TSCHLAND!

I think you can tell a lot about a culture by the way their language is constructed. Take Chinese, for example. Wikipedia told me that there are approximately 47,035 characters in their dictionary (which all look the same to me.) A character stands for a syllable, not an entire word. A typical word is constructed of two or three characters. Full literacy takes knowledge of 5,000 characters, which combine to form thousands of different words. What does this tell you about Chinese culture? They are complex and detail oriented. They are also not very practical - apparently standing in line is a skill that Chinese officials recently taught people for the upcoming Olympics.

English is made up of a bunch of other languages. Our words come from a mix of the Germanic languages, Latin, and French. We have over 600,000 words in our dictionary, with 25,000 being added each year. What does this say about English-speakers, Americans in particular? We take things from other cultures and pretend we invented them. We use multiple words that have basically the same meaning. If we can't think of exactly the right term, we make one up. "Giant" and "enormous" didn't quite capture what we meant, so we created "ginormous." Things are overly complicated in English - think about white paint colors. We have eggshell, winter white, ivory, cream, foam, natural white, "antique white USA", chalk, baker's white, kitten white, white swan, berkshire white, flour... and yes, I did look all of those up. Is that really necessary? It's white paint. Figure it out.

Frau Frei used to say that German doesn't have many words, but they are put together in interesting ways. Mostly, their words describe the functionality of something. Instead of "refrigerator," they have "kuhlschrank" which literally means "cold cabinet." Bicycle is "fahrrad" or literally, "drive wheel." Very practical people. This relatively smaller vocabulary gives the Germans a reputation of being incredibly blunt - small differences between the meanings of English words are not understood by a German speaker. They don't have fifty words for the color "white" in German. It's just fucking white.

This bluntess is rubbing off on me. I'm not sure if it's a good thing or a bad thing. Honestly, I think it just makes people uncomfortable.

Oh well. Change of subject. Last night was interesting. Don't worry parents, I didn't get drunk and ridiculous. I met a few new people who thought I was 27 years old. When I told them no, I am only 20, they looked at me like I had three heads. So when I'm 40, I guess I'll look 80. Sweet. The game was good though - Germany won!! EM Finals here we come...

On the downside, I got virtually no sleep and am a little bit cranky today. For example, there is this woman in my office who is always ridiculously happy about everything, and I mean everything. If she laughs at one more not-funny joke, I might go insane.

*Big breath.* I'm putting on some good music and getting some coffee. That will make things better.


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