I learned some new words last week: "hoa" and "pai" and "kaitiaki". All of these are Maori. I first read them in a story, without translation, and understood their rough meaning.
The story is now online in the Aotearoa Affair Blog Fest, together with an interview with translator Anita Goetthans that developed from reading it. Here's the link:
Once upon a time in Aotearoa – Translating Maori Myths into the Now and into German
One of the lines from the interview struck me: "but most of the younger generation freely mix the Maori words with English." How would that work, I wondered. And only later realized that it actually is the same in Germany these days, with mixing English into sentences. The German term for these words is: "Anglizismen".
There's a long list of them up in the German wiki::
List of Anglizismen
Many of them are so common that if you would ask people to list Anglizismen, they probably wouldn't think of them: Adapter, Bar, Computer, Deo, Eishockey, Fairness, Gag, Hamburger...
Languages. Such a vast and interesting landscape.
Sprachen. So eine weite und interessante Landschaft.
1 comment:
Congrats on this (interview and story) - this is awesome stuff. :)
Re the Anglizisimen, I like the first one at wiki very much. (!) ... English and Spanish are mixed a lot here and of course there is Spanglish too, which is kind of like its own language. I particularly like the technology words translated into Spanish: e.g. twittear (to tweet), retwitteado (retweeted) - etc. + Hamburgeusa, here. :)
Post a Comment