Issue #34_page-0020

Fatal Faux-pas and How to Avoid Them

Of all the potential faux-pas in the German language, vergiften (to poison) is by far the best known. While vergiften has occasionally been known to trip up non-native speakers over the festive period, to label it the ultimate German-language Judas would be an act of considerable quackery. Some of the other candidates in the pantheon of vicious verbs, horrid homonyms and fatal false friends can be far more perilous. The very worst are capable of twisting entire sentences upside-down and inside-out – sinking the unsuspecting speaker into some pretty deep water in the process.

Having learnt German for the best part of a decade now, you may expect me to have long since eliminated such amateurish errors. Not so. Just last week for example, while out on a walk in the local park, a pigeondropped its load all over my brand-new cream-coloured pea coat. I stormed home in a huff to be greeted by my landlady, a kind and mild-mannered German native, who wanted to know what had irked me.

At this point it’s crucial to note that the German word for pigeon is Taube and takes a feminine article – always either die or eine. A masculine article – der or ein – changes the meaning of the word to describe, of all things, a deaf person. In this moment of white-hot anger, I managed to overlook this critical detail. My poor landlady watched on in staggered silence as I launched into an obscene diatribe against the filthy, low-life, degenerate deaf person that had just emptied his bowels all over my brand-new jacket.

This labyrinthine mishmash of articles and pronouns is perhaps the most likely source of faux-pas for a non-native speaker. Each of German’s four gendered articles decline into four cases – nominative, accusative, dative and genitive – all of which serve a different grammatical function. Having finally nailed the definite articles, you’ll be served up a fresh batch of indefinite articles to learn – closed followed by pronouns, possessive pronouns and so on. Some of these pronouns even overlap with each other; the pronoun Sie, for example, can assume up to three different meanings.

Fortunately, each one comes with a different set of verb forms that distinguish them from each other – although mix-ups are still not out of the question. Should you be addressing a respected older gentleman – a distinguished war vet or a retired politician for example – you would always be expected to use the formal you (Sie). It would only take a brief lapse in concentration however for a novice speaker to confuse Sie for sie (meaning she) – subsequently conjugating all ensuing verbs and pronouns into the feminine form, and gravely insulting a revered national hero in the process.

Each of these pronouns decline further into two reflexive forms; in the first person they are mich (me, myself) in the accusative case, and mir (to me) in the dative case. To make matters worse, the German language comes with a stacked arsenal of reflexive verbs (for example sich waschen – ‘to wash yourself’) and almost no sure-fire way to determine which reflexive pronoun is right for the job. In a pinch, taking a blind stab at one of these options may be a halfway permissible tactic, but one that fails to deal with the wider strata of instances in which a reflexive pronoun is also inexplicably required. States of being – bodily temperature for example – are always expressed using the dative reflexive pronoun Mir, rather than the first person Ich (so ‘I am hot’ would translate as Mir ist heiß). What your textbook doesn’t tell you is that using the latter – as would be the inherent instinct of an English native speaker – devilishly switches the meaning from ‘I’m getting bit too hot’ to something more to the tune of ‘I’m getting a bit too horny.’

Just confusing matters further is a wicked web of homonyms – deceptive words with up to five meanings apiece. The word blasen for example describes almost anything related to blowing – from tooting a wind instrument to giving a blowjob. It’s not impossible that an innocent invitation to a freeform jazz recital could be misconstrued as an offer of oral sex. More precarious still is the verb festnehmen (‘to arrest’) which is just slipshod spacebar removed from fest nehmen – literally meaning ‘to take hard.’ One haphazard slip of the finger could transform a dark and grizzled cop drama into a risqué bedside-table porno novel.

There is however one faux-pas that stands tall above the rest – a single verb which, if used incorrectly, can have potentially fatal implications for the unsuspecting speaker. The word in question is umfahren – not be confused with its twin brother: umfahren. In the infinitive form, these homonymous verbs are only distinguishable by which part of the word is emphasised – where umfahren would mean ‘to drive around’, umfahren crucially means ‘to run over.’

Admittedly it would be pretty rare for these treacherous twins cause significant problems seeing as they conjugate differently in both the perfect past and imperative tenses. Supposing that the stars should somehow align; a nervous learner driver at the wheel of a car, a stammering driving instructor in the passenger seat and an absentminded pensioner crossing the road ahead. In this rarest of instances, a split-second lapse in concentration could drastically alter the course of the sentence Du solltest den Rentner, der die Straße überquert, umfahren (you should drive around that pensioner crossing the street) to inadvertently incite the obliging learner to accelerate and plough directly into the defenceless old timer.

Granted, it would take a freak twist of fate to enable such a fateful faux-pas, just as it would to trigger any of the others mentioned – but in the course of language acquisition, stranger things have been known to happen. As with all language mistakes however, faux-pas are not something to be feared, but embraced as invaluable learning experiences. Each and every embarrassment, humiliation and failure you face is just another small step on the road to achieving total fluency.

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Adam Millward

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