The German language

to have pig : )

Warning; "bescheuert" is very close to "retarded" in meaning and usage; I avoid it.

This seems like the best thread to ask this:

I am currently reading quite a lot of German Lit in translation. Partly its to further the depth of what I know, a mixture of re-reading and reading more by writers I love: Kafka, Rilke, Schnitzler, Musil, Joseph Roth, Bernhard.

But also finding new writers, some of whom are poets: Bachmann, Trakl, Heine, Peter Weiss, Brecht (what a poet he was, had no idea!)

I wasn't really going to tackle Goethe. I read Faust years ago, making little impression. ...Werther just isn't appealing. I told myself Buchner made much more of an impact upon the 'expressionist' mode of German writing and thought that appeals to me (I love the essay by Canetti detailing his encounter w/Lenz).

Upon reading The Diaries of Franz Kafka this isn't going to do. His notes on him, his awe of him...I need to read some of his poetry but what else is there? Any partic translations. He is someone who is quite hard to get a handle on.

there is an older penguin selected verse, available only used in the u.s., that pairs originals with prose paraphrases. i think the newer penguin is from the same translator david luke, but there apparently the verse is all translated.

faust can make an impact but, i dunno, i think you have to see it as more pop / mythic. i used to maybe read the kaufmann, or taylor, translations and they didn't do much for me. i had better luck with the oxford one, which i think is also (coincidentally, i don't have any great love for him) david luke. iirc luke emphasizes his effort to preserve the verse-forms: different speakers (and the same at different times) will say each part in its own little poem, so certain translation choices (or worse, prosification) will obscure one of the charms of the thing.

i've been poking away at the thomas carlyle (yes that one) translation of wilhelm meister for several years (i want to get a handle on mignon's character because of some shit schopenhauer said about one of the songs she sings). i couldn't really say why, but it has such an odd texture.

Can't speak to the accuracy of any of the translations but vol. 1 in the Princeton Collected Works, ed. Middleton, has a good spread of contemporary takes and a few older ones, all in verse and set against the original. I like Middleton's "Song To Mahomet" there.

Thanks both.

bentelec you've just reminded me I used to have one of the Princeton vols, studies on colour. Never felt inclined to crack that open.

Frohe Ostern Euch allen.

Speaking of Kafka, I probably just got this link off ILX in the first place, but it doesn't seem to be on this thread, so:

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2014/01/on-translating-kafkas-the-metamorphosis.html

That's a great link, thanks.

Thanks, earlier this week I was just reading Susan's intro to her translation of Walser's Berlin Stories (NYRB books), part of my lol project.

Yes, thanks for the link. Didn't Nabokov actually claim to know the type if insect, some sort of beetle? This makes more sense.

nabokov always claimed the beetle had wings, and could have flown out the window, but gregor didn't know.

Oh yeah

How often is there a new translation? Seems like every few years. Maybe not quite as often as Can reissues but...

Truth be told it took me ages to parse the second sentence of Die Verwandlung- classic overstuffed German syntax.

part of my lol project.
What lol project? lol = learn other language?

http://www.vox.de/cms/index.html

^ for lovers of the fernsehen

Hier Komme Die Warum Jetzt

(possible future display name)

^ deutsch aufklärungshändler schlagzeile, klicken sie jetzt um herauszufinden!

"enlightenment dealer"?

du kennst… wie die weltberühmt voxjournalist ezra klein, oder die statistikenwunderkind nate silver

ja natürlich!

Pretty essential infographic:
How to Name Animals in German

Though sadly not covering Dickmaulrüssler-territory.

http://www.babbel.com/magazine/favorite-german-words

Original meaning of "toll" is closer to "crazy", which makes tollpatschig an even cooler word.

Keypad slipped into Deutsch mode and "overcome" was autocorrected to Obervolta and Obertönen.

Received a report from my German teacher which concludes "deine Fortschritte ist unverkennbar", except I spent a good couple of minutes staring at it because my first attempt at deciphering the handwriting was "...unverzeihbar"

my favourite recently discovered german word

http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konfokalmikroskop

Here is a weird translation thing. If you look up the word "die Wanze" in a German-English dictionary it merely says "bug." But if you look it up in a German-only dictionary it seems to be more specific, that it is a flat, blood or sap-sucking insect.

