Amy seems to have decided to use "Yeah" for affirmative replies.

I wonder whether she picked this up from a film, or where it comes from. The phonetic similarity to German "Ja" presumably plays a role.

I mean, sometimes "Yeah" is appropriate in colloquial English, but it carries a certain stylistic connotation, which I don't think she intends at ( Read more... )

The other day, Amy said something along the lines of “wanted to know what it look likes”.

Took me a sec until I realised that she had added the third-person singular present marker -s to the “verb” to look like. Amusing parse :)

However, she seemed to have realised her mistake; at any rate, two sentences later she had one with “what it looks like ( Read more... )

Amy seems to be getting the hang of the difference between say and tell (which are the same verb in German, cognate with say): the other day, she said something wrongly, then corrected herself.

On the other hand, she still hasn’t internalised all the rules for auxiliary do: when (not) to use it and what forms it goes with.

Common errors are:

• ( Read more... )

Today, Amy told me about her stuffed-animal rabbit “Mopple”.

I was amused that she had anglicised its name from the German original “Moppel” when talking to me: instead of quoting the name (as she would with, say, her friend Erik), she turned it into English /mɒpl/ (i.e. variously [mɒpəɫ]~[mɒpɫ̩]-with English velar/“dark” L rather than German “ ( Read more... )

For Amy, them seems to have no distinct strong form; instead, she has generalised the weak form /ðəm/ (for her, [dəm]) for the strong form as well.

For example, recently we were looking at a car where the windows on our side had frost on them and we couldn’t see inside; she suggested, “Let’s see whether there’s frost on the other windows, ( Read more... )

It’s always fun to hear Anglicisms in Amy’s German-where her weaker language is influencing her stronger language.

This morning, about a toy “windmill” shaped like a ladybird: “Es dreht sich bei sich selbst, wenn der Wind bläst”, where I’d say “Es dreht sich von selbst/dreht sich selbst/dreht sich von alleine, wenn der Wind weht”; the “bei sich ( Read more... )

Amy, this morning, to Jana, about a card that she got:

„Guck mal, da ist Schreibung drin!“

I wonder where she got “Schreibung” from, since that’s not a German word, to the best of my knowledge; I imagine it’s a morpheme-by-morpheme translation of “writing” (as in “it’s got writing in it”).

Fun stuff!

For doing two things simultaneously, Amy used to borrow an expression from German into her English: she'd say, for example, "I want to watch television by eating" (= while eating), based apparently on German "Ich möchte beim Essen Fernsehen gucken" (I want by/at-the eating television to-watch). I'd usually repeat the sentence using "while", making ( Read more... )

Heard from Amy today, "I am later again there".

This probably makes next to no sense for those who don't know both German and Amyish.

It means, in fact, ( My hovercraft is full of eels )