Exported words
March 5, 2010
In England or the US, many children attend a kindergarten. Psychiatrists refer to angst or gestalt. We often refer to something tasteless as "kitschy" and something that is broken is kaputt. What all these English words have in common is that they come from German.
And German words have traveled far beyond English-speaking countries and made their way into a wide variety of other languages.
"It's an interesting phenomenon, to see how far these words spread, how many languages use them," said Rolf Peter, head of projects at the German Language Council.
People use words from other languages because they do not always have the word to describe a particular concept, he added. But that's not the only reason.
According to Martin Haspelmath, senior linguist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, major central European languages borrowed many words from German partly due to Germany's prestigious image in the 18th and 19th centuries.
"Germany in the 19th century was at the top of the world and everyone looked up to Germany in the sciences, technology and humanities," he said.
Rise of German prestige
The Czech Republic, Haspelmath said, was a traditionally German-speaking area, with Franz Kafka the most well known German-speaking writer born and raised in Prague.
"These are countries where the ruling class was traditionally German," he said. In Russia, he added, "it was exclusively the prestige of the German culture" that brought over vocabulary from the German language.
Eighteenth- and 19th-century Russians were often bilingual and many studied in Europe. Subsequent generations traveled frequently to Germany, bringing back German culture and vocabulary. Russian royalty was often of German descent, such as Prussian-born Catherine the Great who reigned in Russia from 1762 to 1796.
In her book "Ausgewanderte Woerter" ("Migrated Words"), Jutta Limbach from the German Language Council said there are many German words used in Russian today, though not always with the same meaning as in German.
"Schlagbaum" means barrier or tollgate in both Russian and German. But "Anschlag," an old-fashioned German word referring to a placard, came to mean a successfully sold-out theater performance in Russian.
German influence beyond Europe
The prestige of German culture in the 18th and 19th centuries extended beyond eastern Europe, Haspelmath added. In the 1860's, the Japanese modeled both their university and healthcare systems on those of Germany and many of Japan's aspiring doctors traveled to Germany to study medicine. This connection may have resulted in the Japanese word "noiroze," a derivation of the German "Neurose" (neurosis).
Other examples from Limbach's book include the German word "Organ" (organ) as "orugoru" in Japanese or "arubeito" from the German "Arbeit" (work).
The University of Leipzig, Haspelmath said, was an uncontested leader in linguistics around the turn of the 19th century and garnered a lot of prestige. Later, in the 1920's and 1930's, intellectuals were attracted to Germany, in part because of the many Nobel Prizes that were won by Germans during that time: Albert Einstein (1921), Thomas Mann (1929), Carl Bosch (1931), to name a few.
It was Germany's high international standing that brought a few German words into the Hebrew language, including "Schalter" (switch), "Biss" (bite) and "Schluck" (sip), as well as more technical terms like "Pachtel" (trowel) and "Beton" (concrete).
Found in translation
In some cases, German words weren't transferred literally into the language, but were translated. The Hebrew word for newspaper, "iton," comes from another word for time, similar to "Zeitung" in German, Haspelmath said. The Hebrew term "gan yeladim" is an exact translation of the German term "Kindergarten," a garden of children.
"The Hebrew language was modernized in the 1920's and 30's and many people in Jewish Palestine were of a German background, or they were eastern Europeans who culturally took German as a model," Haspelmath said.
All of that was changed by the Holocaust. "After 1945, German was not a language you were proud of," he said.
German words also traveled to present-day Tanzania, a former German colony. In the 19th century, the Germans did not impose their language as an administrative language as many other European colonizing countries did, so Swahili imported only a few German words.
One exception is the Swahili word "shule" (school), which Haspelmath said was "a sign of the fact that in the 1880s, administrators came and told colonials that they had to go to a Schule."
Concepts unique to the German language
According to Peter, certain peculiarities of the German language may also make it easier for certain words to transfer to other tongues.
"In German you can combine words, you can create words that describe very specific things," Peter said.
Thus words of very specific emotional character or specific concepts that do not exist in other tongues, like "Gemuetlichkeit" (roughly, coziness), "Sehnsucht" (longing) or Heimat (home), are used in many languages.
Every language is enriched by the words it integrates, Peter said. "With more contact of people and economic relationships, the more contact the languages have, so the exchange of words, I think, grows," he added.
"The idea was to make visible that languages are not static, in the process of developing they need the exchange of other languages," Peter said.
Author: Alina Dain
Editor: Kate Bowen