Den guten Salamanderschuh! *

[sanspoof]

Maybe this says more about me than about the languages involved, but I don't think any of these german examples is particularly inelegant or ugly. Jeez, it's sensical (uh, generally) and as my old teacher used to say, 'so logisch

Comments

[pixelfish]

John and I are taking a German class and we delight in learning the big words, although as our German teacher pointed out, the big words are just a lot of little words sammidged together.

Favourites so far:

+ Massenvernichtungswaffen (weapons of mass destruction)

+ Uberrachshungablenkungsmanover (surprise inspection)

+ Strahvolzugsbeamte (prison guard)

(I probably misspelled those, but thems is some of our favourite. We found uberrachshungablenkungsmanover in Der Kadet, the German version of Bujold's The Warrior's Apprentice.)

I love the German habit of making compound words. This means that about a third of the time when John and I pull together a word out of the vocabulary we DO know, it has a chance of actually being right.

[sanspoof]

I'm still sad I didn't see any hilariously long streetsigns. I guess I wasn't in the right place. SIGH.

I do have a picture of a german don't-throw-tampons-in-the-toilet warning though for you. I'll get to it sooner or later.

[pixelfish]

*bounces up and down*

Ooooo...can't wait to see that. :)

[swinehund]

Come on. You can't deny that 'Mannschaft' is at least amusing.

[sanspoof]

Oh, sure. I was more being snooty about the 'beautiful language' stuff.

[diaryarena]

yeah people who complain about agglomerative languages sort of ... i dunno it's just another way of doing things that can have its own elegance and beauty.

i cannot STAND listening to music when there's a white-noise source, it "detunes".

[diaryarena]

apparently i am now one of those people who doesn't use capital letters? dang

[sanspoof]

You're Allowed.

[sanspoof]

Maybe this is a universal truth. That would be much cooler than most universal truths.