The Many Names of Berlin

Having a native German speaker for four days was a great boon to our growing collection of German (and German-language) oddities. Let's start with a brief quiz about the nicknames that Berliners give certain icons in their city. Consider the following pictures:

Please identify the following landmarks.

___ The Fat Hen

___ The Pregnant Oyster

___ The Washing Machine

___ The Pope's Revenge

___ Barad-Dur

(Answers at the bottom.)

There's no potential for beating around the bush when discussing birth control pills here. According to an ad I saw on a subway (recruiting participants for a clinical investigation), the pill is called the Antibabypille. Wonder what it does?

In English, we occasionally refer to underwater basket weaving as a useless activity to pass time (for example, if you need one more class in college but you don't want to do any work). The equally useless and time-wasting activity in Germany is Teebeutelweitwerfen--tea bag throwing. (Literally, it's tea bag distance throwing, which I think adds a certain elegance to the task.) A similar word for a mindless task that requires no qualifications is a Dünnbrettborer--a person who drills holes in a thin board. Which may be how I can find employment in a few years.

I saw a vending machine in an S-Bahn station with a sticker on the side advertising the "Maybe Baby" pregnancy test. Turn out, it wasn't just a regular ad, but the product was actually in the vending machine. Right between the Twix and a pack of Antibabypille. (Just kidding about the pills in the vending machine. Though it's funny, one can't buy even ibuprofen without consulting a pharmacist here, but you can snag a pregnancy test from the vending machine!)

Speaking of crazy vending machines, we spotted this on our way to dinner last Saturday. It's a good thing the promised dinner was excellent, else I would have spent far too many euros on this cookie monster.

After our tour of the Reichstag building on Saturday morning, we walked out of the security building to find the reminder that in front of the capitol building, grilling is forbidden. Don't even try it.

Lastly, I saw my favorite word (currently Sparschwein) in a new form: die Sparschweinerei. Now the -ei ending usually indicates a place where things are made/sold; for example, Fleisch (meat) with the -ei becomes Fleischerei, a butchery. So what is a Sparschweinerei? I'm not sure, but I hope it's a Factory for the Pigs of Salvation (or piggy banks). Especially for the types that we saw (and sadly didn't photograph) in Monschau called "Kapitelistenschwein." Priceless.

Answers:

E. The Fat Hen is the national symbol for Germany. Apparently drawn by politcal cartoonists a little skinnier depending on the state of the budget.

C. The Pregnant Oyster is actually a building donated to Germany by the USA in 1957, and where JFK spoke in '63. It's currently a center for European contemporary art, following the collapse of the roof in 1980.

B. The Chancellory, where Angela Merkel (currently) works and has a small residence, looks much like a washing machine from the side.

A. The television tower, built between 1965 and 1969, has a globe that reflects light across the sky, including across the Wall to East Berlin when it was separate. Why, then, the Pope's revenge? Owing to the flatness of each individual mirror, The sphere reflects light in the shape of a cross wherever you look. I hear the East Berlin officials weren't terribly happy with that.

D. Okay, it's not really Mordor. It's the world's fourth largest carillon, built to commemorate the 750 year anniversary of Berlin. Not as old as Aachen, but a bit older than Mordor.

Fills like Fall for Rill

It's starting to get chilly over here at the Meldrumhaus, and there's no getting around it: it fills like fall for rill. (This silly spelling is based on the accent often used in the Intermountain West region of the United States and translates roughly as "it feels like fall for real.")

While we're sad to leave the (obnoxiously rainy) summer months behind, the clear, blue days are really beautiful, and it's nice to sit down to a mug of tea in the evenings. Also, we've been thinking about the really cold weather to come. I've acquired my first real winter coat in over five years, Sara has some new waterproof shoes, and we're going to Paris and Brussels with my brother, Jaren, the week before Christmas. It's pretty exciting.

