Thursday, January 23, 2014

Otterwechsel

We were talking about the verbs "wechseln" and "tauschen" (both more or less mean a variation of "to change/exchange/swap") here in the comments on one of my "language ragbag" posts; that led to the amusing German word "Otterwechsel" – that's equivalent to "otters crossing" (as in, look out for otters, because this is a place where they're likely to be changing sides of the road). But what's delightful about it is that it sounds like it could mean a place for exchanging otters – an otter swap!

Anyway, here's a picture:


(The same word-forming pattern applies to other animals, like "Wildwechsel" (deer crossing) or "Froschwechsel" (frogs crossing) – because, yes, Germany is a country so devoid of large wild animals that people actually take the time to worry about how, where and when frogs cross the road.)

Not a Guitar, Not a Double Bass

Coming out of the subway station at Alexanderplatz today, there was a guy ahead of me with a cello case on his back. Smack dab in the middle of the case was a big sticker that read, "Das ist ein Cello" ("This is a cello"). Above that, nearly as big, "Nein, keine Gitarre, auch kein Kontrabass" ("No, not a guitar, not a double bass either").

Rock on, dude. Easy to guess which dumb questions he gets asked over and over!

Friday, January 17, 2014

The Schornsteinfeger Cometh

This morning was the annual maintenance visit from the chimney sweep.

Yes, the chimney sweep. Sometimes, in Germany, there are these little moments where I wonder just what century I'm living in!

Every building is required (by law, I think; and in fact by old-timey, convoluted laws, because this is one of those super old professions governed by all kinds of quirky traditions and rules) to pay the chimney sweep once a year to come and check in on things.

In buildings that still have functioning chimneys, I assume part of the chimney sweep's work involves cleaning those, but in modernized buildings like mine, what he does instead is inspect the gas heater. Incidentally, this is a task that's also done by the guy from the heating and gas company, who's also required to come once a year. Hoo boy, that German efficiency you always hear about? It's dead. There's more than enough German bureaucracy to go around, but believe me, bureaucracy is not the same as efficiency.

Anyway, once a year the chimney sweep shows up in his traditional black garb and jaunty little black cap, at some ridiculously early hour of the morning, and cheerfully totes all his gadgets and equipment into my apartment. It's always the same guy (again, if I understood right, there's actually a law that assigns chimney sweeps each a specific bit of the city, and forbids them poaching one another's territory!) In fact, I think this picture I posted three winters ago, of a chimney sweep on the roof of the building opposite, is him, too. He's very nice about explaining what he's doing and answering my curious-foreigner questions!

First he started by opening a little flap in the wall near my (modern, gas, no longer connected to a chimney) kitchen stove and shoveling out the soot and debris that had collected there over the course of the year. I asked him why there's soot in there, given that the chimney hasn't been used in years (I live in a typical Berlin "Altbau," a turn-of-the-twentieth-century six-story apartment building, but one that was completely renovated after the fall of the Wall) and he said that over time, damp air shakes loose a bit more the soot stuck to the inside of the chimney. It must be true, because there's always that bit of soot when he opens the flap!

Once he was done being all anachronistic, with his little black cap and his bucket and spade for mucking out the chimney, he opened up his toolkit and whipped out his modern measuring instruments and turned his attention to my apartment's actual heater, to measure carbon monoxide and things. All in all, it only took a couple minutes, and then he jauntily packed up his things and cheerily headed back out the door. I wonder if all chimney sweeps are that happy? It seems to speak well for the profession!

Thursday, January 9, 2014

...to Screw in a Lightbulb?

Ohhh. So, one of the overhead light bulbs in the office just blew, so one of my colleagues got up on a stepladder to try to wrestle apart the light fixture (pretty, arty, but not very convenient when you need to actually get in there and change a bulb) and the rest of us hovered around, stabilizing the stepladder, handing things up to him, giving unhelpful advice, etc.

The whole thing looked very silly (there were four of us, to change a single bulb) and I was tempted to try to make a "How many translators does it take to screw in a light bulb?" joke, at which point I learned that apparently the rest of the world doesn't have light bulb jokes! (The colleagues are French and German.) Sad. I sort of tried to explain the concept, and looked up some examples online, and my colleague kind of got it, but a joke's just not the same once you've had to explain it.

"Why light bulbs specifically?" he asked.

I don't really know – maybe because it's such a simple, mundane task that should be eminently doable by one person, so it lends itself well to being distorted in various humorous directions?

Anyway:

How many translators does it take to screw in a lightbulb?

Four: one to replace the bulb and three to research the relevant cultural context in the target language! :-)

Tuesday, January 7, 2014

Justin E. H. Smith on the Philosophy of Immigration

This is a smart and thoughtful piece that looks at some of the underlying thought patterns (and historical patterns) that fuel Europeans' mistrust of immigrants, this attitude that the arrival of immigrants spells the beginning of the end for all that the locals hold dear:

"Does Immigration Mean 'France Is Over'? by Justin E. H. Smith

An excerpt:

"But like the celebrated tomato and so many other staples of various European cuisines, European cultural identity too is a product of longstanding networks of global exchange. These networks have tended to function for the enrichment of Europe and to the detriment of the rest of the world for the past several centuries, and it is this imbalance that in large part explains current patterns of immigration. Europe has never been self-contained[...]"

The piece is specifically about France, but almost everything here (aside from the extensive colonial past) applies to Germany as well. (Although my experience differs from Smith's in that, in Germany, even for Americans, a visit to the immigration office never, never, never feels "more like a welcome ceremony"! However, I'm entirely sure I'm still treated a whole heck of a lot better there than someone from Africa is.)

Indeed, Smith also highlights the distinction Europeans draw between "immigrants" on the one hand and "expatriates" on the other – as he delightfully puts it, expats are people who are "here for voluntary and probably frivolous reasons, rather than out of economic necessity or fear for my own survival or freedom."As an expat myself, I can only nod along – and then wonder why on Earth frivolous, fun reasons should be considered more valid than reasons of survival, necessity and freedom.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Also, speaking of Europe, this map visualizing Europe's languages, and how close or far from one another they are in terms of vocabulary, is awesome!

Lexical Distance Among the Languages of Europe