Hallo

When I first visited Bavaria in 1991, I learned how to greet folks in the Bavarian style. One could say Grüß dich/Griaß di to individuals, or Grüß euch/Griaß eich to groups, or Grüß Gott to anyone. All of these are short versions of Es Grüße dich/euch Gott, meaning "May God greet you-singular/plural." If one wanted to demonstrate one wasn't from these here parts, one could say Guten Tag (good day), or simply Tag (hiya).

For the non-native speaker wanting to blend in, the advantage of saying Grüß Gott rather than Grüß dich/euch is that one doesn't have to feel awkward using the informal dich/euch with complete strangers, even though the informal words are implied. The disadvantage is that Grüß Gott sounds explicitly religious, far more so than it's English partner, "goodbye" ("God be with you").

In Bayern, what one was to never ever say was Hallo.

Hallo was reserved strictly for telephone interactions, as in Hallo, hier spricht die Liz ("Hello, here speaks the Liz"). (The German use of definite articles with names, as in die Liz, der Jens, and whether such use is regional, grammatically necessary, or utterly ridiculous, is a topic for another post.)

Thus it has come as a bit of a shock, on my walks and jogs in Steinebach this week, that when I say Grüß Gott to folks, they say Hallo in response. This has happened multiple times.

I tested the inverse, thinking that perhaps if I said Hallo, Bavarians would remind me of my foreigner status by replying Grüß Gott. So far, the response to every Hallo has been Hallo.

I asked Stefan about it.

"It's possible that you're only meeting people from out of town," he said. "Now is Ferienzeit ["vacation time"] in the north, and Steinebach is swarming with tourists. But it is also possible," he added solemnly, "that you are witnessing the degradation of the Bavarian character."

I mentioned my observations to Stefan's Tante Puppi. She is 93 and sharp as a tack.

"Oh!" she said with a disgruntled frown: "die Hallo Krankheit." The Hello Sickness. She declared it "furchtbar." Terrible. The linguistic plague has its hold on southern Germany.

Every time I visit Germany, I learn a new word that comes up so frequently in conversation that I wonder how I ever got by without knowing it previously. This visit marks the first time I've noticed familiar words fading away. Farewell, Grüß Gott. Hello, Hallo.

Toast

Like English, which routinely borrows words from other languages, German readily borrows words from languages around the world. Particularly visible in modern Germany are English words affiliated with pop culture and computer technology. If you are youthful and hip, you're surely more likely to respond to a computer ad offering "50 Euro Cashback!" than to one offering "50 Euro HoweverOneExpressesCashBackInOneLongCompoundGermanWord!" Aside from the bizarre sales appeal of anything in English, my friend Martin informs me that the word Cashback had to be borrowed because Germans never conceived of the concept until English speakers brought it up: "unlike Americans," he explains, "Germans just expect to pay what things cost."

One wonders, then, what Germans did with stale bread for the several millennia before they borrowed the word Toast from English. Today, Toast is a staple of the German diet. When special company arrives unexpectedly at our door, Stefan knows to make something special to nosh on: Toast! Among the food essentials our friends Janice and Martin brought to our shared Ferienwohnung in Dresden? A package of supermarket-purchased Golden Toast! According to the package fine-print, Golden Toast is Vollkorn Toast (whole-grain toast) that is packaged--if you can believe it--untoasted, meaning that (does this really need explaining?) it isn't technically TOAST. Germans already have a word for this: it's called Brot (bread)--although Stefan says really you should use the adjective ungetoastet for this situation, which turns Brot into ungetoastete Toast. How's that for German efficiency? As far as the non-untoasted stuff goes, Stefan says the only alternative to the word Toast in German is geroestetes Brot--roasted bread--which somehow doesn't capture the actuality of, y'know, toast.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word toast comes from Old French, toster, to roast or grill, and before that, Latin *tostāre, from torrēre, to parch. The French, if not the Germans, were refined enough to understand the difference between toasting and roasting, since they bothered to borrow the latter word from Anglo-Norman (a Germanic language!) roster, to cook on an open fire.

Helen sits next to me as I type and insists that toast is a modern concept for Germans. She goes on to explain how people toasted bread in the olden days, in a flat metal contraption over an open fire or in the oven. She herself has a ganz primitiv (entirely primitive) steel bread toaster that, alas, she can't remember the name of because the concept of toast post-dates its invention.

Nothing is sacred

I'm sure German can be a poetic language when it wants to be, yet it is a language of unexpectedly limited vocabulary. This is ironic, given that German allows speakers to invent new words by smashing multiple old ones together; but German ran out of phonetic Ur-combinations some time ago. Thus it has to use the same word, die Dichtung, to mean both poetry (hail Goethe, hail Schiller, hail Heine) and gasket (hail exhaust manifold, hail intake air duct).

Granted, English does the same thing. Take the noun key, for example, which can be both something to unlock a door (der Schlüssel) and something to affect sound production in a musical instrument (die Taste).

Still, you'd think concepts like poetry are sacred enough that the Volk would have found a different word/concept to share with gasket--say, das Radieschen (radish) or der Elch (elk). Maybe gaskets were invented before verse.

