FRENGLISH - THE ROBERT W. WHITAKER ARCHIVE

FRENGLISH | 2007-02-07

From my "Partisan Dictionary" in the Southern Partisan about thirty years ago:

Englishman -- n -- A German trying to be a Frenchman

Germans call the German language today "Denglish." It adopts more and more American words. I was talking to a guy in Moscow who was taking his PhD in German, and he was complaining about this to me, in German. Two minutes later he used the word "renten." As you can see, "renten" comes from American, "to rent." The proper German word is "mieten."

I am a naturally forgiving person, so in less than an hour I stopped kidding him about this.

The Germanic English of 1066 has been replaced by our present Frenglish. Much of it is harmless, but most of it is truly destructive. You see, along with French we adopted the whole attitude that anything Germanic is lowah claaass. It is considered very upper claaahss to say "Merde!", but the Germanic-derived word s*** requires all those stars.

But the hatred of Germanic has a much, much, greater cost. Medical students spend much of the time they should be learning about medicine in learning the tortuous route the English language took to avoid ANYTHING Germanic. So in order to describe parts of the human body, those parts must be translated into Latin, or, worse, Greek, and then spoken in a way I am dead certain no Roman or ancient Greek would have recognized. It is a wholly artificial language made up for the express purpose of being hard to learn and impossible for the average person to understand.

When non-German speakers look at German, it seems to consist of long, long words. We associate long words with incomprehensibility, since that is what they are used for in English.

As a matter of fact, I do know of a single long word in the German language, one that showed up a lot when I was translating brick-making stuff into English in the 1950s, "TemperaturwechselbestÃ¤ndigkeit." Looks LONG, doesn't it? But it is several short, easily comprehensible words put together to describe something:

Temperatur -- I don't think that needs translating

Wechsel - change

bestand - withstand

ichkeit -- this is a standard ending which denotes that what went before is a description.

The word in English is "refractory." But how in heaven's name could a person tell, from "refractory," which I assume is some tortured Latin word, what one is talking about?

Britain had absolute dominance in industry about 1820. Half the manufacturing on the planet earth took place on that one little island, totaling half the size of the Black Sea Valley. Germany, despite its ridiculous European economic policies, pulled up beside Britain by the dawn of the new century. America, of course, had outstripped them both hopelessly by then.

How did Germany do it? The British had industry, but looked down on it. The Uppah Claaahss "went to University" and learned Latin and Greek. The German upper class took technical courses, and laughed at a grown man wasting his life studying dead languages. The only reason the Frengish survived at all was America.

The Germans did not even bother to Latinize their technical language. If you were smarter than the peasants, you didn't need to hide behind some cheating like that.

The big excuse for Frenglish and Latin and Greek is that they are supposed to be "universal."

Wake up and smell the coffee! Eastern Europeans and the rest of the world are absolutely mystified by this obsession with French and dead languages. They speak ENGLISH as the universal language, and they are deeply pissoi-d off that they have to learn that pretentious crap when they are trying to do something serious.

It takes a long, long time for reality to catch up with crap, oops, sorry, le crapois, like that. The internet is moving us toward phonetics. Something else will have to come along to force us to say temperaturechangewithstanding instead of digging into graveyards to come up with les crappois like "refractory" or a whole medical vocabulary nobody needs.

COMMENTS (3)

#1 Peter | 2007-02-07 20:03

NOT SPAM

Temperaturechangewithstanding?...... Doubleplusgood!

Bruce

#2 errorclock | 2007-12-26 14:54

Hi Bob:

I was reading your nice article here. It dawned on me after a few paragraphs of reading that I could probably help you out here. Without getting into novel writing, here are some responses based on specific phrases or ideas that you presented. I hope this makes sense, and I hope this helps.

COMPLAINT #1

...the whole attitude that anything Germanic is lowah claaass..."

"...the hatred of Germanic... ...[the tortuous] route the English language took to avoid ANYTHING Germanic."

SOLUTION #1

We English speakers do not think of things "German" as being lowah claaass. We also haven't taken any tortuous route to avoid anything Germanic. Here is what really happened...

English has always taken in words from other languages and cultures. Centuries ago, we were busy taking in words from everywhere as fast as we could find and absorb them. It was the linguistic version of the premise - Why re-invent the wheel? Most of the French borrowings (forcings, actually) which we have are not from the weasely surrender-monkeys inhabiting Gaul now. Instead, most of the French in our English is from the strong, warrior-class Normans. The Normans, as I'm sure you know were not "French". Instead they haled from a strong Scandinavian Viking ancestry. After invading and settling in Normandy they adopted much of the language there. But a study of history shows that the language they adopted was not French (since "French" itself did not exist until the 13th century). What they adopted was a Gallo-Romance dialect (Romana lingua). Modern French partly derives from similar, neighboring Gallo-Romance dialects. But make no mistake, the majority of the "French" we have in English today is not from the wimpy language spoken by the current inhabitants of France. The few words we do have from the cheese-eaters are from their sissy cooking schools; Words like buffet, latte, concierge, maitre d', apritif, filet and entre. Here are some examples of the strong "Norman" words we have in English. Referring to them as "French" is actually misleading.

