through parts of France and Germany I hadn’t been before, and visited Belgium for the first time. The engineers on German railways started a 5-day strike today, and I was worried that my trains might not be running. Fortunately they did run, and were more or less on time.

The gathering was bigger than last year with about 350 participants from many countries. There were many people there I knew from last year’s gathering, and from the Polyglot Conference in Novi Sad, and I met lots of new people. I had conversations in all the languages I know well, and most of the ones I know less well. There was a Breton speaker there, though I didn’t get to talk to him, as well as speakers of Welsh, Irish, Cornish and Scottish Gaelic. Like last year, there were plenty of Esperanto speakers, and I had quite a few conversations in Esperanto, which I brushed up a bit beforehand. There were a number of people who had studied sign languages there, including BSL, ASL, Dutch Sign Language (Nederlandse Gebarentaal / NGT) and Slovak Sign Language (Slovenský posunkový jazyk / SPJ), and the Slovak signer demonstrated how she interprets songs in SPJ, which was fascinating to watch.

The talks and lectures were really interesting, and I went to quite a few introductions to languages, including Northern Sami, Navajo, Arabic, Hebrew, Milanese, Gottlandic, Finnish, Greek and Basque. I don’t intend to learn any of these languages just yet, but it was fascinating to find out more about them. My own presentation, on the History of Writing, was well received, and I got lots of positive comments.

Some of the polyglots at the Polyglot Gathering in Berlin in May 2015
Some of the polyglots at the Polyglot Gathering – from right to left: Richard Simcott, Alex Rawlings, Christopher Huff, Jimmy Melo, and me – between us we speak at least 20 or 30 languages, to varying degrees.

The evening activities included a polyglot games evening, an international culinary festival – I took some Welsh cakes and bara brith, which were popular – a book fair, a polyglot game show, a concert with the multilingual French singer JoMo, who sang in 25 different languages, and an international cultural evening, at which I sang a Scottish Gaelic waulking song (Ceud soiridh soiridh bhuam) and one of my own songs – A Hen in My Hat (in 5 languages). After the cultural evening there was a little Irish and Scottish music session – I had a couple of tin whistles with me, and a few other people had instruments.

So now I’m back in Bangor and will start to catch up with the work I couldn’t do while away due to time constraints and internet connection issues.