"What's that you said?"

Living in the German-speaking part of Switzerland, which I and my family did for a time in the 70’s, is something which scars, sorry, marks you for life. Language is a major barrier. Swiss German is as rich and as valid a national language as Dutch, but for some reason, the Swiss have relegated it to a dialect: all official communications, spoken or written, are in Hoch Deutsch (High German) , that is, the formal language of Germany. The result is, given that the Swiss actually HATE High German, that they refuse to speak “proper German”, but resent any foreigner who tries to speak Swiss German. I tried a few times and grew very sad very quickly.

Forget it. Personally, I love all kinds of German. I love a language that can produce words like Dampffschifffahrtsgesellschaftskapitänsgemahlin and Generaloberfinanzkriegsunddomänendirektorium (blame Frederick the Great for the latter). I love a language that can build from “krank”, meaning “ill”, to “krankenwagen” (ambulance) and “krankenhaus” (hospital) to “krankenschwester” (nurse). I love a language that produces literalnesses like “Auspuff” for a car’s exhaust, and “Durchfluss”, literally “through-flow”, for diarrhoea. When you arrive at a carpark, you go in via the “Einfahrt” and leave via the “Ausfahrt” – the former sounds to me like a painful experience.

But wait. That noiseless “fahrt” comes from the verb “fahren”, meaning “to go other than on foot”. If you go on foot, the verb is “gehen”. And if you think that is complicated, welcome to Russian, which not only distinguishes between going on foot (xhodit’)and going in a vehicle (yezdit’), but has parallel verbs for all sorts of other activities which may be carried out on foot or in a vehicle (come, jump, fall, arrive, depart, carry, bring, take, fetch, etc). Add to that that each of these pairs of verbs has an imperfective and a perfective form (aspect) depending on whether the action is perceived as ongoing or completed and you have a conjugation of verb forms that makes Latin look like Esperanto. Someone once described these things as "the diseases of language" and he was probably right, but for me they are all part of the fun of being unable to communicate with 90% of the human race.