Recently I had the opportunity to go to Germany and visit the small city of Bad Kreuznach, where I had spent the majority of my hitch in the Army many decades ago. Obviously the place had changed a lot since then, and I quickly realized that I’d need some help getting around. Fortunately my old friend Claus lived nearby so I gave him a call and asked for his help.
No surprise, he agreed to show me around. As soon as he arrived I couldn’t help but start peppering him with language questions. “What’s up with that word I see all over the place on street signs — “straBe” — what’s that all about?”
“The word means ‘street’ and that letter that looks to you like a capital B is what’s known as an ‘eszett,’” Claus explained with surprising patience. “Some people refer to it as a ‘scharfes s’ and it stands for two consecutive esses. Until recently it existed only in lowercase, so if you had wanted to spell ‘straße’ in all capital letters you’d have needed to spell it STRASSE, with double esses.”
“But no more?”
“Not any more.”
“And what about those dots over some German vowels – tittle, tittle?” I asked as I waggled two fingers in the air.
“That’s called an umlaut, which comes from ‘um,’ which means ‘about’ and ‘laut,’ or ‘loud.’ It changes the pronunciation of the vowel or makes it independent.”
He continued, “And if you were paying attention, you noticed that ‘laut’ and ‘loud’ sound a lot alike. Well they mean the same thing in English and in German. Words like that are called ‘cognates’ because anybody can reCOGnize them right away. It’s basically German for dummies.”
“Hey, wait a minute,” I retorted, “are you calling me a dummy? How’d you like it if I called you a Kraut?”
“Then you’d be calling me a cabbage, Yankee. But anyway, back to cognates.”
“Such as?” I inquired.
Well, since you brought it up, sauerkraut is sour cabbage. “See how ‘sauer’ and ‘sour’ sound the same?”
“Are we moving on to alliteration now?” I wisecracked.
“Try to rein in your fancy American grammar words while I’m trying to tell you some cognates, OK? They include words such as ‘garten,’ ‘haus,’ ‘auto,’ ‘nudel,’ and a couple of my favorites: ‘bier’ and ‘wein.’ Since ‘hund’ sounds like ‘hound, it’s easy to figure out that it means ‘dog,’ while ‘essen,’ as it’s used at the end of ‘delicatessen,’ means ‘to eat’”
Claus continued, “‘Delicatessen’ also happens to be one of those loanwords, I think you call them. You know, words you Americans basically stole from us and use as your own.
“Like you guys stole ‘delicatus’ from Latin, because it was ‘delightful,’” I fired back.
“You know what else is delightful?” he snorted rhetorically. “Having you on my turf, where I know all the big words for once, so if you don’t mind, I’ll continue. The next time you go out to eat, you can thank the Germans if your order includes a hamburger, a weiner, a schnitzel, a strudel or schnapps – and yes, even sauerkraut.”
Claus was on a roll. “Have you ever had angst because your wunderkind in kindergarten might have a doppelganger? Or maybe your diesel auto was kaput while you were on your way to the beer garden for a lager. Where would you and your child be without German words? Where?”
“‘Wer’ is German for ‘who,’ right?” I asked.
“Right. You’re catching on.”
“So then a German owl says ‘Wer, wer?’”
“That’s terrible,” groaned Claus. “And I thought puns about German sausage were the wurst.”
Jim Witherell of Lewiston is a writer and lover of words whose work includes “L.L. Bean: The Man and His Company” and “Ed Muskie: Made in Maine.” He can be reached at jlwitherell19@gmail.com.
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