A couple of visual indicators of this transformation in Aachen. The tree outside our house is changing colors:


There are beautiful pumpkins and other gourds at the store:


And the Weckmänner are here:


These last guys are pretty interesting. I saw them for the first time about a week ago walking by our local (and currently favorite) bakery, Moss; turns out they're all over town now. They're made of a slightly sweet dough with two raisins for eyes and a sugar cube navel (other varieties exist that don't use sugar cubes), and they hold pipes made of clay. As best as we can tell, they're the symbol for Saint Martin's Day (November 11). Saint Martin was a kind soldier who lived in the 4th century AD. Once, while walking/riding around, he saw a beggar in the cold. Being so benevolent, St. Martin took out a knife and cut his cloak in two and gave half to the beggar. (He kept half so he himself wouldn't die in the cold, apparently.) To honor Martin's generosity, on the 10th children will make little paper lanterns and then the following day will go around in a parade where they will be rewarded with candy and other small treats, including Weckmänner. I don't really know how the Weckmänner came to be the symbol for this festival, but they are pretty good! (Sadly, we'll be traveling by train to Berlin on St. Martin's Day, so we may not have much by way of pictures to post this year. Hopefully we'll see something in Berlin and can photograph and report.)

As we learn more and more German, we find more and more to share with you. This time I have some stories relating to the culture of addressing people, both formally with "Sie" and informally with "du." Lots of languages have two forms of address, including Spanish, Lithuanian, and, formerly, English (you and thou were formal and informal, respectively). The culture of when to address people formally and when informally varies quite a bit within the languages. For example, in (Argentine) Spanish, people almost exclusively use "vos" (informal) unless addressing a much older complete stranger. In Lithuanian, I use "Jūs" (formal) with people I don't know and people who are older than me, but otherwise it's usually "tu" (informal). While I anticipated some level of formality in German, it turns out to be more austere than I expected. For example, at a recent conference in Bonn, it came up that I address the professor with whom I work by his first name. The German graduate students I was speaking with were stunned. "You... you say, 'Bernhard' and not 'Professor Blümich?'" They just couldn't understand that level of informality with a professor, someone who commands respect. They told me that they always use "Sie" with their professors, who use it with them in return, and that often even professors address each other with the formal "Sie" and use last names, rather than first names.

Sara had two interesting stories relating to using "Sie" and "du." A few weeks ago, she was auditioning for the Aachen Bach choir. During the audition, the director and Sara used "Sie," since they didn't know one another. After the audition, the director (unsurprisingly) liked Sara's singing and invited her to join the choir if she wished. He very politely and formally asked, "Oh, one thing. In the choir we use first names and 'du.' Is that okay with you?" Such a ritual, a definite event, to define how choir members should address one another!

A similar process took place last Saturday where Sara, looking for opportunities to work in any library, volunteered for a "Freiwilling für Aachen" (a city-wide volunteer day) event in a church-community center near us. The director asked the three volunteers to introduce themselves, each of whom talked for approximately five minutes, recounting lots of personal details like loss of employment and divorce. (Sara gave her standard, three-German-sentences introduction.) After introductions, another volunteer suggested that, to keep things easy for Sara, they should use first names rather than "Frau So-and-so." The volunteers agreed, but the director then asked, "Well, if we're using first names, should we use 'du,' too?" They all consented and, after the ritual of establishing "du-ism," the work commenced. Interestingly, when another volunteer showed up after the work had begun, the director quickly pulled her aside to introduce the protocol: "We're using first names, and we're using 'du.'" Pretty crazy how defined the "du"/"Sie" relationships are!

I was thinking about a Lithuanian verb "tujinti," which means to address someone with the informal form "tu." I thought that surely German has an equivalent, though we hadn't heard it yet. Sure enough, "duzen" and "siezen" mean "to address someone with 'du'" and "to address someone with 'Sie,'" respectively. German precision at its finest.

