March 15, 2010

Ich bin krank.

The last day of Spring Break, I got sick. It figures. Today's the first day back in classes, but I declared a sick day. When I was a younger man, I'd've just skipped out on class and not worried too much about it, but now I feel obliged to send apologetic emails to my professors. I wrote the German prof in German, of course, so maybe she'll give me a little slack. I  guessed wrongly on the proper German sentance, though.

There's a slightly weird thing with self-reference in German, you see. In English, you would say "I am cold." That does literally translate into German: "Ich bin kalt." But saying it that way implies a permanant state, in this case that you are unemotional and unfeeling. To declare that you would be happier if the thermostat went up a little (a transient state), you'd say "Mir ist kalt," which is all kinds of strange: "mir" is the first-person dative pronoun, used when you are the indirect object of a verb. "ist" is the third-person singular form of the copula. So that sentance seems strongly ungrammatical, as it has an indirect object without a direct object. Plus the copula doesn't take indirect or even direct objects. Very strange.

At any rate, I guessed that being sick ("krank") was a transient state and thus should be expressed as "Mir ist krank." I was wrong, it should be "Ich bin krank," which is the literal translation from English. Perhaps in German there is no colloquial meaning with "sick," unlike in English? ("Man, Charles Manson was sick!" Or, for that matter, "That 540 tail-grab was sick, dude!")

Also, the whole permanant state/transient state isn't entirely consistent, either. Saying "Ich bin warm," suggests that you are looking for sex. "Mir ist warm," means you wish there was some A/C. In this case, both forms suggest a transient state. *shrug*

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