studieren

Auf Deutsch, wenn man “einsam” ist, fühlt man allein. Aber, wenn man “zweisam” ist, dass heißt das Gefühl der Zusammenheit. Ich finde dass suß.

In German, if a person is “one-ly,” that person feels alone. But, if a person is “two-ly,” that means a feeling of togetherness. I think that’s sweet.

Happily Ever After

Und wenn sie nicht gestorben sind, dann leben sie noch heute.

And if they have not died, then they are still alive today.

Etymology learned from Hannah Arendt.

– Company, “men who eat bread together”

– Armut and Arbeit come from the same root, in German.

– Arendt references Kluge’s Etymologishes Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache in a footnote, and now I am set upon Davis Library’s PF3580.K5 1989.

All I do in German class is ask, “Hat das Verb stimmen etwas mit die Stimme zu tun?” or “Wie schön ist das Unterschied zwischen Umwelt und Umfeld; wir sagen nur Environment!” or “Warum hat Geschlecter das Wort schlecht drin? Weil Sex ist immer etwas schlectes?”

“Unsere kleine Linguistin,” says Frau Christina, “dass weiss ich nicht, aber gute Frage.”

neuro-cognitive linguistics* probably has something to say about this:

the fact that I confuse the German words furchtbar and fruchtbar, because, in my mind, they are the same collection of letters.

the first means “dreadful,”

and the second, “fruitful.”

* if that is even a field.

I wonder.

if there’s a fast food restaurant anywhere called “Der Bügermeister.”

because puns are irresistable.

Etymologically Exciting

is when a word that comes from Latin is found in German, but not in English.

Namely:

“Cista” = “Kiste” = “Box”

this is wild.

looking at this graph of People In Germany – such noticeable holes caused by the First and Second World Wars, as well as the Great Depression!

Wow (in a shocked, My-God-the-Devastation-of-War, way)!

your ONYEN password expires soon

having changed it:

it’s not about Berlin anymore.

zitate.

“Not to find one’s way around a city does not mean much. But to lose ones’s way in a city, as one loses one’s way in a forest, requires some schooling. Steet names must speak to the urban wanderer like the snapping of dry twigs, and the little streets must reflect the times of day, for him, as clearly as a mountain valley. This art I acquired rather late in life; it fulfilled a dream, of which the first traces were labyrinths on the blotting papers of my school notebooks.”

“Among the caryatids and atlantes, the putti and pomonas, which in those days looked on me, I stood closest to those dust-shrouded specimens of the race of threshold-dwellers – those who guard the entrance to life, or to a house. For the are versed in waiting. Hence, it was all the same to them whether they waited for a stranger, for the return of the ancient gods, or for the child that, thirty years ago, slipped past them with his schoolboy’s satchel. Under their tutelage, the Old West district became the West of antiquity – source of the west winds that aid the mariners who sail their craft, freighted with apples of the Hesperides, slowly up the Landwehr Canal.”

- Walter Benjamin, Tiergarten, Berlin Childhood around 1900

things that will always be

Having listened to so many story-tapes about the lives of die Komponisten, as a child, these two cities will always be

1) Venice, the Queen of the Sea!

and

2) Vienna, City of Music!

with certain associated metrical patterns, of course.

this message, and its remininscense / city-focus, brought to you by Walter Benjamin’s Berlin Childhood.