When traditional German apartments are hard to find, der Loft is a potential alternative in old-time industrial zones of the inner cities. However don't expect it to necessarily be a loft in the English sense of a high attic space made habitable. The German word for that is a Dachausbau, and to describe a lofty room, the Germans say mit hohe Decken. A loft in the real-estate sense - a light-touch conversion to living or studio space of the roof space over a factory, shop or warehouse - does not have a specific German word to describe it. Einer Loft is something else. Here's an advertisement placed by profi-partner on immobilienscout24 in February 2009: "Loft Living nahe Kollwitzplatz! Ruhiges Erdgeschoss-Backstein-Loft mit Terrasse." No, there's no mistake: the ad confirms this really is on "Etage 0" (the ground floor). The photo confirms it is neither a loft, nor lofty. There will never be any pattering of raindrops on the flat ceiling of this place unless several upper storeys are bombed away first. There are no exposed pipes or ducts,
no stained concrete floor, no exposed interior brick, no 6-metre-high ceiling. What happened? Closer inspection of the advertisement reveals that the space is a converted factory. To be fair, some US realtors might also not hesitate to describe a low-ceilinged ground-floor factory
conversion as a "loft". But that would be an ordinary realtor's lie (some people maintain that real estate agents are incapable of speaking the truth). In Germany it's not a lie: it's Denglisch. Der Loft (genitive: des Lofts) is capitalized and the "Lo" in it has a long O like "low".
... Read More
Loft, der
Lounge, die
With just two omnibus Anglicisms, das Center and die Lounge, one could in theory describe the entirety of urban life. Every activity where your mien is earnest - government, religion, education and commerce - may take place in a building styled das Center. But if the management desires that you smile, the business space will be dubbed die Lounge. The genesis of the lounge, as a more comfortable type of living room in a home than an old-fashioned parlour or best room, is no longer visible in German. However two compound derivatives, the lounge bar and the hotel lounge, clearly entered German decades ago and were abridged into a single term, die Lounge. That is as far as the execrable Duden Fremdwörterbuch gets with its out-of-date definition: "Gesellschaftsraum in Hotels o. Ä; Hotelhalle / Cocktailbar mit anheimelnder Atmosphäre." Die Lounge today is just as likely to mean a status or a part of a website as a physical space. Examples include:
Die Lounge is capitalized, given feminine gender, inflected with -S- in the genitive and pronounced with a less complex diphong than in English.
... Read More
Kescher, der
A purse net stretched on a stiff wire ring with a long pole as a handle is known as ein Kescher in German. It is practically indistinguishable from a North German accenting of the English word catcher, with the difficult English A assimilated to a German E and the unfamiliar T dropped. Many terms of nautical German have a close affinity with terms used on English coasts, and it is plausible to suppose that fishermen on both sides of the North Sea, or Mare Frisicum, would have bought and sold hand nets under this name. So far, we have not obtained any evidence for this, and do not wish to create a folk etymology: this proposed connection is purely a hypothesis. If it were to be correct, we would have a curious situation, since there is a less modified loanword with a similar source, der Catcher, in German. The latter is a pseudo-Anglicism to mean a wrestler. Its root is in the same English verb, to catch. The Duden remains agnostic about der Kescher, tracing the etymology to a word Kesser in Mittelniederdeutsch and adding "weitere Herkunft ungeklärt". Nowadays, a Kescher (also spelled Käscher) is just as likely to be a child's butterfly-net plaything at the beach, or a skimming net used to clean a swimming pool. Der Kescher is capitalized, given masculine gender, inflected with s in the genitive and is the origin of the verb keschern, meaning to fish something out of water with a catcher net.
... Read More
Konzern, der
The mismatch between concern and der Konzern has caused endless grief, though the evidence suggests this is in fact an indirect Anglicism, having entered the German language via French, and thus gaining a double twist along the route. In English, a concern is any kind of enterprise, large or small, and is a useful word to describe an enterprise of a size unknown to the speaker. Judicial verdicts often use the word, since judges may not have been presented with the necessary evidence about the correct legal title of an incorporated (or perhaps unincorporated) organization that is indirectly party to the case. The word is also useful for describing an organization which is not a business, but functions in a business-like way, as in this example from the International Herald Tribune (2008-06-16) about Barack Obama's presidential campaign organization: "As the chief executive officer of Obama for America, a concern of nearly 1,000 employees and a budget of hundreds of millions of dollars, Obama is more inclined to focus on the big picture over the day-to-day whirl." In German however, Konzern has a specific legal meaning as a group of companies with some kind of interlocking shareholding, an overall chief executive and a set of accounts that portrays the businesses as a single whole, where the turnover and assets of each are weighted in proportion to the parent company's equity in each subsidiary.
Konzern is capitalized, given masculine gender, inflected with -...- in the genitive and pronounced with a proper German Z that includes the T sound.
... Read More
Laptop, der
A German synonym for das Notebook. The dict.cc forum suggests that der Klapprechner is still too slangy, though Hermann Schreiber (Hamburger Abendblatt 2007-09-24) recommends the latter for standard German. Bastian Sick of Zwiebelfisch has jokingly suggested Klapprechner was the best word to avoid a grammatical pitfall with Laptop: the possibility that it might be das Laptop. Der Laptop is slightly changed in pronunciation, since our dipthong -a- is unknown in German, and the stress in der Laptop shifts ever so slightly to the first syllable. Capitalized and gendered masculine, the German word matches its English source semantically. ... Read More
Jury, die
An import via French that comes very close to being a pseudo-Anglicism, die Jury is the German word for a panel of judges at an art show, for a film festival or for a literary prize. Manfred Höfler (Dictionnaire des Anglicismes) traces this usage in French back to 1794. It is certainly a false friend: for many English speakers, the known distinction between "judge and jury" is actually a mental obstacle to a correct translation. The word has apparently made a round trip back into English in a highly specialized expression, a juried art show, meaning an exhibition selected by a panel. Feminine gender and pronounced with a non-English -zh- at the beginning and an uvular -r-. ... Read More
Posts
