Ducks affecting language?

[Harald Havas]

-----Ursprüngliche Nachricht-----
Von: "Petri Kanninen" <pkannine at cc.hut.fi>
An: <dcml at stp.ling.uu.se>
Gesendet: Dienstag, 08. Jänner 2002 02:13
Betreff: Ducks affecting language?


> Hi!
Reading this made me wonder if there are same
> kind of things in other countries? I would think that in Scandinavia
> something like this could have happened or in Germany where the
> translations of Erica Fuchs are so loved. Or are we Finns alone with
> this habit?

O no! Disney comics and especially the translations of Erika Fuchs had a BIG
impact on German! More than can be discussed here. Some affected categories
are:
- sayings ("Dem Ingeniör ist nichts zu schwör" - "nothing's to difficult for
an inventor", meaning Gyro G., being the most popular of them)
- names ("Dagobert (Duck)" [Scrooge] being synonimous with "rich man")
- even grammar: Fuchs "invented" a kind of comic-language by abbreviating
the infinitive: with an English person saying "sigh" - this could be a noun
or a verb. But the noun in German would be "Seufzer", the verb "seufzen". By
writing "Seufz!" (truncating the -en) in her speech bubbles Fuchs created a
new (and yet unnamed) category of grammar - which is now widely used in
comics and even in the spoken language: "Seufz!", "Jammer!", "Schluck!",
"Rülps!" (instead of seufzen, jammern, schlucken, rülpsen...)

Big impact, my friend ;-)

H.