More Language: This Time with [unrelated] pictures (Day 52)

It snowed here everyday for a week

Snow by the Marx Engles Forum

Anyway our task today is to talk more about things that are wonderful (possibly) about the German language....

Ranking in somewhere in the top ten has to be the length of its words. Let me tell you folks, what we do in a sentence, they do in a word......a word as long as a sentence that is.

To begin, Mark Twain is famously quoted as saying that "German words are so long that they have their own perspective." This is because German is what is known as an "agglutinative" tongue, that is you can stick various words together to make new compound words. This is kind of like how we stick "quick" and "silver" together to make a compound word like "quicksilver." Its a totally different word made of two totally independent words with separate meanings, kinda cool right?

German does this too, only all the time, and without the hyphens we usually use. For example:

"Flug" [flight] + "Zeug" [thing] = "Flugzeug" [Airplane or lit. "Flying thing"]

"Früh" [early] + "stück" [piece, often food] = "Frühstück" [Breakfast or lit. "Early food"]
Interesting note........think about Breakfast for a second........

"Taschen" [purse] + "dieb" [thief] = "Taschendieb" [Pick-pocket or lit. "cut-purse"]

This is generally simple but it gets a little more complicated. One can tack on adjectives, sometimes verbs, more than one noun, and generally anything else you want to the words. Also, they don't always make sense at first......

"Hubschrauber" = "Hub" [vertical lift] + "schrauber" [screw / bolt] = Helicopter

"Glühbirne" = "Glüh" [glowing] + "birne" [pear] = Lightbulb

Also the words get longer.....

Bezirksschornsteinfegermeister = Head district chimney sweep
(30 letters)

Farbenfernseherapparatekaufhäuserleiter = The manager of a store selling color TVs.
(40 letters)

And longer.....

Betäubungsmittelverschreibungsverordnung = Regulation requiring a perscription for an anesthetic
(41 letters)

Ok so...whatever you say....English has long words too......What about manichean (9 letters)? ..... What about Honorificabilitudinitatibus (the longest words Shakespeare used which weighs in at a whopping 27 letter).......what about the big Kahuna.........

Antidisestablishmentarianism

Nope, only 28 letter .... although for those wondering it actually corresponds to a political position (mainly from 19th century England) opposing the disestablishment of the Anglican church as the official Church of England, so odds are if you've ever used it in ia sentence before, you've used it wrong.

In fact the longest nontechnical word (Floccinaucinihilipilification: or the habit of estimating something as useless) is only some 29 letters long. Its claim to fame is having been created out of four seperate latin roots meaning "I don't care" by a bored student at Eton, and in turn for actually making it to print.

Fine.....what about science.....

Here we get the longest word in English! A mighty 45 letters:

Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosos, unfortunately this term, which describes the inflammation of the lungs after being exposed to a fine silica dust, was coined explicitly for the purpose of length and so the prize is better off going to the inherited disease "pseudopseudohypoparathyroidism," which despite having two "pseudos" only comes in at thirty letters.

German however is only just beginning to flex its muscles.

First off numbers are always written as single words, so the longer the number the longer the word, effectively removing the limit on how long a German word can be. For instance a small number like 7,254 is written with almost forty letter as "siebentausendzweihundertvierundfünfzig."

But the true heavy weights are things like:

Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungs-
aufgabenübertragungsgesetz (69 letters)
the "beef labeling & relegation of supervision law (voted the German "Word of the Year" in '99)" which is abreviated with as: ReÜAÜG. Your guess to the pronounciation of that is a good as mine. Thats right, the abbreviation has four vowels in a row, two of which have umlauts.

And the result of the classic German childrens game of "add things to a word until you can't" and currently out the lexicon:

Donaudampfschifffahrtselektrizitäten-hauptbetriebswerkbauunterbeamtengesellschaft

Notable for picking up a letter (one of the three f's in a row) in the most recent German language reforms this colossus features a full 80 characters, making it practically twice the length of English's champion.