Kirchen, Kornelimünster, and the Fleischwolf

Upon our (wet and cold) return to Aachen from Greece, Sara and I were both a little in the post-vacation-in-one-of-the-most-beautiful-places-in-the-world doldrums. However, our city of Aachen was quick to lift our spirits and remind us that we really do like living in Germany. First was the Nacht der Offenen Kirchen--the Night of the Open Churches. Many of the churches in the city opened their doors to all visitors from about 6 pm until midnight with free tours, concerts, and people explaining more about church. I think that's a pretty clever idea for such a secular society. It was pretty cool because Sara sang in her first choir concert since she left the San Francisco Symphony Chorus in June. Figuralchor Aachen, Sara's new vocal ensemble here, is a group of about 20 people that sing a cappella music, and that quite well. Their concert was about 40 minutes long and included works by Byrd, Kodály, and Holst, among others. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to catch any video of the singing as I was in the center of the church right in front of others, and I didn't want to obstruct their view. However, the music was good and the evening was enjoyable, if a little (and, at times, a lot) rainy.

After the concert, Sara and I took advantage of the open church night to check out the Dom, the central cathedral in Aachen. (We'd been there once before, as you may recall.) It was far more spectacular this time. They had completed (or at least temporarily suspended for the exhibition) the renovations on the second floor. That meant that, while we couldn't go to the second floor, we could see all of the mosaics and murals above us, together with the organ. It was gorgeous and quite sparkly--so much gold tiling! Again, no pictures (we weren't sure if they were allowed or not), but we'll do a real tour soon and then you'll see it up close and personal! Speaking of up close, we also got to see the chests/arks/things in which Charlemagne's remains are kept. There were phenomenally ornate and quite beautiful--and they looked heavy! Also, the weirdest thing we saw was a podium or lectern cast in metal with three lions making the support on the ground, a large eagle facing an audience, and, attached to the eagle's back and making the place where the book would be placed for the reader, a large bat. Again, you'll need to see the pictures to understand, but it was crazy. And pretty cool. Like Aachen.

The day after the Nacht der Offenen Kirchen, Aachen hosted another festival: the Kunst und Kulinaria (Art and Culinary) festival in the piece of Aachen known as Kornelimünster, about 45 minutes by bus from us, and just a few minutes by the same bus from our church. The festival itself was nice--a little pricey, but full of cute crafts and delicious food. (Notable foods include the Zwiebelkuchen--an onion tart--with onions, egg, rosemary, and some apple slices that was really good, and some fancy jams. Fancy as in Raspberry-Rhubarb and Blackberry-Apple-Cinnamon. So good.) Perhaps more notable than the festival was the town itself. Take a look!








After looking around, I remarked to Sara, "I think we just found the Marin County of Aachen!"

Also in Kornelimünster, we noticed an advertisement for an event the previous night (thus, one in conflict with Sara's concert) that was some live rock music performed, apparently, by Charlemagne:

We're pretty bummed we missed that one.

One more crazy thing we discovered in Kornelimünster: pay toilets. Now, we've seen these before, but we hadn't yet used them. Since we were pretty tired still from the lack of sleep on Thursday night and the long day of travel on Friday, Tyler had consumed about 2 liters of Cucasaft (our word for Coke--taken from a spin on "Coke juice"), leading to his need to pay 50 cents to use the bathroom. It was 50 cents so well spent that Sara did it too. Here's the bathroom itself:


You pay your money (no change provided, though), and the door slides open automatically. The toilet itself doesn't have a drain, as shown here:


So what you do is, well, what one normally does in a bathroom. Then, when you leave, the toilet tips into the wall floor (after careful review, the geometry indicated that tipping into the wall is impossible), dumping the contents in a sanitary and environmentally-friendly place, and the whole bathroom is cleaned and sanitized (desinfiziert, they say). It's even left a little wet after the cleaning, so you know it was done right. So crazy! An outhouse that is sanitized after every use! Of course, Sara and I are most perplexed by how they keep the toilet paper dry during cleaning. Hmm....


