German/Linguistic Lols
Hallo :) I'm Armand, a 3rd year German major with a linguistics minor. This semester I'm taking German-English Contrastive Grammar, the professor for which is Dr Born. She's this older (quite round) German woman whose voice is continually hoarse from years of smoking. About 90% of my notes from her class are just things that she's said, and not relevant to the material. Even though I'm doing study abroad next year, I'm jealous of my friends who will be taking another one of her classes.
First day of class:
- So many of you! And so early! Don't any of you have something better to do than contrastive grammar?
On seeing that the majority of us showed up:
- My first class--my language class--was halved. But you're linguists! I'm proud of you!"
On proper pronunciation of German vowels:
- Don't drop your chin. As soon as you do, you sound Swabian and you don't want that.
- You can chew gum and pronounce English vowels. Not so much in German
On words:
- (on the specific meaning of the German word "Begierde") Guys that watch pornography have that sort of thing
- Learn the noun plurals. Just memorize the damn things!
- Gender in German makes no sense. It's completely arbitrary. Like this *takes out keys* the word for key in German is... *looks at key a moment* Well, I guess I could sort of see why that would be masculine
On regional differences:
- My mother was a Northern German, my father was a Southern German, and in those days you weren't supposed to interbreed...
- You could be ignorant as long as you have a Northern German accent. It's still better than an intelligent Bavarian
Conversations:
*writing on the board: I-pad*
-- (student) No, with a capital P
*changes it to I-Pad*
-- (another student) Little I
*changes it to i-Pad*
-- (yet another person) One word, not two
*changes it to iPad* iPad? That is perverse...
--Dr Born, what's your email?
- rborn@(school email).
--rborn?
-yes. rborn. *does the uvular trill* born.
-- (me) ...but what if i don't have a *does alveolar trill* key?
--(me, eating a blue lolly)
- *strange look* Oh, God. That is awful! You look like one of those Chinese dogs. What are they, with the blue tongue?
a Chow Chow. That's it. You look like a Chow Chow.
-- (later, still eating my blue lolly)
- God, put that thing up! That's just awful!Other:
- German didn't have the Battle of Hastings and didn't get all that romance shoved down its throat"
- I'm so phonetic I can't spell anymore!
- If you go to Quebec...you know, in Canada..
- *looking at iPad, still written on the board* So that's how you spell iPad...
- The book has a complicated treatment that I think is completely crazy
- I hated grammar when I was learning languages, and here I am, a linguist!
- The Amish have no high schools. That's when you start questioning things.
- (no one knew quite what hail is) You southerners, you don't know about weather!