CASTLE - (Norman castel) (Latin castellum) (wimpy French chteau)

CAULDRON - (Norman caudron) (Latin caldarius) (wimpy French chaudron)

FOREST - (Norman forest) (Latin forest) (wimpy French fort)

POCKET (Norman pouquette) (from Germanic pocca!) (wimpy French poche)

SUBSIDY (Norman subsidie) (Latin subsidium) (wimpy French - lost this word)

So anyway, after taking in a bunch of words from the Norman Romana Lingua (Mislabeled as "french"), we started going after German words. What we found was disturbing. First, we found that the Germans had been stealing words (a lot of them from Latin) just like the English had been doing. And we discoverd that it is not very pleasant to adopt a very long word from German, produced by concatenating a bunch of short words together. We were sailing through the German wordlists and after coming upon the following words (and many others like them, we decided that to steal from a stealer was not what we wanted to do. The Gallic people spoke a vulgar Latin and the Norman "French" was a direct descendent of that. But the Germanic tribes, as a whole, never spoke Latin as much as the Gauls. They simply took Latin words and stuffed them into their language. That's why we took and kept the Norman Romana Lingua we had already been forced to use by the sons of Vikings. For the rest, we went straight to the original Latin -- developing our own version of the original Latin.

Aktiv (English active) (Latin actio) why change a "c" to a "k"?

Kaiser (English Caesar) (Latin Caesar)

Kamera (English camera) (Latin camera)

direkt (English direct) (Latin directum)

Disziplin (English discipline) (Latin disciplina)

After seeing these examples we were reluctant to embrace German words. As with any other borrowings, (like the French phrase, "dj vu") if it expressed a long idea concisely then we adopted it. So, we English speakers easily understand Doppelganger, poltergeist, schadenfreude, NAZI, angst, kindergarten, sauerkraut, blitzkrieg, dachshund, ersatz, fest, flak, gesundheit, glitz, glockenspiel, gneiss, hamburger, hamster, hinterland, kaput... et cetera, (almost) ad infinitum.

Without the German additions, how could I pack sauerkraut and wienerschnitzel in my rucksack with a bottle of schnaps, call my faithful schnauzer to my side to go traveling to satisfy my wanderlust? I could go on and on. I don't think this comes anywhere close to a "..tortuous route..." to avoid anything Germanic.

COMPLAINT #2

"...I do not know of a single long word in the German language..."

SOLUTION #2

Here are four off the top of my head. To claim that they are not long because they are concatenated short words is disingenuous.

Betubungsmittelverschreibungsverordnung

Bezirksschornsteinfegermeister

Donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaftskapitn

Rechtsschutzversicherungsgesellschaften

Rindfleischetikettierungsberwachungsaufgabenbertragungsgesetz

COMPLAINT #3

""Temperaturwechselbestandigkeit." ...[T]he word in English is "refractory." But how in heaven's name could a person tell, from "refractory," which I assume is some tortured Latin word, what one is talking about?"

SOLUTION #3

I easily made the connection of "refractory" with our English word "refraction". Can you see what they're talking about now?

COMPLAINT #4

"If you were smarter than the peasants..."

SOLUTION #4

Actually, if one were smarter than the Continental Europeans, one would be able to multitask linguistically ( so to speak...). As an example, even nowadays they apparently have headstuffing only barely capable of performing mathematics requiring the simple movement the decimal point (the Metric system). They moan and complain because the Americans haven't yet converted to the Metric system as promised more than fifty years ago. Of course, the Americans are capable of performing Metric calculations AND English Unit calculations fairly easily, so there is no sense of urgency to forbid that which the Europeans can't do.

COMPLAINT#5

"Eastern Europeans and the rest of the world are absolutely mystified by this obsession with French and dead languages. They speak ENGLISH as the universal language..."

SOLUTION #5

Yes I suppose they are "...absolutely mystified..." at the "...obsession..." to study French, Latin, and Greek (I would add Spanish too). That dumbfoundedness might be germane to why they are 2nd and 3rd world countries. Once they get over their confusion, and get on board, they'll then have an opportunity to rise to the top and meet English speakers face-to-face. As the saying goes, if you want to be successful, copy what the successful people do. Having learned to speak English to get along in the World is a good start. Now they should move to the next plane. Modern French is an abomination when compared to the Latin from which it came. One website has made the comparison that, "French is to Latin as Ebonics is to Standard English". ( http://www.joehepperle.com/Joe/Opinion/Pigstalking.htm ). Nonetheless, many countries around the globe, including a large part of the African continent, and a large part of SouthEast Asia can be accessed directly with the French language. Concerning the dead or obsolete languages, most all of Western civilization's past is accessible with a working knowledge of Latin and Greek. (And don't let the Christian fundamentalists hear you say that ancient Greek is a waste of study time!)

COMPLAINT #6

"Something else will have to come along to force us to say temperaturechangewithstanding..."

SOLUTION #6

Temperaturechangewithstanding? Naw! Although we already use our Germanic language heritage to concatenate words (bathrobe, hilite (or highlight), tearjerker, moth**f***er, a**hol*, something, anybody, yoohoo) I doubt if we'd be caught using the clunky "temperaturechangewithstanding". Being the multilingual, multitasking people we are, we'd probably come up with something easier, like...say... heat-resistant? If we were actually forced to use a clunky concatenated "newspeak", we'd probably go with the better sounding, "capableofenduringhightemperature".

"Hey Fred! Check out my new fireplace. I just finished building it with bluetinted capableofenduringhightemperature brick. Looks great, huh?"

#3 Pain | 2007-12-26 19:48

errorclock:

Were I to correct your comment, I would tell you to cut it down by about 90%. Then I would tell you to read Bob's post again.

Then I would mark the factual mistakes, such as:

1. Confusing "Germanic" with "German;"

2. Saying that English has always borrowed words from other tongues: most all the borrowings we have were made up after 1500, and most all are seldom or never spoken;

3. Misunderstanding what "refractory" means.

The last mistake is the most telling since it shows that we use these loan words with little clue about what they mean. "Refractory" means heat-hardy and "refraction" bent ray.

Our own English words are a bit more clean-cut, aren't they?

Hope that helps.

[PAIN! you're not using the li tags correctly at all and breaking the page... just use numbers! Thank you. sysop]