Wednesday, March 3, 2010

An Addendum

As a short addendum to my previous post about the Christmas market in the Autostadt, I was incorrect in stating that English was used (in this case) for its 'hip' factor.  As Vicki and I recently learned (at a lunch of traditional Russian fare with a colleague from the Ukraine and his family), the Autostadt has a different theme every year for their Weihnachtmarkt.  This year's was Britannia, and thus the English signs.  Last year's was the United States and the year before that was Russia.  However, it is not uncommon to hear English words inserted in everyday language (as well as large swaths of Internet jargon pronounced German-ly) for the aforementioned 'hip' factor.  As news publications often write following corrections, I apologize for the error.

2 comments:

  1. So if Korean-English is "konglish" and Chinese-English is "chinglish" [<- that is so much more un-PC than it sounded in my head, sorry!] what might German-English be? Deutsglish? Is there a slang term used for it? Or would it be Angldeutsch, since you are in Germany and not the other way around?

    (p.s. I'm crossing my fingers that I'm spelling that remotely close)

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  2. In English the combination of German/English is usually 'Germish', but in Deutsch, the combination is 'Denglisch'.

    Also, I think that Angldeutsch would simply be English, if not old English (the first sources of the English language being from the Angles of northern Germany, Saxons from north central, and Jutes from what is now Danemark emigrating to England and combining their native languages with Latin during the Roman occupation of Britain), though I could be wrong. Any linguists out there able to shed any light here?

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