Monday, August 11, 2014

German 4 Dummies: Märchenstunde

This noun composed of "Märchen" (fairy tale, or tall tale) and "Stunde" (hour) is not found in the German classes foreigners are invited to take but it should be in the corpus.

The common translation of Märchenstunde into English is (children's) story time, or bedtime story. French has conte {m} de fées for Märchen.

Its traditional use as story time for children is reflected in the list of web search results for "Märchenstunde". In Germany, the stories used to be mostly fairy tales, hence the name. In English speaking countries, the term reflects the audience, not the topics of narration.

That's a common feature of languages, sometimes a German term denotes the use of an instrument while the English will denote the shape or form of that instrument.
Sometimes, one language uses the name of the inventor, for instance German says Roentgenstrahlen for x-rays because Germans wanted to celebrate the name of the person who discovered them. Students of both languages often hate the fact that the English x-rays matches the name Mr. R. originally used for his discovery, X-Strahlen.

Another lovely example is McPherson strut. It is neither a type of gait nor walk named after a Mr. McPherson but an automotive assembly item called something totally different in German.

Märchenstunde in German has a second, rather remarkable use. In the parlance of government employees, it means a meeting with the higher ups, a hearing, or statement before a committee, or deliberations during the writing of a report.

In an article about the introduction of surveillance technologies in modern Germany, specifically a device called IMSI catcher for mobile phones, the researcher quotes a source who declined to be named saying: when we want a technology, we fall back on telling politicians that we need it to catch child molesters.

A meeting in which this argument is put forward as described by the researcher would very likely be called Märchenstunde by the officials who want this toy.

No comments:

Post a Comment