Legal Ramblings
[ Monday, February 20, 2006 (1:33 AM) ] ( link )
Swiss-German: According to somebody I spoke to this weekend, you cannot learn Swiss-German simply by learning the vocabulary and grammar of the language. That's because Swiss-German invests non- or extra-denotative meanings in highly ritualistic phrases, sentences, and even multi-party exchanges. Of course, every language does this (metaphor and allusion are the two most obvious examples), but supposedly this phenomenon is unusually strong in Swiss-German.
We chanced upon this discussion when some people asked the Swiss-German speaker what the Swiss-German analogues were to various four-letter words. (What, did you think we were just casually discussing morphemes?) According to him, there weren't any; at least, none with the same sort of punch as a real Swiss-German insult. And those insults took the form of ritualistic phrases and elaborate exchanges (e.g., "Your mother is of low birth," "Your father milks cows in the evening" (I made up the latter one)) that are hard to translate into English.
Actually, the whole discussion reminded me of the hilarious insult "duels" in Monkey Island (see here, here, and here), but I did not share this particular connection to the highly educated group.
UPDATE: Here's why my friends are awesome. Steve P. writes in to say: This reminds me of what I learned was the worst insult you could say to a Frenchman. In English, it's "You f--- like a Spanish Cow." I forget the French.
The interesting part is that it's the "like a Spanish Cow" bit that makes it really insulting, and telling a Frenchman that he, for example, "files his taxes like a Spanish Cow" would be almost as bad.
On a more academic note, James points to this paper by Harvard's Stuart Schieber, which presents a formal proof about "the weak context-freeness of natural language." The paper is ostensibly about Swiss-German but, in reality, is about how unbelievably weird linguistics is. Take, for instance, the following quotation: Swiss German, like Dutch, allows cross-serial order for the structure of subordinate clauses. Of critical importance is the fact that Swiss German requires appropriate case-marking to hold even within the cross-serial construction.
I have no idea what he's talking about, although I wouldn't be surprised if James did.
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