Multilingual problems: false friends
Hello and welcome to the July newsletter!
Things have been extremely chaotic here recently. I started looking for my own apartment in December, and just when I’d decided to hit pause because I was about to travel (and thus unable to attend any viewings), I got an offer for one (around May 20), with the lease starting June 1. Not the greatest timing ever, because I was back in the US from June 10 until the beginning of July, but with the housing market the way it is in Berlin, if you get an offer on an apartment you applied for, you take it. So I frantically got myself a kitchen and some furniture from IKEA and managed as much logistics as I could in those 2 weeks, including assembling the kitchen and furniture (with help from 3 amazing friends), and packed what I could before disappearing for 3ish weeks. Then I had about a week to pack everything I own into boxes for the movers to come take. The last 3 weeks have been spent unpacking, organizing, and sorting on top of, you know, my paid work. So it’s been a mess.
Fun fact: most rentals in Germany do not include a kitchen! There’s a stove, and a sink if you’re lucky (I was not), but otherwise, it’s up to you. There are pros and cons, of course. Pro is that you get to pick out the layout and cabinets and appliances yourself, rather than get the Landlord Special junk; con is that you have to pay a lot of money to get all this stuff and install it. (I have a really cute retro-look fridge, and I love it. I saw it at the store and had to have it.)
I’m going to start writing again soon
I signed up for the summer stretch on the Dream Foundry discord, with a delayed start because of moving, and I’m going to start my stretch this coming Monday. I have to spend 4 days a week for 4 weeks working on my writing project (the novel I’m about 75% rewriting because I had a better idea). Conveniently, it’s also summer break for my roller derby league, so I won’t have practice, and there’s only one game I’ll need to travel for in August, which frees up my weekends to let me write.
Some of you may have heard me talk about (or have read the previous version of) the space diner asexual lesbian romance, and that’s what’s going to come out the other end of this process. (Ideally a finished draft that I can send to beta readers, but that would require, like, 15k words a week, which even at my most productive is difficult.)
Filling Your Worlds update
I submitted the ebook to tolino, and I need to add some stuff to the copyright page to meet German requirements, so that’s on my list of things to do this week. I still need to get my tax stuff sorted with Amazon to get the print version available.
False friends
(hat-tip to Keri for the topic suggestion!)
If you’ve ever learned another language, you’ve probably encountered false friends at some point or other. Take the German word bekommen, which means ‘to receive,’ but it sure looks like become. Or Spanish embarazada, which doesn’t mean ‘embarrassed;’ it means ‘pregnant.’
Because English and German are closely related (2nd cousin once removed, if I understand the genealogy charts right and simplify things a hair), it’s fairly likely that you’ll find cognates that shifted meaning differently in the two languages over time. Like English deer and German Tier, which both stem from Proto-West-Germanic *deur ‘animal,’ but modern English refers only to a specific type of animal (an ungulate), and German still refers to animals in general. (Old English deor meant ‘animal,’ and Middle English deere meant ‘small animal, deer.’) Norwegian dyr also means ‘animal.’
Additionally, because both English and German have borrowed or invented words from Greek and Latin roots, you get false friends like Promotion (getting a PhD) and promotion (moving forward or upward). I think this is also the root of the problem with Protokoll (meeting minutes) and protocol (a step-by-step way of doing a task). There are a variety of lists on the internet; this one is from the German department of the University of Texas.
You also get words borrowed from one language into another that don’t have the same meaning, like angst, which in English means ‘a feeling of anxiety, apprehension, or insecurity’ and often is used in phrases like teen angst. In German, however, it means ‘fear, worry.’ You can also use it for anxiety, but if you say “Ich habe Angst,” it doesn’t mean you’re experiencing an existential crisis; it just means you’re afraid.
One of the most awkward types of false friends are the ones that were invented to sound, say, Englishy and don’t exist in the other language (or not like that). Here are some examples from German.
das Handy: a mobile (handheld) phone (2 meanings in English: 1) convenient, useful; 2) a sexual act)
der Old-Timer: a classic car (En: an old person)
Home-Office machen/haben: work from home; the place where you work from home (En: the place where you work from home)
das Mobbing: bullying (not a word in (US) English, but you can see how the semantics work out.)
Then there are problems with prepositions, which aren’t so much false friends as “I would use this preposition in my language, and here’s the one in the other language.” Sometimes it’s right; sometimes it’s not.
For example, German bis ‘up to, until’ (approaching something) is used in the sentence “Antworte bis Freitag um 17 Uhr” (‘answer by Friday at 5 pm’), and you’ll frequently hear Germans request that you answer until 5 pm on Friday. This construction befuddled me until I translated it back into German and got bis out of it. To be fair, I’m sure I use the wrong prepositions in German regularly.
How can I apply this to writing?
If you’re writing in a multilingual setting, or there are multilingual characters in your story, you can come up with some false friends and use them to create miscommunication problems for your characters. These problems could be humorous or serious, could have minor (they’re embarrassed) or major (diplomatic incident) consequences.
That’s all for now!
Hopefully I’ll be able to tell you next time that I got the novel rewritten.
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