Word of the Month: Buchschmuck

We know by now that a Buch is a book. Schmuck means "jewelry", both the precious stuff you possess and the stuff you use to accessorize your person. The Schmuck in Buchschmuck is of the second kind: It's the sum of the graphical elements that have been added to a book's pages to enhance the status of the book as an artifact—the decoration of the title page; the special treatment of the first letters of a chapter etc. These features are not to be confused with illustrations intended to support the text—they have a practical purpose, Buchschmuck has not, in the narrow sense. It does not contribute to our understanding of the text, but it may contribute significantly to our enjoyment of the book as an object—it makes it more precious. I show, as an example, on the left the title pages of the edition of the Grimms' fairy tales that motivated me, in second grade, to teach myself the old-fashioned font called Fraktur in German.

I must confess that I have not seen the term Buchschmuck used in a long time. It sounds old-fashioned, harking back to a time when books were objects that could be considered precious. Are these days gone? Or, to put it differently, could eBooks have Buchschmuck? More generally, could they become carefully-crafted objects to be appreciated as such? I see no reason, in principle, why they couldn't.

Wagner Heralds the Arrival of May

If April is the cruellest month, May is the loveliest, at least for those who— like my wife and I—were born in it. This is how Siegmund rapturously celebrates its onset (and his re-unification with his twin sister, Sieglinde) in the first act of Die Walküre (The Valkyrie), the second opera in Wagner's Ring Cycle:

Winterstürme wichen dem Wonnemond.
In mildem Lichte leuchtet der Lenz...

Winter storms gave way to the Month of Joy.
Spring glows in a soft light...

The link I'm giving above is to a concert version—I didn't like the staged versions I found on YouTube because I did not like the staging (or the tenor's knödeln—seeming to press and sing through his nose). Instead, I show below part of the panel depicting the scene in P. Craig Russell's graphic retelling of the opera.


[Source: P. Craig Russell, The Ring of the Nibelung, Volume One, 2002. © P. Craig Russell. Used by permission]

Word of the Month: Die Kampfsau, das Kampfschwein

Just in time for the beginning of the most exciting phase of the soccer year in Europe—The final stages of the Champions League and European League competitions:

Kampf means "fight," a Sau is a sow and a Schwein a pig. Kampfsau and Kampfschwein are terms used in sports, particularly soccer, where they are applied to players who may be technically limited, but more than make up for it by their unflagging fighting spirit, by the abandon with which they risk, not life, but certainly limbs, fighting for the ball and tackling players on the opposing team. And if their jersey is not the dirtiest at the end of the match, they know they haven’t given it their best effort.

Calling someone a Sau or a Schwein in German is an insult, and a relatively bad one. But in combination with Kampf, these words turn into compliments: Kampfsäue and Kampfschweine (those are the the plurals) tend to be fan favorites.

I wonder how speakers of languages that avoid consonant clusters will deal with Kampfschwein, which requires one to enunciate 5 consonants in a row: m • p • f • sch (same as English "sh") • w.

[Source: Wild Things in the German Language: Kindle/paperback version | iBooks version]

Word of the Month: Torschlusspanik

I was reminded of this word when Kathleen Kiesel Cozzarelli sent me an e-mail inquiry about it, and it is a very useful word indeed. Tor means "gate" (or, in soccer, "goal"); Schluss can mean many things—in the present Word of the Month, it stands for "closing"; and Panik is the same as English "panic". In combination, they refer to the intense anxiety one feels when a decision has to be made before an approaching deadline, but none of the available options looks in any way promising. The term is also used to explain why a hasty decision was made under these circumstances.

Back in the days when women were supposed to get married, Torschlusspanik was regularly used to explain why a woman who was fast approaching middle age would marry someone below her status. Times have changed, and for the better in this case. For decades, I haven't heard the term applied to women marrying later in life. But it's used regularly in other situations, for example, when just before the end of the annual trading period for players, a soccer team that needs to improve at certain positions acquires players who may not be particularly skilled at these positions, or are past their prime, but were the only ones still available.

Three Literary Parodies and an Homage

I've finally found the time to collect, in one place, the literary "finger exercises" occasioned by the MOOC (massive open online course) "Fantasy and Science Fiction: The Human Mind, Our Modern World" I took in the summer of 2012. The course was taught by Prof. Rabkin of the University of Michigan. COURSERA provided the supporting software and infrastructure.

Three Parodies and an Homage

People who do not have first-hand experience with a COURSERA-based course may not get the insider jokes in the Alice piece. But the rest does not rely on such knowledge—you just have to know the literary piece being skewered/paid homage to.

