« a bit of grouching... | Main Index | quick SV fanfic rec »
07/01/2003: anglicisms...
You know, writing/reading in English so much has some odd (and rather embarrassing) side-effects. Like in English in German there are some fixed expressions, some quite similar to their English counterparts, but not exactly. And I have developed the odd tendency to take the English phrasing, with German words, instead of the German one. For example, today I caught myself with the phrasing "das Ding ist, dass..." (the English "the thing is, that...") instead of using "die Sache ist die, dass..." as I should have. I also catch myself rather frequently with using "hast du eine Idee, was..." (the English "do you have any idea what...") instead of using "hast du eine Ahnung, was..." and I'm sure there are more examples.
It gets really annoying when even after thinking for a moment I'm not sure whether you can use some phrasing in German. I mean, these transformations are always more or less grammatically correct, they could exist, they are just not the right phrasing, and it's really disconcerting to have lost hat feeling of certainty in some instances. Of course I'm not alone in doing this, and in some cases the process is so far along that the "English" wording is replacing the one previously used or becoming an alternative like it has happened with "das macht keinen Sinn" (the English "makes no sense") and the German "ergibt keinen Sinn", I googled both combinations, and "macht keinen Sinn" is now about six times as common as the other one. And it's not like I'm some kind of language purist and think that the process in itself is awful, but it still is sort of embarrassing if you are doing it with phrases for which it is not common yet.
I think that the embarrassment of this is only surpassed by using common fixed expressions that don't exist at all in German, but are useful in English, so I use them in German as well (notorious is "I get the idea" though I really watch myself with that one by now). Just they don't exist (yet), and of course people look at me funny. Or I barely stop myself in time, and then have to scramble to think of how to phrase in German. I'm really starting to see why bilingual people, when they talk with other bilingual people (that is when they share the same two languages) seem to switch between languages in mid-sentence fairly regularly for some words or expressions without missing a beat. It sounds sort of odd at first, but I see why that is fairly common.
