ankewehner.de

This is one for the people who are interested in languages.

So, German, like some other languages, assigns “gender” to nouns. You can tell the gender from the article, which therefore should memorize the article with the word, if you ever have to memorize German vocabulary. “Der” is male, “die” is female, “das” is neuter.
Tables and the sky are male, vases and traffic lights female, books and windows neuter. There may be some weird logic behind it when you go far enough back in time, or maybe not, but it looks pretty arbitrary, and it has for most words nothing to do with biological sex. Since the same goes for animals, which often do have a sex, so that gets a bit confusing.

the dog = der Hund
the cat = die Katze
the horse = das Pferd

In consequence, any dog (and frog, and most species of bird) of unknown sex is referred to with “er” (“he”); any cat (and spider) of unknown sex is referred to as “sie” (“she”), and any horse of unknown gender is referred to as “es” (“it”).
You cannot just change the article to change the gender. “Die Pferd” isn’t a female horse, it’s a mistake. The word for a mare is “Stute”. And, yes, that is grammatically female, too; at least that much logic is in the system. Incidentally, a gelding is “der Wallach” – castrating a stud still leaves him male. Some people get weird ideas in that department.

One rather prominent example where the biological sex doesn’t match the grammatical gender is the German word for “girl”, that is, “das Mädchen”. That’s because that word is a diminutive (of “Magd”, meaning “maid”), and all diminutives are neuter.

There are some words that can be more than one gender. “Gelee” (“jelly”) can be male or neuter, depending on whom you ask. Other words mean different things depending on gender. I don’t know many examples, but here they are:
“Die See” is the sea, while “der See” is a lake.
If someone says she’s driving to Shanghai “mit ihrer Honda” (“with her(female) Honda”), she’s going by motorbike, if she says she’s driving “mit ihrem Honda” (“with her(male) Honda”), it’s a car.

So, “the Harley” is female. “The motorbike” is neuter. That’s because the German word, “Motorrad”, is a compound noun formed from “der Motor”, which means what you think it means, and “das Rad”, which means “wheel”.
This is one of the few hard-and-fast rules: In compound nouns, the gender is always that of the last component noun.

I’ve been trying to find some other patterns, but
Nouns formed with -heit or -keit at the end are always female – “die Dummheit” (stupidity, stupid idea), “die Wirksamkeit” (effectiveness), “die Menschheit” (humanity)

Talking about trees: There may be certain rules of the thumb you can find. While “der Baum” (the tree) is male, pretty much any species of tree whose name does not end in “-baum” and which is native to Europe is female – die Birke (birch), die Eiche (oak), die Buche (beech), die Fichte (spruce)… “Exotic” trees on the other hand are more commonly male: der Ginko, der Eukalyptus, der Baobab.
A similar pattern can be found with river names, although a bit more muddied. There are some male rivers around here, most prominently the Rhine, but a lot of rivers in Europe are female (including the Loire, Thames, and Volga). On the other hand I can’t came up with a female river outside of Europe. The word for river, “Fluss”, is male, too, so that might have something to do with it.

I’ll leave it at that for now, hoping conlangers or writers or just apprentice language geeks get something out of it.

Dark Roasted Blend mentions in a post about British Pub Signs:

The Pig and Whistle’s origin is obscure, but it could be a corruption of the Anglo-Saxon “piggin wassail” which means “good health”.

One fun part is that there is a German expression of surprise, “Ich glaub mein Schwein pfeift”, which translates to “I think my pig’s whistling”. As far I could could find out from a quick web search, it dates back to the 1970s or possibly 1960. Variations on the “I think” theme include

• “…mich knutscht ein Elch” (“..a moose is smooching me”)
• “… mein Hamster bohnert” (“…my hamster’s waxing the floor”)
• “…mein Hund spielt Halma” (“…my dog’s playing Halma”)

I hadn’t encountered the last two before.

Links to share:
15th century “typo demon”

Lucky shot: Photo of an “exploding” meteorite
Astronomical Quilts

Madly Awesome Paper Craft
…and cardboard-craft (Some is like 3d graffiti!

Pretty new spider discovered
‘nother article with ‘nother photo

“What’s the opposite of boot?”
“Sandal?”
“No, entirely different –”
“Hat!“
“Nooo, what you do with a computer.”
“Oh. Um. Crash?”
“I’d think that’s something the computer does… I mean what you do before switching it off normally, anyway.”
“I think that’s ‘shut down’.”
“That’s all?”
“Can’t think of anything else.”
“Bah. Thanks, anyway.”

