Today is publication day for the German edition of Kees Moeliker’s Tell-All-About-The-Duck book. As you probably know, Kees was awarded the 2003 Ig Nobel Prize for biology, for his research study “The first case of homosexual necrophilia in the mallard Anas platyrhynchos.” This nifty video shows Kees gamely talking about it in German, rather than […]
Tag: German
The inconsistencies of animal-based insults in German and English
If you call an English person ‘a mole’ will it carry the same weight as if you call a German person ‘ein Maulwurf’? The power of insults that are based on the names of animal species can vary quite dramatically across different languages and cultures. Prof. Dr. Dagmar Schmauks who is a supernumerary professor at […]
Drunk German Speech [podcast 68]
Until not so long ago, if you wanted a public corpus of alcoholized German speech, you would have been up a creek, so to speak, without a corpus. That situation has changed — as we see (or hear) in this week’s Improbable Research podcast. SUBSCRIBE on Play.it, iTunes, or Spotify to get a new episode every week, free. This week, Marc Abrahams — with dramatic […]
“Being German is No Laughing Matter”
Andreas Kluth, the Berlin bureau chief of the British magazine The Economist, wrote an essay called “Being German is No Laughing Matter“. Here is the beginning of that essay: Shortly after moving back to Germany in 2012 after decades of absence, mainly in Anglo-Saxon countries, I took my kids to the Berlin zoo. The children […]
