Uff guet Schwäbisch

I kan di Schbroche ufzelle, wu i drin han gdräumd: s Englisch, s Franzesich, s Deidsch, s Schbanisch, s Kadalanisch, s Irisch un vornächd--zuem erschde Mol--s Alemannisch! S hätt e Schar vu schwiizersche Wandrfründe gää, wu a mi Hus vorbi gströmd isch, wil ihr Zug eini Banne ghaa hätt. Zersch han i si dummerwiis uf Schbanisch bigrüeßt, aba i han min Irrduem verliggerd, soball i n-ihr Banner gluegd han. Di hän gärn mit mr uf Dialägd gschwätzt un (do seller e Traum gsi hätt) i han fasch jedes Word verschdande! Eini hätt mr rächd hefli druff glupft, ass i e paar Schbroochfehler ghaa ha. I han ere ägschbliziird, ass i kei Schwiizerdeidsch schwätz sonder Badisch. (Tatsächli han i gsait, "Eigendli räd i nur Schwäbisch." I weiss wirkli nit, warum i "Schwäbisch" statt "Badisch" gsait han. Aba heisse nit alli Deidscher "Schwobe" fir di Schwiizer?)

Ik spreche germanska

I've heard people say that your brain seems to acquire new "modes" as you learn more languages. At first you have only "native mode" and "foreign mode", so if you learned only a year of French before switching to Chinese, you find yourself constantly coming up with French words when you're trying to remember Chinese vocabulary. I did that myself with Spanish when I first began taking German classes.

I eventually got over that, but I still seem to have fewer modes than languages. Dutch to me is really a kind of encoded German, and I have to keep reminding myself to rearrange the syntax and undo the Second Consonant Shift before I speak. And now I guess my brain sees Swedish as encoded Dutch, since I'm forever about to say "ik" when I mean "jag" and whenever I read the word "under" what I hear in my head is "onder".

Sankt Niklaus macht Besorgungen

Quite a haul this St Nick's. I thought I was doing all the buying when I hit the Christkindlmarket yesterday, but I came home to a grinning GWO telling me "someone broke into the house and left things". Someone who shops at the Godiva Store, apparently, since I ended up with Godiva dark chocolate pastilles, Godiva pecan caramel bark, and a Godiva Santa. In addition, mind you, to the Ueberraschungsei, Lebkuchen, and Niederegger marzipan that show up every year, not to mention the Frankfurter Brenten and Spekulatius that I picked up for good measure. Somebody is going to have to come over to help me eat all this!

The first stupid thing about the Sweets Castle on Sunday is that at noon the line was already longer than it had been Saturday night at 6:30 when Nuphy declared it ridiculous and dragged me off to One North for drinks. And this despite the fact that it was colder and windier in the sunlight than it had been in the snowy dark. No matter; I was a man on a mission so I resigned myself to waiting and fighting a claustrophobic crush inside.

The second stupid thing, however, was that the damn place was half empty. All these people standing just inside the door like idiots and plenty of room to manoeuvre on the far side of the divider. Not only were they not buying anything, many weren't even looking at anything. I waited patiently for some bovines to make a selection from the Lebkuchen assortment, but finally muscled my way in when I realised their mind were miles away. I spied sympathy in the eyes of a fellow fellow-loving fellow standing nearby and said, "I don't know what they're doing, but they sure aren't buying anything." "They were talking about tractors," he informed me. "I'm not interested in tractors. I don't go to a lot of tractor pulls."

The cashiers were pleading with people to move it along, to no avail. "Please move in! We have a ten-minute queue outside!" One of them asked me, "Do Americans like queuing?" (Ironically, it took me three tries to parse that last word when if she'd said it in German, I'd have grokked it immediately.) I didn't have an answer for that. "Germans are good at standing in queues, too," I replied. "Yes, but we don't like it!" Thankfully, though the rest of the market was much more sane.