Dublin drawl, German news
Hi,
Today I learned the best fact ever: the drawled vowels of a proper Dublin accent came originally from the Vikings. Upon discovering this, I found a clip of someone speaking Swedish and when I squinted (or did the auditory equivalent of a squint) it sounded momentarily like German in a Dublin accent. Then I stopped auditorily squinting, and it just sounded like Swedish again. I understood a fair bit; Swedish and German are nearly as close to one another as Italian is to Spanish. I think you also get better at parsing between related languages the more experience you have with it. Instinctively our brains filter out languages we don't speak and give us anxiety when we try to tune in. This psychological barrier erodes with time; you get better at tolerating ambiguity, and therefore — paradoxically — at spotting patterns.
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Something else I wanted to consider: what the Germans are saying about that moment at Trump's inauguration.
It's early days, but Der Spiegel has already given us a sterling candidate for most 2025 headline: 'That was definitely a Hitler salute'. Others hedged the charge, calling it a Rome salute (so, a Hitler salute) or a Geste, die an Hitlergruß erinnert. I haven't translated that last one because I think it's an excellent example of how you can obfuscate in German if you want to. There's no literal way to transpose it into natural English. Word-for-word, it would be: gesture that reminds of the Hitler salute. You could say 'gesture reminiscent of the Hitler salute', or 'gesture that evokes the Hitler salute', but to my ear neither of these quite achieves the German original's combination of superficial clarity and actual vagueness. The verb 'remind' sounds firmer and more direct than either its softer adjectival form or the wispy 'evoke'. But who's being reminded, and who's still claiming to have missed the memo? The phraseology evades such questions.
There's an article I found interesting in the Berliner Zeitung which consults a Berlin judge over whether Musk's moment would be legally punishable. The judge Kai-Uwe Herbst says that knowingly raising your right arm is already grounds for an accusation, but you need to prove that the person in question knew it was a Hitler salute. Herbst and another lawyer draw a theoretical distinction between doing it to be provocative versus actually subscribing to Nazi ideology. But the gesture itself is objectively punishable regardless; in order to ward off a habituation effect, German law focuses on upholding the taboo.
From earlier this month, there's a good Spiegel article on Musk's support of the AfD and his connection with the CEO of the Springer publishing house. For those who missed it (I do not blame you; we have far too much news as always), on 28 December Die Welt am Sontag published a guest editorial from Musk encouraging Germans to vote for the antisemitic, anti-Muslim, anti-democratic Alternative für Deutschland in the upcoming snap election. All hell broke loose, of course. As a piece of journalism, I think the article does a great job of letting the context of American imperialism speak for itself. The authors never make the charge directly, but it's plain to see from how they lay out the facts. Musk received this platform in a country he has no real connection to. As a native English speaker at the heart of U.S. power, he was confidently enabled to stage an intervention 'that one could charitably describe as "undercomplex"'. (People think of German insults as throaty slapstick compound nouns. But the best German insults are these surgical little asides; they're not mad, they're disappointed.)
To be clear, the anglophone arrogance isn't the worst thing here. The worst thing is supporting the AfD.
Meanwhile, Musk's Rome-based advisor Andrea Stroppa attributed the salute to Musk's autism. Ma daaaai! As someone autistic who has henceforth gone my entire life without once sieg-heiling — not even for a treat — I would urge you to consider that maybe he just likes Nazis.
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I'm typing this in London and will soon head back out into the cold. I've noticed something but I'm not sure if it's new: people with London accents using reflexive pronouns in a subject and object position, the same way Irish people do. 'Will that be all for yourself?', 'You can call myself if you need anything', etc.
In Irish English, it comes from a couple of things i nGaeilge. We have emphatic pronouns, so that e.g. the subject form of I/you/he/she/we/you pl./they can be translated as mé/tú/sé/sí/muid/sinn/sibh/siad if it's not super-important in the sentence or mise/tusa/seisean/sise/muidne/sinne/sibhse/siadsan for emphasis. The implications are fairly similar to saying 'hago/faccio' versus 'yo hago/io faccio' in Spanish/Italian. Since these emphatic pronouns don't exist in English, saying 'myself' instead of 'I' was probably how our ESL ancestors transposed the nuance. There's also literally more use of reflexive pronouns in Irish than in English; you say 'mé féin' more often than a speaker of international English would say 'myself'.
No idea if Londoners caught this trend from some wave of Irish immigration or if the overlap is coincidental. (There are similar questions over the habitual be in AAVE.) Also not entirely sure if it's actually widespread at all, or if it's the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon pulling its usual tricks on me.
Anyway. What a week.
Till next time,
N