And for those that are wondering it means, its the name of a prewar Viennese club: the association of subordinate officials of the head office management of the Danube steamboat electrical services.

Watch where you drop that particular word, you might end up breaking someone's foot.

Winter Comes to Alex
Alexanderplatz Berlin

Language: Sorry no Pictures (Day 45)

Well,

My time in Berlin is coming to close and before I head down to Austria for the next term I figured I'd share a few things I've encountered in picking up "German". Perhaps some of the information may even prove useful.

The first is that, startlingly, I haven't really been learning German so far, I'm learning "European." As a buy product of the fact that most of the people I interact with are other language students, many of whom already have several languages under their belt, when you don't know the German word for something you can generally just use the Latin based equivalent and the message will get across. Or for that matter, you could just talk in English, because frankly everyone already knows how to speak it proficiently (however, this is the foreign language equivalent of the dark side of the force). This last thing tends to lead to a mind-numbing feeling of "why did I even bother learning a foreign language in the first place?" every once and a while, but the trick is to lie down, let that pass over you, and then do something competent in a foreign language. You should be able to ride that high for a while.

The second is that, as far as I can tell, there are a few discrete steps to gaining language fluency.

Stage 0: Can't understand a darn thing. Generally happens to me when I hear my classmates talking in Korean.

Stage 1: Nouns and Context. Ok so you've gotten yourself a few words under your belt and can begin to understand what people are talking about when they point at an elevator and say "Fahrstuhl" [lit. far chair] this is good. This is in fact so good that it can be enormously intoxicating. There are however a couple of weaknesses inherint to this stage. One is that people tend to pay no attention to verb tense whatsoever, instead just picking out key words, i.e. I know that the man said the number thirteen and the verb to pay, so I can be reasonably confident he wants me to pay 13 euro for something. The issue is that when using a language in this way, one generally discounts entirely the words he can't uderstand so it is likely that he's only getting half the message, like the part where the man actually said "you have thirteen seconds to run otherwise you'll pay." Secondly, this sort of communication is enormously based on context. Or to put it another way, I know what you are doing, even if I can only understand a few nouns because I'm accustomed to these sort of interactions, i.e. this is the part of the day when you ask me if I want fries with that and I say, "Nein danke." However, once anything moves out of that context, the games over and your back to looking like a confused tourist.

Stage 2: Paying attention to tense. Ok, so you've got the nouns down and can recognize basic vierbs. Good. Now you need to start distinguishing between the subjunctive, the past, and the future because timing is important (especially here!). To do this you can't just pick out nouns from a sentence and arrange them. You need pay attention to the whole sentence as it comes so as to distinguish what is happening. However, once you have made it to this stage you should have a wide enough vocabulary that basic interactions don't pose a problem.

Stage 3: Dropping literal translation. Its hard, but there comes a moment when everyone realizes that direct translation between languages are practically impossible (except of course on a noun to noun level). This is especially evident when looking at particular noun/verb pairs, the use of prepositions, and the ever inpenetrable forest of ideomatic expressions (expressions like "thats a whole different kettle of fish" are deadly for noun searchers). However, only after one makes the jump away from literal translation is it possible to begin consersing with other people with any degree of speed. Words in "insert foreign tongue here" must not just bring to mind words in English, they need to lead directly both to images and sets of other words in that foreign language (just watch out for depending to heavily on overly habituated responses).

Stage 4: Playfulness (total mastery). It is at this point when poetry starts to make sense because you are able to break the rules of grammar and idiom in ways that make sense and can help convey a particular idea. It is here where, armed with the full tools of a language one can begin to express thoughts not adequately expressed through a traditional lexicon. It is here where one can use a tool to to adequately indicate one's thought. I have no idea how I'm going to get here.

This is of course difficult to do because our internal monologues are so firmly rooted within the the language we grew up with......

