German words also traveled to present-day Tanzania, a former German colony. "After 1945, German was not a language you were proud of," he said. "The Hebrew language was modernized in the 1920's and 30's and many people in Jewish Palestine were of a German background, or they were eastern Europeans who culturally took German as a model," Haspelmath said.Īll of that was changed by the Holocaust. The Hebrew term "gan yeladim" is an exact translation of the German term "Kindergarten," a garden of children. The Hebrew word for newspaper, "iton," comes from another word for time, similar to "Zeitung" in German, Haspelmath said. The German word "Strudel" is often used in Hebrew for the symbol some cases, German words weren't transferred literally into the language, but were translated. It was Germany's high international standing that brought a few German words into the Hebrew language, including "Schalter" (switch), "Biss" (bite) and "Schluck" (sip), as well as more technical terms like "Pachtel" (trowel) and "Beton" (concrete). Later, in the 1920's and 1930's, intellectuals were attracted to Germany, in part because of the many Nobel Prizes that were won by Germans during that time: Albert Einstein (1921), Thomas Mann (1929), Carl Bosch (1931), to name a few. The University of Leipzig, Haspelmath said, was an uncontested leader in linguistics around the turn of the 19th century and garnered a lot of prestige.
Other examples from Limbach's book include the German word "Organ" (organ) as "orugoru" in Japanese or "arubeito" from the German "Arbeit" (work). This connection may have resulted in the Japanese word "noiroze," a derivation of the German "Neurose" (neurosis). In the 1860's, the Japanese modeled both their university and healthcare systems on those of Germany and many of Japan's aspiring doctors traveled to Germany to study medicine. The prestige of German culture in the 18th and 19th centuries extended beyond eastern Europe, Haspelmath added.
But "Anschlag," an old-fashioned German word referring to a placard, came to mean a successfully sold-out theater performance in Russian. "Schlagbaum" means barrier or tollgate in both Russian and German. German culture was particularly admired in Japan in the 19th century In her book "Ausgewanderte Woerter" ("Migrated Words"), Jutta Limbach from the German Language Council said there are many German words used in Russian today, though not always with the same meaning as in German. Russian royalty was often of German descent, such as Prussian-born Catherine the Great who reigned in Russia from 1762 to 1796. Subsequent generations traveled frequently to Germany, bringing back German culture and vocabulary. In Russia, he added, "it was exclusively the prestige of the German culture" that brought over vocabulary from the German language.Įighteenth- and 19th-century Russians were often bilingual and many studied in Europe. "These are countries where the ruling class was traditionally German," he said. The Czech Republic, Haspelmath said, was a traditionally German-speaking area, with Franz Kafka the most well known German-speaking writer born and raised in Prague. "Germany in the 19th century was at the top of the world and everyone looked up to Germany in the sciences, technology and humanities," he said. Russia's history of German cultural and lingustic influence dates back to the 18th and 19th centuriesĪccording to Martin Haspelmath, senior linguist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, major central European languages borrowed many words from German partly due to Germany's prestigious image in the 18th and 19th centuries.