But now let’s see, how some German words enter the English language cosmos:
- There are the nearly normal ones: Kindergarten, Kindercare, Auto, autobahn, zeitgeist or even weltgeist, angst, gestalt, weltschmerz and many, many more, but especially interesting are:
- doppelgänger and poltergeist (even in Harry Potter!),
- schadenfreude (mh, strange that there has to be German word to describe the emotion ;-) According to some language theorists things just exit when there is an expression for them… ;-)), but there is also gemütlich to compensate the impression schadenfreude might leave - and don't forget about wanderlust,
- eigenvalue and eigenstates (great! Quantum physics rules),
- gedankenexperiment (that was explained by the author: it's an experiment in your thoughts; as far as I can remember it was Griffiths)
- ansatz (that’s some kind of problem, since I use the plural in my report: “there are several ansatzs (? or ansätze?! ) to solve the problem…”),
- rückwärts (my Serbian colleague told me, that you go either forwards with your car or backwards or rückwärts)
- … and last but not least, which actually made me laugh and I still have to smile when I read it: The infamous Aha-Erlebnis. I just bumped into it, when I read the last chapter of the book (that does not imply that I read the whole book or vice versa) where the author mentions his hope to satisfy everyone’s expectations with his book (De Graef, An Introduction to Transmission Electron Microscopy):
Even if the
exchange rate is not fair, the languages have started mixing and let’s hope
that there are sensible completion and we won’t end up with an unified Kauderwelsch.