Bundesliga (Day 42)

The Game
Olympiastadion Berlin

So I went to see some "football" today in the typical German style. I had been told that it was a bit of a thing over here, and so when I walked into the Stadium to sit next to my 75,000 some odd companions in a sold out Olympiastadion I was fairly impressed. I was witnessing the sort of fervor reserved for the Red Sox, particularly large Nascar rallies, or the public appearances of Rock Warren. I was sitting next to several towns of people! Most of whom were in Uniform! I tried to play it cool, but I don't think it worked.

The Crowds Assemble
Olympiastadion Berlin

Needless to say, this was a Big Game. Hertha BSC (that would be Berlin's Team) was playing FC Bayern (the team from Munich) in a match that would determine the number one ranking in the Bundesliga (German Soccer League). Moreover, it was the cultural equivalent of New York taking on the state of Texas [the Bavarians, more than one exasperated North German will tell you, are a wholly different people] if everyone involved had a lot more flags. So wearing as much blue (Hertha's color) as I could, as well as about twelve shirts (its still Febuary here), I went off with my flatmate to sit awkwardly towards the Bavarian side of the Stadium.

The Hertha Fans
Ostcurve Olympiastadion

A brief note on the stadium. It is in fact the former site of the Olympic games in 1936, an event that was awkward for just about everyone, that is except for Jesse Owens, who was awesome. This was demonstrated by the large archaic staute of Aryan athletes we encountered on the way in. As such, the stadium is typical Nazi Monumentalism, built with the clear intent of countering the Coloseum in terms of grandeur (gotta beat those Latins somehow, even if there empire ended almost 1,200 years before you were born). But, like everything else in Germany, the Stadium has moved on having been the site of the World Cup final in 2004, and sporting a lovely new awning for the fans. The lesson here: Awkward history can always be covered up with a hat!

A Nice Hood Orniment
Olympic Symbol outside Olympiastadion

The game itself turned out not to dissappoint and after a hair-raising two halves, in which the ball seemed to remain permanently on the Berlin side, Hertha emerged the winner with a 2-1 score, leaving them (at least for the week) as the top seeded team in Germany. Quite the upset! And then, in typical German style everyone went home in a perfectly orderly fashion on a perfectly puntual transportation system.

Night Comes to the Football Game
Olympiastadion

Hope for Berlin
The Heavens over Olympiastadion

And Now For Things Less Serious (Day 38)

Winter in Berlin:

Light

Streetlamp Tempelhof

Its almost gone now. Today it rained instead of snowed. The cold tried its best with waves of hail but its time is nearly up. The snow of Monday barely stuck and the mercury read more than 1, sometimes ever more than three. Those who pass by in the street (Flaneurs as they call them in other lands) have dropped layers of artificial skins, and spring, we can safely say, despite the stubborn efforts of several soon to come cold snaps, is on its way.

Holocaust Memorial in the Snow / South of Unter Den Linden

I found children throwing snowballs in the middle of it when I got there. I found this uplifting.

Whats written at the top of one of the monuments

Much of this feeling comes from the sudden appearance of the light once more. You adjust to life here when it gets black at all of a few minutes after 4:00 (16:00) in the afternoon and you forget that its really making you unhappy. Then when all of a sudden it is 4:45 and you can still see three feet in front of your face, the whole world seems to come alive. And unlike finicky things like the temperature, the advance of the light is ever steady in its advance. I walk to the train now, bathed not in the early dawn, but in the full light of morning. Someday soon it may even be light when I wake up. This gives the coming of Spring a certain inevitability allowing for rationalizations like, "Yeah it may be minus 5 today with heavy winds, but I could see out the windows of the Sudkreuz S-bahn station for the first time in the month that I've been here." And because the winter is darker here and the summer lighter, the shift between the two is much more noticeable. You can feel the difference between a few days whereas in the east (which strangely is west of me) one can only look up every once and a while and notice that "oh yeah, it is getting a little lighter isn't it?"