I thought some people might find this amusing. It’s a photo of a section of a road map at a bus stop in Neuwied.

Block is a village between Neuwied and Engers, the next town upriver on the Rhine. I have no idea why the street is named “Im Tardis”. (“Im” means “in the”, in the masculine or neuter form. However, the TARDIS is grammatically female in the German version, which would require “in der Tardis”.)

On the radio news there was something about the emergency help the USA have planned against the financial crisis. The US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson supposedly said he’d “put pressure” on his international counterparts to take similar measures as the USA, and he’d “go about it aggressively”.
Now, that is translated to English from German, which was was translated and shortened from English, so, has anyone in the US heard what he actually said? Or what I have to feed into google news to find American articles that do not talk only about the USA, or where else I could find the untranslated statements.

Completely unrelated, in the last week two 250kg WWII bombs exploded.

One did so spontaneously, leaving a crater 6 metres deep and 14 metres across in a field of a plant nursery in Vienna (Austria).

Another explosion was triggered by construction work in Hattingen in the Ruhr area (Germany). The cab of the hydraulic shovel was solid enough and there was enough luck involved that the worker got away with nothing worse than some cuts from splintered glass. 16 other people suffered blast trauma, and buildings and machinery up to 300 metres from the bomb were damaged. Estimates of damages are a “high six-figure number”. Parts of the bomb flew as far as 1,5 km.

I also looked for “Blindgänger” in google news, and for the last week found articles about one 250kg bomb disarmed in Villingen-Schwenningen – with photos – one the same size in Ingelheim – with photos – one dud in Lake Starnberg being destroyed in a controlled blast producing a tens of metres high fountain, a 125kg bomb disarmed near Mainz, and attempts to precisely locate a bomb that is getting in the way of extending a bridge near Bielefeld.

Just a bit of a habit spreading the word; I think stuff like that is part of the reason why most Europeans are not as keen on bombing countries as the last American government.

imported from older blog
From the series about Germans in comics, commentary on Avengers: The Initiative 1 – Happy Accidents (2007-04) and 2 – Hero Moment (2007-05)

I’m not sure this Baron von Blitzschlag is undead or just old, but he certainly is another Nazi scientist. This is starting to get silly.

“Blitzschlag” translates to “lightning strike”. Not a last name I ever encountered. If someone reading this is really curious about the “Baron” bit, you could look into Freiherr.

What’s really interesting is the way he talks – not the over the top accent, but the fact that he consistently addresses Doctor Hank Pym as “Herr Pym”.
This can come across as a bit of a snub, since he does not address him as “Doctor Pym” (or even “Doktor”, if need be).
It’s also interesting to see that he knows the address “Mr” (last page of #1), yet chooses to use “Herr” to address Pym.
With both combined, also considering the “I’m your greatest fan” speech in #2, it looks to me like von Blitzschlag is trying to get on Pym’s nerves.

Unfortunately we have a “Herr Gyrich” earlier, so it seems like the “Mr. Secetary” might have been a slip, and I might be reading entirely too much into it.

A general note regarding having German characters use “Herr”/”Frau”/”Fräulein” instead of English forms of address: For most characters, it’s nonsense.

Apart from the fact that something that common is easy to pick up when you learn a language, you would have to have spent your life alone in a cave to not know Mr and Mrs and Miss. It’s all over entertainment.

We get a lot of movies and TV series translated from English. Those are not subtitled, but dubbed. However, even when speaking German, the characters use the English forms of address. (I’m not saying you couldn’t find counter-examples, though I can’t think of any right now.)

This is not a new trend. Even in the German dub, that pointy-eared guy from Star Trek is called “Mister Spock”. The oldest example I could find in a hurry was Gone With The Wind (1953).
This also extends to titles, for exampel right now “Mr. Bean macht Ferien” gets advertised, and off the top of my head I can think of “Mrs. Doubtfire”, “Mr. Bill” and an old cartoon show called “Mr. Maggoo”.

Considering present day settings, “Fräulein” is particularly inappropriate, because it’s obsolete. If someone who was not a senior citizen had addressed me as “Fräulein” when I was a teenager (last decade), I’d have thought they were making fun of me.

So, yeah, quite a few Germans in English comics sound very weird to me.

Back to the comic at hand, there’s a small point left: In Avenger: The Initiative #2, von Blitzschlag calls M.V.P. “die Übermensch”. That schould be “der Übermensch” (grammatically masculine, rather than feminine).