I am embarrassed to admit that I am addicted to VOX’s
Shopping Queen. It’s the latest
addition in the “Das perfekte….” series of reality tv shows on this channel,
which are themselves a bastardized version of the latest in demeaning British television. Each week 5 people get together to compete at something like
cooking food or shopping and then rate each other on the results. Five nights of reasonably catty reality tv, and you don't even have to waste your long-term memory in storing contestant names, job histories or sexual orientations from week to week.
Anyway, I discovered Shopping Queen a couple of weeks ago
while on sick leave, and I’ve allowed myself to continue this guilty pleasure
based on the fact that I’m improving my German while rotting my mind. So far I know to add “nuh?” at the end
of all my sentences is a truly authentic way to sound like an airhead. (Heidi
Klum has backed this up on my second favourite German reality tv show, Germany’s Next Topmodel.) However,
the other major addition to my
vocabulary baffled me for at least two weeks of episodes. How much money they have: what I
thought was the BG actually turned out to be a fancy Frenchified way of saying
“Budget.” Think Tar-jay for
Germans.
Germans are just as guilty of Francophilia as the British. But rather than showing their
appreciation by buying up France, they are embracing the Frenchification of
their language. The original French pronunciation is preserved in words
like “Engagement” and “Chance.” Of
course, most of these words have clearly been absorbed into the German language
due to the colonizing influence English as an international ingua franca, as
opposed to, say, repeat viewings of Alain Resnais movies.
These word borrowings are totally frustrating to someone who has spent several months attempting to internalize German pronunciations by repeating all of the announcements made on the S-Bahn at extreme personal risk. Just when you think you've gotten rid of all of the habits built up by a decade of French classes, you wind up having to relearn it all at the "Accessoires" counter in a German department store.
It's all the more
frustrating because the Germans don’t quite pull off their well-intentioned word borrowings. They sound like Germans, understandably, who are struggling through grade-school
French. In the same way, simple English words like "Partner" and "Vintage" fail to make
the transition without an extra “w” and a few glottal stops for good measure. And then there are the in-between words like "Details" - looks like it's English, sounds like it's (sort-of) French - a completely German invention. When in doubt, stick with an old-fashioned Germanic word like "Einzelheit." The German grandmothers of the world will thank you.
image via newspoint.cc
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