So I thought I'd leave some parting immages of the Winter:

The Gerndarmenmarkt in Snow

Stadtmitte

No Swimmers

Unknown lake in the Grünewald [Green Forest]

Hope

Wall near Hackescher Markt

German phrase of the moment: "Die Blaue Stunde" lit. The Blue Hour or Twilight. Along with "Weiße Nacht" it is a poetic synonym for "die Dämmerung" which you may have heard of in the context of "Die Götterdämmerung" [lit. twilight of the Gods] of Wagnerian fame or from mythology where we normally call it Ragnarok.

Botanical Gardens in Winter

Near Gesundbrunnen

View of the City

On top of an old Anti-Aircraft Tower [Flakturm] in the Botanical Gardens

Building Berlin: Carl Fredrich Schinkel (Day 35)

How to Design a Capitol:

Model of the old Berlin

German Parliament Museum: Gendarmenmarkt

Every city seems to have a master architect who's name becomes intimately associated with the city. Here in America in cites New York and Los Angeles the names of planners and contentious modernizers like Robert Moses and William Mulholland tend to be spoken of in either hushed tones or with shaken heads. In Europe the most famous example may be Christopher Wren who appears to have singlehandedly built a quarter of the south of England. However, in terms of their omnipresence, all of them pale to Berlin's own Carl Friedrich Schinkel. The man seems to appear everywhere I go.

To begin with some backgound, Schinkel was Berlin's most loved and most prolific Neoclassical architect. And like all famous architects of the age he happened to be fortunate enough to be living when the Crown was spending a great deal of money on its capital city. It seems that following its liberation from Napoleon, Prussia was determined to prove its greatness "ionic-ly" via Greek Revival architecture (Roman Neoclassicalism was of course simply to French) and Schinkel was more than happy to oblige. Nonetheless much like "pogs" the fad may have gone to far.

Schinkel built this building (The Altes Museum)

To the modern viewer this may look like a bank.

Front view of the Altes Museum

He also designed the Lustgarten (Pleasure Garden) in front of it


One of his acolytes then built this museum behind it (The Alte National Galarie) which displays painting like these (which are by Schinkel) as well as numerous sculptures by and or of Carl.

Cathedral over a City

Carl Friedrich Shinkel

Interestingly, C.F.S was originally a painter until he saw Caspar David Friedrich's (Always three names with these men and always Friedrich) "Wanderer above the Sea of Fog." He was so impressed with the work that he promptly moved from painting to architecture.

To get to the museum you need to pass statues like these, that he of course designed.

How the Greek Revival Should Make You Feel

Statue of Schinkel on the Bridge to the Museum Insel

Which are across the way from Schinkel Square (Platz) a place which features this monument.

The Man Himself

Statue of Schinkel in Schinkel Platz

Behind the monument lies the Bauakademie, a school used for various purposes over the year, and which was designed by our good friend Carl Friedrich. Which of course stands next to the Friedrichswerder Church, another Schinkel creation, which now reborn as a sculpture gallery which features the visage of the man inside.... and thats only about two city blocks......

Personally I'd say he might have deserved the rather famous Iron Cross for all of his labors but he was the guy to design it to begin with.
.

Iron Cross circa 1813 : A Schinkel Design

Art: Part 3 (Day 30)

Viewing art:

How I feel sometimes [Note the eyes]

Fish (I think?) In the Ethnologisches Museum

As I alluded to a few posts ago, I've been having some trouble with viewing art (particularly that of the modern persuasion) in museums. I wanted to share some of your troubles in the hopes of getting your feedback on them.

