Plurality of meaning is something that stumps the average language tourist, and your language is a very good example. In “The Awful German Language”, the funniest single reaction to Deutsch among English speakers, Mark Twain highlights the trauma of polysemy: “The same sound sie, means you, and it means she, and it means her, and it means it, and it means they, and it means them. Think of the exasperation of never knowing which of these meanings the speaker is trying to convey. This explains why, whenever a person says sie to me, I generally try to kill him, if a stranger.” Speaking of lexical ambiguity, I always find it amusing that your word for the economy – Wirtschaft – is also your word for the pub, depending on your level of sobriety. But however slippery a perfectly engineered language such as German ends up being, nothing prepares the stranger for the awful English language when it comes to multiple meanings. For a start, as a practically non-inflected language, English enjoys a high degree of multi-functionality with verbs operating immediately as nouns and vice versa. English is the only language where you can lift a thumb and thumb a lift interchangeably. Germans learn words like go, do and know as verbs, but these same verbs function as nouns at the drop of a hat: “I’m on the go” (or very busy), “Let’s have a do” (or a party), “He’s in the know” (or well informed). Next, take the ambiguity of British and American usage, where the exact same word such as table can have perfectly opposite meanings. In the States, you table a proposal by removing it from the agenda while in England you are putting it forward for discussion. Single words like cleave can mean to split apart or stick together depending on context, helping to make English the easiest language in the world to speak badly. Whenever I finish retelling a strange incident with the typical question tag “It’s funny, isn’t it?” my German listeners are almost certain to reply: “No, it is not funny.” This is a bit like taking the question “Is the Pope a Catholic?” literally. Funny not only means funny ha-ha but funny peculiar or strange, a distinction made explicit by the English novelist Ian Hay in 1936. The Germanic tendency towards kidnapping English words for a life of slavery in Denglish reminds me of George Orwell’s description of Newspeak: “Every concept that can ever be needed will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meanings rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten”. Hey, guess what? An ‘event’ is not just a party. Believe it or not, 9/11 was an event. And ‘society’ is not just composed of high-flyers. Homeless people are significant members of society. Make-up is not only something you put on your face – you make up for lost time by working longer, you make up after a fight by apologizing, you make up a story by telling a lie and make up a solution by preparing it. Alles klar, baby? English has an estimated 3,000 homographs – words written alike but pronounced differently such as lead (guide) and lead (the metal). There are around 12,000 homophones in English, words such as no and know which are spelt differently but pronounced the same. The 500 most common words in English have 14,000 different meanings. Phrasal verbs, critical for everyday conversation, represent a minefield of multiple meanings. Top 10 verbs such as do, get, go and take are responsible for a crazy spectrum of mixed messages. To get through, for instance, not only means to reach someone by phone but to endure a rough experience (with some colleagues not such a big difference). You take your date out at the weekend but take out your next victim by murdering them, a subtle distinction. To take someone on can just as easily mean to challenge a rival as it can mean to give someone a job. With some bosses, of course, there is no contradiction. A vacuum cleaner sucks or removes dirt but a rotten deal sucks or causes grief. Neue Rechtschreibung? What a joke. Give us a few dozen German lexicographers to help organize the world’s most schizophrenic language.
