There’s a general belief that different languages may have a different feel to them. So, French and Italian are supposed to be ‘romantic’. Urdu is ‘poetic’ and so on.
I’m dubious about this. I see nothing particularly romantic about the French language (this, may of course be, leftover resentment due to my barely scraping through my French exams) but as far as I can tell, how a language sounds is mostly to do with who is doing the speaking and what they’re talking about. But if I could be convinced to believe in this theory, it would be because there exists one particular language that somehow makes everything seem cooler than it is. That language is German.
It is a truth universally acknowledged (that is, I and some people I know
acknowledge it) that everything sounds more badass in German. Rammstein, the industrial metal band from Germany has been living off this fact for years — translate any one of their songs into English and its awesomeness diminishes immediately. Were they to write (in their
native tongue) a song about fluffy pillows, kittens and the joy of the colour pink, it would still sound cool and no one would ever know.
Advertisers too have figured this out. I forget which make of car a few years ago was advertised in this country with the slogan ‘achtung, baby’ (formerly the name of a U2 album as well), but that I remember the slogan is surely proof that it worked. More recently, Volkswagen, which is a German company and therefore holds some stake in that country’s language, have been promoting themselves with the line ‘Volkswagen. Das Auto.’ It is the short, abrupt words that follow the brand name that make the whole thing work. It’s stark, it’s dramatic, and it works.
In Germany, a humble telecom engineer may find dignity in his profession by calling himself a ‘Telekommunikationssytemelektroniker.’ The people of Germany are responsible for giving the world the words ‘Schadenfreude’ and ‘Doppelgänger’. They gave us ‘Angst’ (without which teenagers would not exist) and ‘Zeitgeist’ (without which this newspaper’s Saturday supplement would not exist) and ‘Götterdämmerung’ (it’s gloriously appropriate that a word describing an apocalyptic ending should sound so much like someone swearing loudly) and the prefix ‘-über’. They gave us ‘hamster’ and ‘kindergarten’ (without which an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie would not exist; however, the credit for Arnie himself goes to the Austrians) and ‘Hamburger’ and ‘Kitsch’ and ‘Ersatz’ and ‘Poltergeist’. It is as if there is no end to their linguistic gifts to the English-speaking world.
Were I the sort of person who believed such theories, I might postulate that other facets of German culture (namely the Brothers Grimm, Richard Wagner and Oktoberfest) all contributed to the apparent ease with which speakers of the language manage to sound amazing. But that would clearly be frivolous and silly. And this column is never silly.
— bluelullaby@gmail.com