funny how
zwiebelchen?
On the markets I passed a tourist with an American accent who was saying to his companion, “Jeez. So much amazing stuff to eat and drink!” Inexplicably he managed this in a tone of complaint.
The potato lady is an old punk and always has some raddled spud which has started to send out its purplish tendrils, turned upside down for hair and with eye holes nicked in its face with a toothpick. Generally these guys will be carrying a flag or dressed in a scrap of fabric, propped up in front of middlemost bucket. I skirted the Turkish stall holders who sing their wares and scold their customers and fronted up at the endmost cheese stall, where some of the cheeses are eight years old. She also has butter, far younger, in fact churned yesterday. The woman in front of me was buying a slab of butter and as I sometimes do I composed the German sentence in my head while I was waiting. “Auch so ein Stück Butter, bitte.” Ie ‘I’ll have another such slice of butter, please.’ One of my greatest difficulties on the market is I don’t know the words for piece, slice, bunch, punnet – the collective nouns. When I came home with my basket over my arm, my friend was stretching up over her bicycle’s rump to pull my doorbell again. I told her of my triumph and we hugged each other gleefully. We are veterans of Germany’s indefatigably formal and prolonged migration processes, where ordinary German seems to acquire a top hat and a moustache. You see, I told her as we mounted the stairs to eat the Dutch pepper cake I baked this morning: I performed three distinct linguistic somersaults in a row, to get out that sentence intact. First there’s the two different Ks: auch, and Stück. The two different Us, ü and u. Then the two different but similar words, Butter which ends in a dry R, and bitte which ends in the kind of disdainful e we rarely use in Australian English. Out it came flawless. I somersaulted home.
8 comments on “zwiebelchen?”
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Thanks Cathoel. Your words transport me to where you have described. Having just experienced the joys of learning some Italian in Italy, I can relate to the struggle to grasp the subtleties that exist in every language.
I particularly like your descriptions of the people you meet: they come alive, and remind me of people I have met.
Thank you, Ian. I’m so happy to hear you say so. Because one’s observations are alive in one’s own mind it’s never possible to estimate how much/how little or them is conveyed in the words we use, to a person who wasn’t present. So thank you indeed.
You learned some Italian? What a beautiful tongue. I’d love to hear some of what you picked up.
Good for you!
Thank you Cynthia! There’s no triumph like a triumph of the tongue, eh.
(One of my linguistic triumphs was in a market in Otavalo, Ecuador, which is apparently popular with German tourists. After I made several purchases, the stall holder asked me, “You’re not German, are you?” “No,” I replied. “Why did you ask?” “Your pronunciation is too good… You’re also very polite,” was her response.
Hah, yes, those *are* in fact the two requirements for nouveau citizenship methinks…
I loved reading about your adventures in marketing and linguistics! Sharing this with my sister :)
Hello, Jameela’s sister! Isn’t it excellent how the meaning of ‘marketing’ has reversed. I like its old form, ‘buying necessities’ better than its newer version, ‘selling landfill.’