Offering a false excuse to explain an absence ("visitez ma tante", "visité ma tante"). It to French soldiers in Berlin who were either trying to lure young women inside (to visit their aunt) or The plural noun "Fisimatenten" ( excuses nonsense gimmickry) has in fact unclear roots, but popular lore traces Some words acquire appeal through folk etymologies that attribute foreign origins to them. That the early Germans learned from the Romans ( fenestra murus). Only etymologists know that words like "das Fenster" ( window) and "die Mauer" ( wall) are building-construction terms Most of them have become so much a part of the language that modern speakers are unaware of their origin. To other Germans' enthusiasm for such things.Īctually, loanwords have always constituted huge portions of the German vocabulary. These curmudgeonly objections were of course responses Then of the metropolis, modernism, and finally popular culture. In the 19th and 20th centuries, English seemed to pose the greatest threat, first as the language of industrial capitalism, Later on, in the 18th century, German purists' most impassioned objections centered on French imports, which, it was felt, representedįoppish, reactionary, aristocratic forces that were antithetical to the values of the rising middle class. The Académie française was founded around the same timeĪnd still aggressively combats linguistic imports. #Fariegn wordum free#Nor were other nations free of analogous concerns. (However, the story that early purists tried to replace the supposedly-foreign word "Nase" with theĪrtificial construction "Gesichtserker" is apocryphal). Which seemed to be overwhelming "real" German Sprachgesellschaften (language societies), dedicated in part to limiting such borrowings, The 17th century saw the founding of a number of While others throw up their hands in horror at the degradation of their language. Some people enthusiastically embrace trendy items from other languages (e.g. Germans have traditionally displayed a strong ambivalence toward adopting foreign words. German has always been willing to import words from other languages.
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