Did you know these English words are borrowed from German language

In a recent tweet criticising the media attacks on actor Shah Rukh Khan’s 23-year-old son, I decried the “ghoulish epicaricacy” that animated this all-out assault on the young man. My use of the word epicaricacy, meaning deriving pleasure from the misfortunes of others, sent many scurrying to the dictionary. Amusingly enough several objected that I need not have employed such an obscure English word when there was a perfectly adequate substitute available from German — schadenfreude, a word far more commonly used in English to describe the malicious satisfaction that some people gain from seeing others suffer.

This is true — schadenfreude is more often used than epicaricacy — and it points to the remarkable capacity of the English language to absorb infusions from elsewhere. Where a foreign language has a word that precisely connotes something, English is happy to embrace it. And a surprising number of these borrowed words come from German, a language more commonly associated with long, polysyllabic formulations that are usually considered hard to pronounce and harder to spell!

One of those sesquipedalian German words that has found a place in many people’s vocabulary is Weltanschauung, translated most simply as “worldview” but embracing a comprehensive personal philosophy or conception of the universe and of human life than the simple “worldview” suggests. A writer’s Weltanschauung is often the subject of literary scholars’ attention. These would not necessarily be the same scholars who would write learned theses on the Bildungsroman, an untranslatable term for a novel that details the psychological development of the principal character. (There are many novels like that — and where one English word couldn’t be found to describe them, German came in handy!)

wknd@khaleejtimes.com