Pet peeve: "realisieren" in German

[pne]

Gah. Just read an article in German Wikipedia which used the German word "realisieren" in the sense of "to realise, understand, come to know"; this is, for me, an anglicism and a false friend and rubs me the wrong way. (It should be something like "fassen, begreifen, sich gewahr werden, erkennen, verstehen" instead IMO.)

For me, the German "realisieren" should be restricted to the sense "realise a project (i.e. implement it, carry it out)".

This rant has been brought to you by Prescriptivists, Inc.

(Hmm... though my Duden does recognise the other sense, even if it's marked in the etymology as "from the English word 'realize'".)

Another pet peeve is the spelling of "Entgelt" as "Entgeld", though it's easy to see where that confusion arises.

ETA: Heh. And coincidentally, "Zwiebelfisch" has an article about the Americanisation of German.

Comments

[marikochan.livejournal.com]

It didn't occur to me until after I'd clicked on the link that the article would probably be written in German, not American. (Or English, but it sounds more parallel that way...) My sociolinguistics prof. here was telling us about some of the ways Japanese has become more English-ized -- for example, more widespread use of 達 as a pluralizer. It used to be only applicable to (categories of) humans.

Oh well. Will add the link to my bookmarks for when I can read German!

[pne.livejournal.com]

My Japanese teacher said that "kare" and "kanojo" also originated as "translationese", but I imagine they've started to become used in natural Japanese as well to an extent?

[marikochan.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure about the origin, but they've definitely become more oft-used because of the influence of English.