Word of the Month: Pleitegeier

Pleite means "bankrupt" as an adjective and "bankruptcy" as a noun. A Geier is a vulture. In combination, they may denote a person who has gone bankrupt or the precarious financial situation an enterprise finds itself in, like in the sentence, "Der Pleitegeier sitzt auf dem Dach." (The Pleitegeier is sitting on the roof.)

The term derives from Yiddish plejte gejer—"bankrupt goer," i.e., someone who went bankrupt. Folk etymology turned the gejer into a Geier. [Sick 2012]


[Source: Wild Things in the German Language: Kindle/paperback version | iBooks version]

How to Pronounce German "ch"

There is quite a bit of misinformation out there on the web when it comes to the way German speakers pronounce "ch," a digraph (pair of letters representing a single sound) that appears very frequently in German words. So, let me set the record straight.

"ch" poses a particular problem for English speakers. For starters, its pronunciation changes depending on the preceding letter or, if it appears at the beginning of a word, on the following letter or other circumstances (see below). To make things worse, the resulting sound has, in the most common cases, no English equivalent.

After “i,” “e,” “ä,” “ü,” “ö,” “ei,” “ai,” “eu,” and “äu,” “ch” (as it appears in ich—"I") is pronounced like a very soft English “sh." In fact, Germans will understand you if you pronounce it like “sh”—they will simply assume you learned your German in the Rhineland, where people pronounce the soft “ch” like English “sh.”
Listen:
ich ("I") • weich ("soft") • euch ("you")
Note that euch is the plural object case of "you."

After consonants other than "s," "ch" (as it appears in durch—"through") is pronounced the same way; i.e., as a soft "sh."
Listen:
durch ("through") • Milch ("milk")

If "ch" appears after "s," one has to distinguish between two cases:

1. The sequence "sch" is part of the same syllable (as it is in Mensch—"human being"). In this case, "sch" is pronounced exactly like English "sh."
2. The "s" ends one syllable and the "ch" starts the next. This happens, for example, when the diminutive "chen" is added to a word ending in "s" (as in Näschen—"little nose"). In this case, the "s" and "ch" are pronounced separately, and the "ch" sounds again like a soft "sh": NÄS • chen. Note also that this is always the case when "ch" follows "ß" (as in Füßchen—"little foot").

Listen:
Mensch ("human being") • Näschen ("little nose")

After “a,” “o,” “u,” and “au,” “ch” (as it appears in Bach—"brook" or the guy with the wig) is pronounced like the “ch” in Scottish loch, a sound that’s sometimes compared to the noise made by people when they clear their throat. There is no equivalent for this in English at all.
Listen:
Bach ("brook") • noch ("yet") • Buch ("book")
Here's a whole sentence: Ich hab' an euch und mich gedacht. ("I thought of you [plural!] and me.")

A "ch" followed by an "s" presents a special case: It's always pronounced like English (and German) "k" no matter what vowel precedes it. Or, to put is differently, the sequence of letters "chs" always sounds like English and German "x." Examples are Fuchs ("fox"), sechs ("six"), or wechseln ("to change, exchange").
Listen:
Fuchs ("fox") • wechseln ("to change")
Here's a joke (courtesy of Andrea Carla Michaels): What comes between fear and sex in German? Answer: fünf!

Finally, let's talk about "ch" at the beginning of a word, where the situation gets really muddled. That's because words in which this occurs tend to have their origin in a foreign language, and this origin influences their pronunciation to varying degrees.

There are, first of all, words that have remained foreign and are pronounced as in their original language. Examples are French Chance, which is pronounced with a sound like English "sh" at the beginning and a nasal "n" (to the degree that the speaker is able to do this); Spanish Chinchilla, where both occurrences of "ch" are pronounced like "tsh;" or Yiddish Chutzpe (that's how it's spelled in German), which starts with a "ch" as in Scottish loch.

For words that have been germanized to a degree, one has to distinguish between these cases:

1. "ch" is followed by "r," "l," "a," or "o": It's pronounced like English (or German) "k."
   Examples: Christ ("Christian"—the noun); Chlor ("chlorine"); Chaos ("chaos"); Cholera ("cholera").
2. "ch" is followed by an "e" or "i": It's generally pronounced like the soft "sh" we know from ich; see, for example, Chemie ("chemistry"). But in some regions, the "ch" is pronounced like "k." This becomes particularly obvious in the case of geographical names, whose pronunciation may vary from region to region. An example is Chiemsee, the name of a lake in Bavaria. The Bavarians like to start that name with a "k" and other Germans with a soft "sh."

Listen:
Chance ("chance") • Christ ("Christian") • Chemie ("chemistry")

And then there is Orchester ("orchestra"), which defies all of these rules: The "ch" is pronounced like "k." The upshot: In case of doubt about this cursed digraph, ask a fluent German speaker!