I'm not saying that there could be nothing more sexy than what a German woman does with her throat and lips when pronouncing the word Orangensaft ("orange juice"). I'm open minded. I'm willing to entertain other possibilities. Maybe I'm unduly influenced by knowing that German Saft is the same word as English "sap," but with the vowel broadened and lengthened; with the final consonant eased lovingly over the lower lip, and finally sent on its way with a teasing tap of the tongue, so that it's pronounced something like "zoft." The sap of oranges. The soft of oranges. (Zaftig, Yiddish zaftik, is another cognate: full of juice, running over with sweetness.) But of course it's the 'r' of Orange, way deep in the throat between those two back-vowels, that sets the stage. After that, who has much left in the way of defenses? And then you get the rich 'g', the same consonant as we get in the middle of "pleasure" or "azure." You're lost before you even get to the Saft.
There are people who think German is an ugly language, presumably having formed their impression from the tense Prussian whine of Colonel Klink on Hogan's Heroes. Whatever.
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I - German native speaker - just tried this out and said Orangensaft a couple of times in what I thought was sensous and sexy and my man - English native speaker - just laughed and shook his head...
Well, it was worth a try.
I guarantee it will work on me, Sabine :-)
Must depend on the regional accent. I've heard thick, hard German, and soft, deep German. I don't know which areas produce which, only that they are drastically different.
Oh, and you have a fetish. Sounds a pretty benign one.
Let's just say cathexis, Joan :-)
All the Germanic languages do it for me, Old English most of all.
All the German I know comes either from opera or from reading too much psychoanalytic theory in grad school. (I can say things like "repetition compulsion" or "Time is a very strange thing," but not "Where's the bathroom?") This post makes me want to learn a lot more of it.
I grew up with a choice of studying German or French (and was required to have some exposure to both in my late single digits).
I experienced French as an ever-melting soup of vowels, with half-dissolved bits of consonant floating here and there. To a kid, it was icky the way all gooey things are.
I experienced German as a clear, sharp series of sounds, rather like the sound of a water flowing over rocks and splashing into pools.
The sex happened, and I was besieged in grad school by French theorists demanding that dissolution and melting are the essence of eros, which is of course the master metaphor for life and death. As I believed them, as young people do.
You're helping me recover. I still study French, but not for the sex.
Ah, you've missed out somewhat on the German that feels like home then, Amanda. To me all the Germanic languages feel very homely -- in the old sense of the word -- comfortable and unpretentious, nice sturdy knockabout languages, with the open continental vowels but nice clear consonants and sentence structures that leave you in no doubt about where the sentence begins and ends. It's largely the cognates with the simplest shortest English words that does it. I fell deeply in love with Old English as soon as I saw it, and learned it almost without conscious effort, it felt so very right to me: I remember my grad school friends being spooked by the fact that by 2nd term I could read Beowulf aloud straight out of the book, and understand it, with no glosses or notes.
Jarrett, it's amazing how many things we believed, isn't it? I was struck the other day with the thought -- what if Rieff was just plain *wrong* about "the triumph of the therapeutic" being the end of civilization? What if it's not necessarily sloppy and self-indulgent at all, but completely compatible with high standards and discipline and all that? There were a lot intellectual moves that look very flimsy to me now, that I took for gospel, because they were so very clever (and because they meant that everything I knew and felt was wrong, which I always found terribly seductive.) Now to some of them I just go -- huh? Why?
:~D
I like Jarrett's comparison too. Oddly enough I just detoured here from a work-related search on phrasal verbs (and where Globish stands on them), and was just thinking about the fused and screwed together bits and pieces that make up much of English. I loved learning German at first, but came unstuck on the compound words, stopped being able to recognise the parts of them and make sense of them. But I still love the sound of it. And I too always liked 'Saft', and the sap connection; 'Apfelsaft' is also very pretty to me.
(Most Anglophone kids, it seems use nothing but phrasal verbs until the age of about ten. That's just by the way.)
Lucy, my Korean stepfather had -- still sometimes has -- great trouble with phrasal verbs. The fact that you could say "pick up all your stuff" or "pick all your stuff up" troubled him, and the distinction between them and "pick your stuff all up" -- there is a distinction, "all" goes with the picking-up in that case, not with the stuff -- maddened him. He used to accuse us of making up the rules as we went.
Yes but if you use the object pronoun you can only put it between the verb and the particle, 'pick it (all) up', not 'pick up it'.
My good Dutch friend, with whom I rarely have to stop and explain or think about anything I say in English, even when we are speaking French at the same time, still can't really get phrasals, even the ones that aren't true phrasals, and talks of 'coming over' things rather than getting over them, a half way point I suppose between overcoming and getting over.
I have been regaling my students today with the true story of the Chinese pilot told by a desperate air traffic controller to 'Pull up!', whose last recorded words on the black box were asking his co-pilot what 'pull up' meant, before they hit the mountain in the fog.
The controller should, of course, have said 'Climb!' which is the standard ATC English term. A salutary tale for any who would make glib assumptions about what constitutes plain English...
Back to sex now, I'm afraid. The points for German are all well made and taken here. But a French woman (well, the one I'm thinking of) saying, "oranges" slowly always did it for me: a husky voice lifting off the glottal 'r' and then making of the soft 'g' a sort of unvoiced fricative, a sliding 'shh' that elided into the sibilant at the end.
Okay, back to the phonics, everyone.
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