First, I've grown unsure of the manner in which I ought to observe it. Am I meant to be a passive watcher who simply notes, ah yes indeed this does indeed depict Fredrick the Great leading his armies against so and such, how very interesting indeed! Or am I supposed to look deeper within a work to find some sort of secondary (or even tertiary meaning). This has been one of the deeper conflicts I've had with my art education as a whole. That is to say, ought I, as my instructors do, constantly search for a deeper meaning within a piece? Or can, as Freud so famously said in response to one of his students asking about the symbolism of the long pipe he was smoking, "a pipe be just a pipe"?

The constant attempt to find some sort of meaning within an artistic work can be a tiring process, or sometimes a frivolous one at best. There are of course obvious cases for which a political interpretation is necessary, Goya's Third of May comes to mind, but there are also other instances (like a still-life) for which it would be equally hard for the casual observer to make a decent argument about the deeper meaning of an artist's beliefs.

Kind of hard to ignore the political message here....

The academic response of course is that we allow the researcher the ability to be able to well reasoned interpretations of a particular work. Still this brings up its own host of problems. First, which material is considered acceptable to base an argument upon, for instance, ought a contemporary event matter much if we can't guarantee the artist cared about it? Ought we consider the biography of the artist at all when viewing the work?

Similarly to history's eternal debate between Thomas Carlyle's belief that "The history of the world is but the biography of great men," and the combined forces of Herbert Spencer and just about everyone else, all of whom come out on the side of historical context and social pressures shaping events, art history is constantly engaging in a debate about how much to use social and biographical context to better understand a work of art. Obviously if context matters than the biography of the artist becomes integral to any deeper reading of the work. Still its not very clear that it ought to matter, as a fair number of people feel that as soon as a work is created we are free to interpret it as we choose (presumably independent of context). However even this kind of seductive psuedo-relativism is, it poses a a problem because it begs the question asked by every high school english student, if the work is what it means to me, why bother with all this interpretation? Why is interpretation meaningful? Why don't I just say that every dead pigeon I see in a 17th century Dutch still-life is a metaphor for Christ and be done with all of this?

The fact of the matter is that this relativism is dissatisfying (at least for me) much in the same way that merely accepting another persons interpretation of a work is, when reduced fully to its logical extreme it fails to produce a (personally) satisfying result.

To take this back to more mundane level, I find myself always asking whether I ought to read the little placards that accompany paintings or not because I know full well that they will affect my understanding of the work in front of me. Moreover, they provide one with the incredible ability to be able to categorize particular works of art (I.e. that painting was some stereotypical French post-impressionist mumbo-jumbo) without giving any sense of the work itself. Guys, remember, labels like that are arbitrary, if art is supposed to have any capacity to move the viewer it won't be able to do so by being called "mannerist" it will do so by showing you the emotional state of a particular individual, by documenting a particular event, or in short by evoking some sort of intellectual/emotiv response from the viewer. The important thing is the painting not the placard.

So far the way of thinking about art that has resonated most with me was one we discussed recently in a class I took last semester. That is that art is a process with the capacity to move and actively change the individual. That if one takes a step back from a truly inspiring work of art and allows that piece to become itself (to in the words of philosophers wiser than myself "allow the thing to thing itself" or to come into its own) without forcing it into a system of categorization or of one's personal understanding of the world, one allows himself to be changed by art. The piece views can then crash through his understanding of the world (in a way that may be as scary as it can be profound) and fundamentally alter the individual. Or to put it in more philosophical terms, art can allow earth (the real world) to crash through world (our conception of reality and the way we order our lives) in a way unimaginable moments before. Not every piece will do this, but the possibilty exists for all of them. That so far is what I look for at art Museums, the opportunity for art to change me.

As a result, it was all the more shocking to find myself confronted with a diagram of this theory when I walked into an exhibit on Paul Klee at the Neue National Galerie. Still regardless of this, I'd love to hear about how you, Dear Reader, think about art yourself. Send me an e-mail, comment or the like if the spirit moves you, but please let me know if you have thoughts on the matter regardless of when you stumble across this post.

One Example of Moving Art For Me

Peace [Burial at Sea] / J.M.W. Turner