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

[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.