Chris Mason wrote:
Shmuel, cryptic as ever, didn't actually mention "das Weib" but I expect
that was what he meant. I can imagine a thoroughly politically incorrect -
and offensive - way I can explain why this word should be in the neuter.
It's based on the attitudes I can imagine men might adopt to women of a
certain age around the time the German language was formalised - the time of
Luther I believe. At least it's "*die* Frau".
So you're positing an analogy to the English crone or hag, whom nobody
is interested in <G> Interestingly enough, Weib and Frau are generally
used for married women, but the formal definitions don't require that.
However, I believe the derogatory semantics to be fairly recent (Mozart
used "Mann und Weib und Weib und Mann" in the Magic Flute); in the
Middle Ages every able bodied person was needed to work, and it isn't
rational to offend someone whose labor you require for survival?
Since you are a germanophone perhaps you can explain why an ingénue should
be basted by the expression "Der Backfisch" - only if it isn't too offensive
and/or politically incorrect!
I checked Google (define: Backfisch), and it came back with no hits in
English, and two in German, the first of which is pretty useless,
stating only that it's equivalent to teenager, and then explaining that
based on the -teen and -zehn suffices. The second is more interesting:
" * (16. Jahrhundert) = junges Mädchen, eigentlich kleiner, zum
Backen geeigneter Fisch; vielleicht aber auch an Baccalaureus (=
anlehnend), zumal mit dem Wort zunächst die jungen, unfertigen Studenten
bezeichnet wurden; in der Bedeutung "halbwüchsiges Mädchen" ist der
Ausdruck auch in die neuniederländische Sprache - backvisch - und ins
Dänische - bakfisk - eingegangen; ein Backfischkasten neueren Datums ist
die scherzhafte Bezeichnung für ein Mädchenpensionat.
av-austria.at/body-lexikon.html "
For non-German speakers, briefly - fish used for cooking typically were
too large to fit in an oven, and were fried or boiled. Only a small fish
could be baked in the oven, hence the extension to teenagers, who aren't
full size.
Incidentally, perhaps one of the advantages of being taught a language, as
opposed to growing up with it, - perhaps the only advantage - is that books
or teachers point out some rules to help with issues such as gender
assignment which to a "native" just need to "sound right". Thus I'm pretty
sure that "-chen/-lein" isn't merely conjecture. Perhaps in English an
equivalent is instinctively knowing how to handle "night wahr?" or "n'est-ce
pas?"[2]. In Ulster there is a similar structure for an assertion of fact, a
phrase added to the end of a sentence beginning with "so".
By the time a student is in school and reading, bad habits are generally
too ingrained for correction; some of those propagate into the formal
language (e.g., the misuse of criteria and data as singular nouns).
Foreign speakers encounter cognitive dissonance due to cultural and
linguistic differences, and are more likely to solicit correction. But
some people are hopeless. For instance, it requires context to translate
"the child" into Spanish. Laziness also plays a part; I have a German
translation of Heinlein's "Farmer in the Sky", where a ferry captain is
referred to as male, but three pages later is obviously female, and the
translator didn't go back to correct the earlier reference. More amusing
is a translation of Verne's "20,000 Leagues under the Sea" (found in the
Fairfax, VA public library) in which the translator, on the trip to the
surface, has a crew member start a fire by holding a lentil up to the
sun (should have been lens), and others communicate with the submarine
over a thread (wire).
Now to get this thread back on topic, it's interesting how much
linguistic contamination there is. When I went to school, computers in
German were Rechengehirne (calculating brains); these days you can walk
into a store and buy a (very overpriced) Komputer.
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