This blog started off as a place for me to post paper commentaries for a computer networking course at Berkeley, but I'm commandeering it for my travel journal. I won't be attempting to write something everyday, but I will be using it over the course of the next 6 months to post things of interest about projects I'm working on, as well as Switzerland, the people, and the language(s) around me.
After a grueling 18+ hour-long journey that took me through Atlanta, Chicago, and Sweden, I made it to Zurich. Fortunately, signs in the Zurich airport are written in English, as I understand approximately one word of Swiss German. Swiss German is quite different from high German, "standard" German. Now, high German is rarely described as being a fun or romantic language.. but I find it to be one of the cutest languages I've ever heard, namely because of the vocabulary. While English speakers are no strangers to compound words, they typically reserve compounds for more complicated concepts. Not the case in German.
Take "airplane," for example. A simple enough word for a simple enough concept, right? Not in German. "Airplane" can be reduced to even simpler concepts, translating as "Flugzeug," or flight-thing. Ice skating in German becomes sled-shoe-running, glove becomes a hand-shoe, and my personal favorite is the translation for crosswalk, which is zebra-stripes. Well, the newest addition to my list of Fun German Compounds is Kuschelwetter. I heard this word used on a German news channel for the weather forecast. Kuschelwetter describes wet, gray, rainy weather, and what does it translate to? Cuddle-weather. Whoever says Germans are cold and impersonal clearly never visited in autumn.