One more tidbit. As part of Tyler's continual quest to find crazy German words, a new entry from the weekly advertisements has come through. In German, das Fleisch is meat and der Wolf is, naturally, wolf. So, what would one expect from combining the two into der Fleischwolf? The meat-eating wolf? A wolf sculpted from meat? No no, it's much more simple:

Der Fleischwolf is a meat grinder! Who knew. Pigs that save and wolves that grind your beef. What's not to love about German?

Tyler's Quick-and-Easy Guide to Speaking German Incorrectly

If you've spoken on the Skype with us in the past few days, you probably know that, linguistically, we feel like we're about three years old. Maybe three-and-a-half. Though the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation very generously paid for two months of German courses for both of us, and though we generally understand German well (both spoken and written), we're still slow at it and can't say much beyond what we want for dinner. (You're not surprised that we do well with food, are you?)

You may be wondering how a super genius like Sara and a moderately intelligent Tyler can struggle so much with communication? Of course, primarily it's that we've been here only 83 days. However, to make the case even more, here are Ten Things I Hate-or-Find-Mildly-Amusing About You, German Language, from the eyes of a Linguistic Three-Year-Old. (Warning: there is a fair bit of grammar in this post. If you want, you can just read the words in bold, then leave a comment that uses the word "Sparschwein" and I'll think that you read the whole thing in great detail.)

1. Your nouns have three genders. In English, when we talk about a book, a city, or a dog, their articles are all treated equally: "a" or "the." Not so in German. They like to have some nouns that are masculine ("der Hund"--the dog), some that are feminine ("die Stadt"--the city), and some that are even neuter ("das Buch"--the book). Now, that by itself wouldn't be so bad, but it's ridiculous when coupled with...

2. The gender of your nouns is often assigned arbitrarily. For example, while it's logical that a man is a masculine noun (der Mann) and a woman is feminine (die Frau), would you believe that a girl is neuter (das Mädchen)? Also, can someone tell me why country and city are neuter and feminine, respectively? ("Das Land" and "die Stadt.") Some rules would be appreciated. (To be fair, there are a few rules, like -e nouns are usually feminine, -chen nouns are always neuter (see "das Mädchen"), and -ung nouns are always feminine, but it just doesn't cut it in all cases, and Sara and I are often asking each other, "Das Hund? Die Hund? Der Hund? Wie heißt das?")

3. Your numbers are all backwards. While in English we say "twenty-three", German uses the form "three-and-twenty." Also, the twenty-first of September is the "one-and-twentieth of September." We're actually getting pretty good at this one, and laugh when people at grocery stores (or, let's be honest, pastry shops) try to speak in English to us foreigners and tell us that our EUR 2.95 bill comes to two euros and fifty-nine cents.

4. Your adjectives are crazy. In English, blue is blue and big is big and they never really change. In German, the adjectives change to match the gender of the noun AND the position of the adjective with respect to the noun and the article. If that's confusing to you, take heart! It's kills us, too. That's why I can't write more about it. (Sara gets it okay, I think. Maybe she can chime in.)

Die Sparschwein? Der Sparschwein? Sara, wie heißt das?* 

5. You have crazy (and sometimes pretty cool) compound words. Germans love to smash words together to make new, really long words with new meanings. Take "Arm" (arm) and "Band" (band) and smash them together and you get "Armband" (armband). Take "Uhr" (clock) and throw it on there and you get "Armbanduhr", wristwatch. To that you can add "Zeiger" (hand or pointer) and get "Armbanduhrzeiger", the hand on a wristwatch. And so on. It's not too hard, actually, and it's pretty fun. Our current favorite is a word I found in the ads the other day--Sparschwein. The verb "sparen" means to save (as in money) and "Schwein" is a pig, so "Sparschwein" is a saving pig--a piggy bank! I like to think of it more religiously, though: the pig that saves.