Huh. DE -> NO dictionary gives what I'll literally translate to English as "wall louse".
Wikipedia DE's Wanzen page points to this English page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heteroptera

Heteroptera is a group of about 40,000 species of insects in the order Hemiptera. Sometimes called "true bugs",[1] that name more commonly refers to Hemiptera as a whole, and "typical bugs" might be used as a more unequivocal alternative since among the Hemiptera the heteropterans are most consistently and universally termed "bugs".

Learned about this word the other day: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kompetenz-Kompetenz

THanks, Øystein. Guess I should have thought to look at DE Wiki. Actually one reason I decided to start to stabilize my German is I had reached a dead end with the the Scandinavian languages.

funkelnagelneu

Kugelkopfschreibmaschine

Kuckucksuhr

Kuddelmuddel

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_placeholder_names_by_language#German

hard to pick one but even on this i found myself bustin up at weitfortistan

Reichhaltige Sammlung.

"The German equivalent to the English John Doe for males and Jane Doe for females would be Max Mustermann (Max Specimen) and Erika Mustermann, respectively."

Erika Mustermann! lol. I had no idea. I did know that Erika is considered a grandma name in Germany but this is pretty funny.

Erica Specimen should be my new alias.

i'm not sure about the reasoning behind that one. i think it should be the equivalent of 'anne sample' and the like (which you do see on anglo id-card samples); so there must be other 'jane doe' equivalents?

There's my friend Rainer Fahrzeit, who tells you how long a trip should take if traffic is normal and you don't take breaks.

when i took a tiny bit of academic german for grad school i heard of instructors who, for feminist reasons, would not teach noun gender and would use the relevant personal pronouns indifferently (or maybe they preferred one to the others, i don't know). of course this was regarded as pedagogically dubious, radical, etc.

given its much more rigorous official standards (duden as centralized authority, uptight speakers in general etc), how has a thing like deliberate contra-grammatical shifts in pronoun usage—'they' instead of 'she' or 'he' for trans subjects or anyone who elects that it be used—been being received in german?

five years ago i taught at a private college, religiously identified but quite liberal, and never heard anything remotely in that direction from administration or anyone else. i just started teaching at a different private college, no less liberal but significantly more secular, and i got some student-elected-pronoun-usage-guidelines thrown in with all the other (optional) policy language that was dumped on me during 'onboarding'.

A national newspaper in Germany (taz) uses ...Innen forms. I think it's still seen as something belonging to the left, even though, govt agencies sometimes use varieties of it.

For those who aren't familiar: there's no simple gender neutral way to refer to a group of people, e.g. the voters = die Wähler implies a group of men. There's a long neutral form: Die Wähler und Wählerinnen (the voters and voteresses), and this is sometimes abbreviated (as by taz) to WählerInnen, Wähler/innen, Wähler*innen.

I can't imagine how gender neutrality could work in speech, like, when referring to a significant other, you can't say mein/e Freund/in

i was always struck by the fact that job ads have to say Xer/erin

and 'eine Freundin von mir'

you could put a stop in there

mein…e freund…in

would be funky

this guide to gender neutral speech really does advocate a glottal stop in that situation, pg. 25 (it's a pdf)
https://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CCMQFjAAahUKEwiFgtPOj53IAhWDGT4KHdkSCis&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.gb.uni-koeln.de%2Fe2106%2Fe2113%2Fe5726%2F2014_Leitfaden_UeberzeuGENDEReSprache_11032014.pdf&usg=AFQjCNF_6ZpHwwCY0FldkMYG8iGt8dKPpw&sig2=_fE6h4Y_I0dhBLjsxpLleA

The plural inclusive form (WählerInnen) is gaining a fair amount of ground and is no longer strictly a form used by the Left, but it also remains controversial.

Grammatical gender is not understood as human gender -- the pronoun "es" for "das Mädchen" doesn't sound the same as calling a girl "it" would in English, pencils are not thought of as male and fountain pens are not thought of as female. It remains a little tricky for me as an English native speaker even after all these years over here.

There is feminist writing in German on gender in German, but it's not tumblriffic popular stuff.

oh right i know it's not understood that way, i just figured, that might be an illuminating parallel

i read a cantankerous academic thortpiece complaining about being asked to start using 'they' instead of 'he' or 'she' in english, and the author appealed to the grammatical unnaturalities, a lame argument but one that it seems is bound to have some traction the more widely people are asked to change language-use habits

"... and do you have the name of the book you're looking for, sir?"

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/516VVPSKMWL._SX351_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

Good piece: https://theconversation.com/why-the-german-language-has-so-many-great-words-55554