puzzling

[ratcreature]

I don't understand how people who try to insert German endearments into their Charles/Erik fanfic end up with female endings. I get that English is deficient when it comes to the concept of grammatical gender, but the auto-translate bots tend to default to male (e.g. if you enter "my Beloved" into Google translate it gives you "mein Geliebter" as first choice not "meine Geliebte" though it gives you neuter if you don't capitalize, presumably because it assumes some noun ought to follow and is indecisive or something), and plenty of endearments authors could pick are the same for both genders anyway (e.g. "mein Schatz"). So how do authors arrive at the female endings? An additional question is of course whether Erik would choose German of all things as his love language to begin with.

Comments

[saraht]

German case endings are HARD, that's why!

It appears that German is Erik's native language--it's the language he speaks with his mother in Shaw's office--so I doubt it's a "choice," per se.

[ratcreature]

German has only three genders and four cases, Latin is way worse!

I'm still dubious that endearment insertion would work this way. He's clearly fluent in English, so IMO littering his English with German endearments would take extra effort and a choice.

In my experience of how the language switch from German/English works in my head, the thoughts tend to stay in one language unless I stumble over something that I know only in one language or the other, like you stumble when you can't think of a word. It's not like you translate in your head once you managed to become fluent in a foreign language. I only do that for languages where I have to struggle to make a sentence. So why would endearments be different from other words, except less generic ones that are more like names perhaps. Maybe such mix and match happens in true bilingual environments where people codeswitch all the time or something.

[saraht]

Nope, still hard. Especially because you have case-declination *and* a partially-fixed word order, which is just overkill.

What you are overlooking is that the Chris Claremont X-Men, which featured an international team, had a bunch of characters who were always peppering their conversation with the same three or four foreign words. Because they were foreign, y'know. It's a convention and it will probably live on forever.

In this particular case, I might defend it by saying that I doubt that Erik has been much in the habit of using endearments in *any* language he learned after the age of eleven, and endearments really are an emotional category of language all their own, so I could see that kind of lapse back in an intimate moment. I mean, it's one thing to *know* that "sweetheart" or "darling" are fair English translations of Schatz, it's quite another to feel that they have the same emotional force.

[ratcreature]

I suppose. I don't tend to use endearments myself in any language, so I probably can't judge. (And my parents used nicknames derived from their first names for each other, and stupid pet names for only their kids, e.g. in they called me "Tüffelchen" of all things, which is "little potato" from the Low German "Tüffel" meaning both potato and "inept, clumsy person", so I could probably claim emotional scarring just from that, though admittedly "Mäuschen" also featured, which is nicer.) But in any case if authors want to go that route they need to make sure the words are right.

Bu if it's any consolation, iirc as a long term historical trend case endings are on the decline in German, in that several are already look the same and fall together. And just look at the genetive which is practically extinct already in spoken language, so it will only be a few more centuries at most until it's like English. Which might be why the word order isn't as flexible as in Latin.

[saraht]

Little Potato! I find that oddly charming.

[shadowvalkyrie]

My mom used to call me "Schneckchen", which isn't much better. I understand why you'd use something like "dear" or "kitten", but most snails/slugs are so fundamentally lacking in adorableness, I don't get it. Same with the potatoes. "Muffin", "sugar", or "honey", I get (hate, but get), but potatoes? Maybe German is just generally horrid at endearments. :D

[ratcreature]

Yeah. It makes you wonder where the now somewhat obsolete slang usage of "Schnecke" for an attractive woman came from too.

[shadowvalkyrie]

Same here! If I've been in the mode of one language for a while it becomes physically hard to switch. I even pronounce my own name differently when I tell it to an English person, simply because there's a different spectrum of sounds I currently have available. I'm not doing it for the listener's convenience, but because switching pronunciation (and voice pitch, and rhythm, and...) for just a word or two would require too much effort to be worth it, unless I'm trying to make a point, and it wouldn't happen subconsciously, either.

[ratcreature]

Yeah, I usually need a slight pause for my name not to garble, so I can see how different pronunciation even for the own name can happen, especially with names that exist the same in both languages but sound different, like "Michael" or the like. With my name I dislike both the related English versions of it and the messed up pronunciations English native speakers tend to adopt when seeing the German spelling, so need to switch, but yes, it's extra effort.

[yvi]

I'm not sure I could continue reading after such things - first I'd laugh and then wonder whether finding someone to double-check the German was really that hard.

[ratcreature]

The errors are not as hilarious as what happens in commercial comic books. I still remember a Daredevil comic I read where I had to translate German words backwards to figure out what they started out with in English. The best example was when one called the other "Früchtekuchen" because they wanted the English insult "fruit cake" for a crazy person...

Mostly I'm baffled because they artificially make it hard on themselves. It's not like they really needed to insert German endearments in the first place with Erik.

But I'm generally a forgiving reader, and I have soldiered on through worse. I once read a fanfic that wasn't bad as such, but the author had a truly awful problem with homonyms. Every other sentence I had to read a word out loud to understand a sentence that was on the surface completely nonsensical, but actually the author had just written a word which sounds the same or very similar to the word they wanted, but which would have been spelled completely different. Of course this kind of thing could only happen in a language like English which such messed up writing system, but still. That really made reading difficult.

[marag.livejournal.com]

I would tend to think that German would be the *last* language Erik would use for endearments, at least consciously. There's probably an intriguing story in the idea of his conscious hatred for the Nazis and what that does to him, vs. his unconscious and its memories of family and being loved.

However, I feel sure that people probably aren't telling that story ;)

[ratcreature]

Yeah. I suppose there were a variety of reactions from holocaust survivors to continued use of German as their language afterwards, so I can see different scenarios for Erik, but I admit that I don't find it that likely that he'd mix German endearments into English dialog. I mean, in my experience of how my language switches from German/English works in my head, the thoughts tend to stay in one language unless I stumble over something that I know only in one language or the other, like you stumble when you can't think of a word. It's not like you translate in your head once you managed to become fluent in a foreign language, I only do that for languages where I have to struggle to make a sentence. So I expect the insertion of generic German endearments into English context to take extra effort, rather than something that slips through like a childhood nickname might, and I don't really see that happening for Erik. It might be different for people who grow up bilingual and codeswitch in mid-sentence or something.

[miss-porcupine.livejournal.com]

I can't see him using German for affection, at least unironically. In an AU where I can see Erik using endearments, I wonder if he wouldn't use Yiddish -- it was certainly the language of endearments when I was growing up, both to children and between adults. And he's probably at least partially fluent in it, if not completely.

[ratcreature]

Whether he spoke Yiddish at home would probably also depend on where his parents were from, and how assimilated they were. If they were German Jews it's probably less likely than if they were from more Eastern parts like Poland or the Ukraine.