6. You do weird things when it comes to possessive articles. Take for example the simple word "his." His book, his story, his hair--all "his". Of course, in English we have also "hers" and "its", mimicking the gender structure of German (masculine, feminine, and neuter). However, in German the possessive article not only depends on the gender of the possessor, but also on that of the possessee. So, while "his book" and "her book" are "sein Buch" and "ihr Buch", respectively, "his coin" and "her coin" are "seine Münze" and "ihre Münze", respectively. (Notice the addition of the "e" on the end.) This gets particularly messy when you throw in...

7. You have cases. Okay, my background in Lithuanian led me to completely overlook this particular point of grammar, but it is difficult. Take the English sentences:

I throw the dog to him.

He throws the dog to me.

I throw him to the dog.

The dog throws me to him.

Each of those has a subject (the person doing the throwing), a direct object (the thing being thrown), and an indirect object (the person to whom the direct object is being thrown). In German (and Lithuanian), each of those grammatical roles, subject, direct object, and indirect object, requires a different case, meaning that the noun changes for each role. (More precisely, in German the descriptors that surround the noun, like articles and adjectives, change. In contrast, Lithuanian nouns themselves change in different cases.) So, our four original sentences are, in German:

Ich werfe ihm den Hund.

Er wirft mir den Hund.

Ich werfe ihn dem Hund.

Der Hund wirft ihm mich.

It's all very simple, really.

8. You are completely ridiculous with your plurals. There are about 117 ways of making a singular noun plural, and there is really no way to guess. "Stadt" becomes "Städte", "Buch" becomes "Bücher", and "Hund" becomes "Hunde." Sometimes you get an umlaut (z.B., "ü"), sometimes you get an "e," and sometimes you get an "s." But use like Forrest Gump taught us, you never know what you're going to get.

9. Your prepositions act strangely. Sometimes when you're doing something, like getting a pizza to go, you need a preposition, "zu." (That's mitzunehmen, by the way.) Sometimes you don't. But we don't know quite when. There are also prepositions that mean either a location or a movement, depending on the case of the noun that follows. And sometimes prepositions are indistinguishable from verb prefixes, so you get a giant mix of crazy, three-letter words that all get strung together to mean something. Usually it means that I'm about to use a crazy mix of four-letter words.

10. Your verbs get crazy with prefixes. Lots of people told us that German was weird because the verb comes at the end of the sentence. That's not really true, and it's not hard to deal with. (Note: in sentences with multiple verbs, one will usually come at the end, and it can be a little tricky, but it's not too bad overall. Think about "I'd like you to leave." "To leave" comes at the end and it's perfectly understandable and relatively easy.) The hard part is verbs with prefixes. For example, "einwerfen" (to throw in), used often when talking about people "throwing ads" into the mailboxes. Or "mitarbeiten", to work together. When those verbs are used in a sentence, for example "I throw the mail in the box" or "Let's work together!", the prefix comes off and goes at the end, producing "Ich werfe ein" and "Arbeiten wir mit!" Often it's not too terrible, since "werfen" and "einwerfen" are pretty close in meaning, as are "arbeiten" and "mitarbeiten". However, sometimes it's a real pain. For example, "nehmen" means to take, and "teilnehmen" means to share. So imagine you hear a mother telling her older daughter to share the toy with her brother. You'd hear, "Nimmt das Spielzeug mit deinem Bruder teil." (Or something like that.) Until the last syllable, you're thinking, "Take that toy with your brother... huh? what?". Then the last word "teil" comes and you realize that it's a totally different sentence. So you go back to the beginning, "'SHARE the toy with your brother!' It's so clear now." At which point you're three sentences behind in your conversation.


All that said, we really like the language. It has plenty of ways to play around and to be expressive in ways that one can't in English, and it sounds pretty cool. For example, "city hall" is kind of boring, but "das Rathaus?" Now there's the place I want my municipal government to work. Hopefully, by the time you read this we'll already be speaking much better and will be exceptional, English AND German (and Spanish and Lithuanian) speaking tour guides for your visit!

*It's actually "das Sparschwein." Sara was asleep, so I looked it up.