Tag: language

The biggest struggle with writing about war when you’re German

marvellously-supernatural:

You see, it’s simple.

“Schießen” means to shoot.
“Scheißen” means to shit.

There’s this tiny difference in the order of these letters and the words are pronounced very differently but they look very much alike.

Especially when you’re typing fast. Especially when you’ve written for the last eight hours and it’s five in the morning and your tired soul is preparing to leave your body. Especially when Microsoft Word doesn’t underline anything because it doesn’t get the error, because technically, spelling-wise, there is none.

This fear, coming even before getting historical facts wrong, the story being boring or my writing being just bad, that I might embarrass myself and my characters because somewhere in this huge pile of over 130k words, in a serious and completely unfunny meant chapter there might be a soldier unintentionally shitting, not shooting, keeps me up at night.

die Tagundnachtgleiche

thatswhywelovegermany:

  • der Tag = day
  • und = and
  • die Nacht = night
  • die Gleiche = noun only used as a constituent of compound words, derived from the adjective / adverb
    • gleich = equal, same, alike, …

die Tagundnachtgleiche = equinox

And since there are two equinoxes in a year, one in spring and one in autumn, there are

  • die Frühlingstagundnachtgleiche = spring equinox
  • die Herbsttagundnachtgleiche = autumn equinox

the-last-hair-bender:

curriebelle:

youngcrappyhungry:

saijanbulma:

eruhamster:

aljofares:

Tbh the idea that German is an angry or ugly language is just French propoganda to divert attention away from the fact that French sounds exactly like when your dog is choking on some plastic wrapper he found somehow

for the most part german sounds exactly as it looks and their words make sense ie submarine’s logic: ‘boat that goes underwater? let’s call it underwaterboat’ 

french is a hell language that the french are elitist about and act prissy over even though like 50% of the letters that make up any given word don’t even get pronounced

Just to add, as a former opera singer I had the delight of finding that the spoken French I knew was of almost no use when it came to singing because they literally could not sing the way they speak it. We had a fluent French speaker in our year who was advised not to sing in French because learning all the new rules might fuck up her spoken French. French is fucked up.

Btw best language to sing in? Italian, hands down. Best language to speak, German hands down. Best for poetry though? Honestly English, because we have so many different words for the same fucking things, even if most of them are stolen, that means when you’re painting in English you have a bigger pallette.

French is pretty good for sounding fancy, I guess. If you like that sort of thing.

I literally speak French and even I know it’s condescending

The whole thing just comes from rich English snobs using French language and fashion to assert how much better they were than everyone

All you have to do to debunk “French is fancy and pretty” is listen to 20 seconds of Quebec French b/c Quebec French sounds like a mean duck doing a bad impression of a duck he doesn’t like.

That is the best description of Québécois French I’ve ever fucking heard.