Ach, du liebe Zeit!
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Writer Jen Percy is dating a German-speaking man. She’s found that the language of love is not, as advertized, universal: expressing her love in German is fraught with linguistic confusion.
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MARCO WERMAN: Alles Liebe zum Valentinstag! That’s Happy Valentine’s Day in German. I know it doesn’t sound like it but it really is. Writer Jen Percy has some experience of the language of love in German.
JEN PERCY: So I’ve been dating a man who’s third language is English, and we’ve been dating for three years, and he lives in Germany, but his family is from the Balkans. And he lives in Germany because he had to leave during the Bosnian war when he was a teenager. You know having a relationship with him I had to move between Germany, Bosnia and you know three different languages.
[GERMAN SONG]
JAN: You know when you speak another language there’s a period where you don’t feel self-conscious at all. For example when you swear in another language initially it’s just a sound. The sound isn’t yet connected to meaning. So the word has to develop meaning over time. And this was something that transferred over to I love you. I didn’t know why I love you would be different. I had said Te amo once to a man in Spain, just to see kind of how the words felt coming out of my mouth and he was very angry. He said not to say it again unless I really understood it’s meaning and to be honest it didn’t actually mean anything when I said it, it was just sounds. When we were in Germany sometimes I would mention the Midwest and he always liked to say this phrase, I was so in love with you there. And of course, you know that’s not something you want someone to say to you because it suggests a lack of love at the current moment. And later when I approached him about this he says oh no that’s not what it means at all, that’s just the direct translation and it sounds bad. But actually it means sort of an outburst of love, a moment when you realize you’re falling in love again. And that was sort of interesting because it’s something you know more beautiful than my own language offered. Another thing that they have in German that we don’t have in English is that they have two forms of to love. They have lieben, which is literally just to love, and verlieben, which is to fall in love. And before you get to love you usually use the verb verlieben. You say I’m falling in love with you. But it’s interesting because with me he went straight to love. And of course I didn’t even notice because I didn’t know we had that phase before hand. He was actually surprised when I said I love you back, because we had both just skipped over that phrase. Of course for me I had no idea that any of this was happening until a year later when he explained it to me. I know that there are much more affectionate both in Germany and Bosnia than we are here, or at least outwardly. For example in Germany when you’re writing an email you say lieba, for dear, and of course I thought that meant he was in love with everyone he was emailing for quite some time. They also say kuss a lot because even with friends, guy friends all the time I never knew where the line was between, you know, friends and lovers. Where was the line drawn in the language? Before I would never really, he would tell me a direct translations and even if they were disturbing to me I wouldn’t really, I you’d know I’d just carry the words with me and sort of re-interpret it myself and this is when I would start to spiral into my own sort of imaginative world, and a lot of anxiety came out of that. But now if he says something I don’t really understand what it means or you know if it means something that disturbs me then I’ll definitely ask. I don’t kind of let it fester like I used to and let the words sort of, you know I used to ask my friends, “what do you think this means?” and that’s not a good idea usually.
MARCO: Jen Percy is a writer living in Iowa City. For more language stories check out our weekly podcast, World in Words. You can find it at The World.org/language. News headlines just ahead on P.R.I.
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