Photo (c) Resident on Earth

I have a beautiful red book to hold my German Wortschatz, or “word treasure.” In English, I suppose we just call it plain old boring “vocabulary.” The book has a ribbed surface, and the pages are of such a fine texture that I can’t help but flip through the book, run my fingers over the paper, and gently breathe in the scent.

As I go about my daily life, I collect German words in my Wortschatz. I write down words that I see or hear around me, such as from ads, TV, flyers, or newspaper headlines (as I look over the shoulder of the guy sitting in front of me on the train). When I get home, I look them up and write down their meaning.

After last week’s excursion into the pitfalls of using du and Sie, it quickly became clear from the number of comments that this is a topic of no small interest both to Germans and learners of the language alike. So I thought I’d give you a bit more on the same theme this week. Don’t say, oh dearest Young Germany readers, that I never do anything for you.

Now, last week I wrote that there is considerable comedic promise in the fact that German has two forms of second-person address: so let’s look at precisely what is so funny about Siezen and Duzen.

Thanks to – unbelievably – Barack Obama on Flickr

"Don't you du me, matey!" (Photo: Iris Jungels)

As I’m writing, it’s visibly holiday-time in Germany. The road past my house is being pounded by cars laden with luggage, bicycles, and screaming children, followed by camper vans in convoy and, every now and then, one of those really cool mobile beer-vending doo-hickeys (Bierausschankwagen) that set up near parks, lakes, museums… well, anywhere exasperated, overheated parents (or thirsty journalists) might be in need of alcohol.

And if you too are off work enjoying the sun and a cool beer at one of these things, who knows, you might just run into your boss from work, perhaps being ordered around by his or her children: “No silly, I wanted to make the dolly swim, not you. Why did you have to fall in trying to get it back out? You’re so embarrassing! And where’s my ice-cream?”

A few weeks back, we all had the not inconsiderable pleasure of an expert explanation of the infamous Berlin dialect, a manner of speaking so reliably confusing to outsiders that even other Germans have their own word for it: berlinern, or “to mumble Berlin slang.” And Berlin is by no means the only German metropolis with its own special way of speaking: residents of Hamburg don’t Deutsch sprechen, for example. No, what Hamburgers do is snacken – and I don’t mean eating meat sandwiches, here.

After a long time at sea, all Hamburg sailors want to do is snack!

Snacken is the way other Germans describe Hamburg’s own peculiar way of distorting standard German. And just like Berlinerisch, it’s a mixture of a characteristic accent, idiomatic expressions, and vocabulary imported from older dialectal forms.

There are a few things that those of us who’ve spent some years acquiring a language realise as we go along. For example, that it’s the everyday things that are usually more difficult to describe than complex political issues: after all, democracy in English gives you démocratie in French, democracia in Spanish and Demokratie in German. But just you try telling a plumber that the seal on the drainpipe below your sink needs changing, along with the washers. That’s when you learn that the German word for rubber seal or gasket is identical to the word for poetry (Dichtung) and that the translation of washer is literally “Mother slice” (Mutterscheibe).

Globalization has started to blur many of the fine cultural differences between countries in the western world.  As EU standard after EU standard passes into law, standardization is becoming more and more common and acceptable.  But differences remain, despite the Euro and the spread of Starbucks and McDonalds.  The differences are in the details.  These are a few of my German favorites.

1. Animals here speak a different language.  That is, the noises they make are interpreted differently by the humans.  Some are similar to the English interpretations, though they are spelled quite differently: cows say “muh,” dogs go “wuf wuf,” and cats say “miau.”  But frogs go “quak” instead of “ribbet,” pigs go “grunz grunz” instead of “oink oink,” and when the rooster crows it says, accordingly to the Germans, “kikeriki” instead of cockledoodledo.”  I wonder what the animals themselves would have to say about all this…

Until last month.

Last month I gave a little house and started renovating. Now, you should probably know that I am one of those people who doesn’t have a clue about building. I would have liked to keep it that way, but then some nice people gave me my little house for free, just because they didn’t feel like doing any of the work that it needed. So I grudgingly, hopefully, decided I would try.