Sep. 22nd, 2014 12:06 pm
Echt Berlinisch
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muckefuckOn the flight to St Louis, I stumbled over this passage in Fontane, equal parts amusing and baffling:
When I finally had a few moments to myself on BIL's machine, I was able to pull up this helpful page, which decoded not just this but all of the "Berolinisms" of Fontane's work. I guess I associate initial voicing so strongly with the South that it had never occurred to me to map Borré to Porree. And since when do Berliners have a special thing for leeks anyway? I guess since at least the late 19th century.
This is a vegetable I would've called Lauch anyway. At first, I thought that preference was due to cognatehood, but according to Wikipedia, that is actually the traditional designation "in der deutschsprachigen Schweiz, in Baden-Württemberg, Saarland, Rheinland-Pfalz, im südlichen Hessen und gestreut in Österreich und dem westlichen Bayern"--in other words, precisely and perversely those parts of the German Sprachraum where one expects to find French loanwords. Maybe Kluge can make some sense of that distribution, but I can't.
My Thuringian coworker natively says Borree, but today I found another term which left her scratching her head as well: Peden. It appears coupled with Nesseln and thus indicates some sort of weed, but damned if we can figure out which. Surely not a dialectal rearrangement of Beten, oder?
[D]er richtige Berliner überhaupt nur drei Dinge brauche: eine Weiße, einen Gilka und Borré.I correctly guessed that the first thing was Berliner Weiße. In hindsight, I should've recognised Gilka as well, since it's a brand of Kööm I've run into before, and not just at Gene's. But Borré really had me stumped, since all it brought to mind was French bourré, which didn't seem to fit the context in the least.
When I finally had a few moments to myself on BIL's machine, I was able to pull up this helpful page, which decoded not just this but all of the "Berolinisms" of Fontane's work. I guess I associate initial voicing so strongly with the South that it had never occurred to me to map Borré to Porree. And since when do Berliners have a special thing for leeks anyway? I guess since at least the late 19th century.
This is a vegetable I would've called Lauch anyway. At first, I thought that preference was due to cognatehood, but according to Wikipedia, that is actually the traditional designation "in der deutschsprachigen Schweiz, in Baden-Württemberg, Saarland, Rheinland-Pfalz, im südlichen Hessen und gestreut in Österreich und dem westlichen Bayern"--in other words, precisely and perversely those parts of the German Sprachraum where one expects to find French loanwords. Maybe Kluge can make some sense of that distribution, but I can't.
My Thuringian coworker natively says Borree, but today I found another term which left her scratching her head as well: Peden. It appears coupled with Nesseln and thus indicates some sort of weed, but damned if we can figure out which. Surely not a dialectal rearrangement of Beten, oder?
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Fwiw, I hadn't heard of Gilka, Borré, wouldn't know what it was.
I know the term Porrée but where I grew up (Palatinate), or am now (Berlin), I only ever hear or see Lauch.
Peden? Beats me.
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