I don't pay nearly enough attention to France. I have to pause and think before I can distinguish Nicolas Sarkozy and Michel Houellebecq. This doesn't mean that I should pay any attention to whichever of the two is the novelist who lives in Ireland, of course.

posted at: 16:27 | path: /hexagone | permanent link to this entry

There's a huge amount of received opinion about German in the UK, and I'm yet to come across a single piece of it that's not thoroughly misleading. Take this article in The Observer, for example.

The writer claims in the first paragraph that "you can pretty much make up [English] as you go along... unlike French and German, which are made rigid from committees deciding from on high whether or not new words or spellings should be admitted to the official lexicon."

Unlike the OED, I suppose. The writer also seems to assume that whereas we, in the UK, write down words without checking whether they're in the dictionary, foreigners can't.

Looking no further than the headlines in yesterday's taz, I find Asyl im Ego-Shooter-Land, Knietief im Prollfloor and Leben in Call Center, none of which have been cleared by the Dudenredaktion or the Rat für deutsche Rechtschreibung, or hyphenated consistently with one another.

All I can recommend is that if you're British, and about to mention German as an example of something, check first with a German or speaker of German. If you can't find either of those, use a better example.

posted at: 10:27 | path: /D | permanent link to this entry