If poetry is not sacred enough, what is? We merely need turn to the word for mother--die Mutter--to learn that nothing is. Die Mutter means both mother and screw nut. The crass English double meanings of screw and nut perhaps highlight that I shouldn't be too critical of German. Still, mother and nut?

German reserves der Vater solely for male progenitors, so maybe we can simply blame all of this on The Patriarchy.

Sehr lecker

We have friends visiting from the U.S.: Michelle and her daughter Zoe. We picked them up at the Hauptbahnhof this afternoon, brought them back to our apartment, and immediately took them to the Lienhart bakery on the corner.

"We have guests from the U.S.," I told the proprietor, "and we are here for their first Cultural Experience. What do you have today?"

"Oh, of course!," she replied. There followed a loving description of all of today's best and freshest cakes and cookies, including the "Badisch Christmas specialty, Linzer Torte."

"Linzer Torte is Badisch?" I said, attempting to sound like an inquisitive foreigner who didn't have a blog entry riding on the answer. "Please tell me about this. I thought Linzer Torte came from Austria--from Linz."

The proprietor's hackles were a wee bit raised. "No, Linzer Torte is a particularly Badisch specialty," she said. Then she paused and conceded, "yes, it is possible that the Ur-recipe came from the city called Linz, in Austria, but for at least 150 years, bakers in Baden have been making the real Linzer Torte."

After we chose five different pieces of cake, she added a gift to our order: a small spiced chocolate covered Gugelhupf cake, also a regional seasonal specialty, sehr lecker.

Lecker, by the way, is one of my favorite German words. It means "yummy," which is probably a good enough reason to like it, but what I most enjoy is the inflection people use when saying the word in advertisements on radio or TV. The accent goes on the first syllable, which is quickly and deftly flicked off the tongue in order to move on to the leisurely, drawn out, unstressed second syllable: 'LECK-aaaaaahr. The English equivalent would be something like pronouncing "yummy" as 'YM-eeeee." Of course, people who aren't advertising anything on the air usually simply say 'leck-er, but it isn't anywhere near as entertaining.

A star is born

Here is Elias in his German stage debut, playing The Australian. He stands with his Translatorix in front of a kangaroo, welcoming Two German Reporteresses.* He explains that Australians "enjoy eating barbie with the family, and fish. There are many things to do in Australia because it is a big country with lots of open space! For music, we have the didgeridoo, and we like to sing songs about kangaroos and koalas." (Cue ensemble number: "Bring dein Känguru mit, Pit, bring dein Känguru mit [schubidubidu]!") Elias impressed everyone with his fluent English.

*One of the first PR magazines Stefan picked up at the University included an article on how outdated and sexist the German feminine -in ending is (the equivalent of -ix and -ess in English, as in "aviatrix" and "actress"). Feminist linguistics still hasn't caught on in most of Germany, thus the two leads in the play were Reporterinnen, not Reporter.

Getting lost

Last night, I got out my list of formal-you pronouns and phoned Herr Professor D. at his private number to talk about organ lessons. Even with the list, I panicked under the pressure of declining formal-you-accusative (Sie) and formal-you-dative (Ihnen), but deftly recovered by avoiding all sentences that required either. It was a pleasant conversation, and hopefully I will be back in the organ swing of things by the time we meet in person in September.

With little to do today between dropping Elias off and picking him up, I decided to figure out a new running route. My friend Robin has observed that running is a great way to get to know a new place. To that, I'll add, so is getting lost, which I'm quite adept at in Germany despite my Garmin GPS toy.

One of the many lovely things about our neighborhood is that you can be halfway up a small mountain and in the middle of the woods within about a fifteen minute hike. I carefully studied my city map before setting off and planned a mostly flat, 4-mile jogging loop. I hiked up to the fitness trail in the woods, and double checked the map posted there (which says, sunnily, "Exercising twice weekly makes you fit!"--an odd piece of advice for anyone with the energy to hike to the trail in the first place).

There are many more trails in the woods than are shown on the maps, and at one three-way intersection with five trail signs pointing in four different directions, I took the far left rather than the near one and zig-zagged a few miles down the other side of the hill, finally emerging near the University Sports Complex, considerably farther from home than planned. Fortunately, Freiburg is filled with helpful landmarks, including the Dreisam river, which I followed back into town. The path along the river is beautiful, with babbling brook, weeping willows, grassy playgrounds (one with a zip line!), gorgeous tall houses (think Chicago brownstones with a European flair), and fit students everywhere--all of which made getting lost on a leisurely afternoon well worth while.

Stefan has also been enjoying the easy access to mountains. Yesterday after dinner, he rode up Schauinsland--40 kilometers round trip, with an elevation difference of ~900 meters. He said there must have been fifty other cyclists on the road with him. I asked if he had passed any, and he said no, but that several had passed him. "Freiburgians are really fit," he explained--and this is from a guy who bikes to work every day and rides metric centuries a few times a month back home.

Eee, fff, sss

The word Donaudampfschifffahrtkapitaensgattin reminded me of another cool thing you can do in German but not in English: legitimately stick three of the same letter together in a row in a single word. Consider, for example, Schneeeule (snow owl; thank you, Harry Potter und der Feuerkelch) and Flussschleiche (river bend). Of course, this occurs only within those fabulous compound nouns...