[Multilingual Monday] Anniversary
On April 11th, 2005 -- little more than five years ago. I did my first Multilingual Monday column, and five years later, I've been (fairly) consistent at making a weekly MM post, getting inspiration from my fellow linguiaphile friends and events in my daily life. I loved having lingual elements in my journal and wanted a place where I could put it
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"Ey, Alter, wo geht's hier nach Aldi?"
"Zu Aldi!"
"Schon so spät?"
A Manta driver drives into town to go shopping.
"Hey, Old Man, how do you get at Aldi here?"
"To Aldi!"
"Already so late?"
The untranslatable pun at the heart of the punchline is zu "to" being also short for zugemacht "closed". But that's only one of the problems with trying to translate this joke. First and foremost, there's the stereotype of the Manta driver, which maps pretty well to the "hoosier" stereotype in St Louis and almost as well to the "guido" stereotype in NYC, but I'm never sure what term to use here in Chicago. Associated with that stereotype are certain non-standard usages considered "sloppy" by other German-speakers, such as the extended use of nach typified here. (You've studied German so you know a thing or two about the headache that comes from trying to select the proper word for "to"; there's a handy summary here.) And then there's the kind of simple-mindedness which causes our man to mistake a prescriptivist correction for a statement about opening hours, and so forth.
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