Jump to content

Talk:List of German expressions in English

Page contents not supported in other languages.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Luftmensch

[edit]

What about Luftmensch?

 Sorry, I am a German native speaker, but I have never heard the word "Luftmensch", neither in German nor in English. --84.138.102.157 (talk) 18:01, 1 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Why only nouns?

[edit]

So far, the page practically discusses only borrowings and adaptations of *nouns* from German into English. Why the limitation to nouns? There are German borrowings and adaptations of other forms of speech too. Two examples:-

'Hopefully' (adv.) has now widely acquired, in English, a meaning essentially the same as 'hoffentlich' in German, a meaning which can be paraphrased as: 'it is to be hoped' [e.g. that something will or won't happen]. The older meaning of 'hopefully' in English, perhaps appearing to fade out, was 'with a hopeful or optimistic attitude' (such as, for example, the apparent attitude of a pet dog looking *hopefully* at a food item in the hands of its owner, seeming to hope to be given some of the food.)

'Once' (adv.) seems to have acquired (when used with an imperative verb) a usage that parallels a German usage of 'mal'. (Perhaps in English this borrowing is regionally restricted, e.g. to areas with significant German-American roots). Examples: 'give it to me once' or 'sit down once', with parallels to German phrases such as 'Pass mal auf' (i.e. watch out (once)!) where older English would not usually include or translate the 'once' at all. Terry0051 (talk) 13:33, 29 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Are names loanwords?

[edit]

A lot of words in the article such as Frankfurter or Budweiser are based on the names of cities. Such words are usually not changed in any way other than phonology, and in this case some people will argue that the original (in this case German) pronunciation should still be used instead of an “anglicized” one. A similar thing applies to the “Selected works in classical music”, “Carols” and “Modern songs” sections: when stating the title or creator of a piece of music, you do not use it as a loanword. If I were to mention Queens “We are the Champions” in a german conversation, stating the name has no effect on “phonology, phonotactics, orthography, and morphology”, as is defined in the main “Loanword” Wikipedia Article. Even if such a name is pronounced differently (such as Johann Sebastian Bach) the name stays a german word. Again, mentioning George Washington in a german conversation does not mean that I’m using an English loanword. PumaPandora (talk) 09:53, 1 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]