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LANGUAGE AND CULTURE

Giving English the big kiss-off

Roger Boyes, the Berlin correspondent for British daily The Times, doesn’t lament the end of Deutsche Bahn’s troubled romance with the English language.

Published: 22 February 2010 15:02 CET
Giving English the big kiss-off
Photo: DPA

Between spying on its employees and mismanaging Berlin’s commuter train network, Deutsche Bahn hasn’t been the source of much good news lately. So I was pleasantly surprised to hear last week that Germany’s national railway operator had decided to ditch its gratuitous and frequently poor use of English.

Not only is DB boss Rüdiger Grube going to get rid of “Flyers,” “Hotlines” and “Call a Bike,” he also ordained that the kissing has to stop. More precisely the “Kiss and Ride” zone in the forecourts of train stations. These areas used to be called Kurzparken and the idea is this: you take your partner to the station and you are given just enough time to kiss goodbye before someone shouts at you to move on.

I suppose this is an attempt to solve a banal problem (too many cars blocking the entrance to rail stations) by turning it into something charming – even though English must cede the honour of being the language of love to Italian, French and Bavarian. Still, the feckless advisors Grube’s predecessor Harmut Mehdorn probably regarded Kiss and Ride as one of their greatest PR triumphs.

But it wasn’t. It managed to upset native English speakers, Germans fed up with the invasion of unnecessary anglicisms, Muslims who prefer not to kiss in public and, above all, serious smoochers.

There’s a deep cultural misunderstanding at the heart of all these Deutsche Bahn idioms. “Kiss and Ride” is not like “Click and Buy” or “Wash and Go” which are mechanical processes without emotional overtones. A kiss by contrast has to do with touch and smell and passion. Unless, of course, one were kissing the signet ring of the DB boss, in which case it would be an act of submission to unchallengeable authority. In English we talk of “kiss and tell” – ex-lovers who sell their memories of unfaithful celebrities to the tabloid press – but even in that case, a kiss is shorthand for a romantic entanglement. There is nothing romantic about parking your car at a train station. You cut your motor, take your bag out, start the car again. Nothing more than a brief moment parking – that is, Kurzparken. Kissing needs time. If you really want to kiss before the 7:31 leaves for Dortmund, then you take a taxi.

Deutsche Bahn has kidnapped my language, and I want it back. Of course, others try the same trick – Deutsche Telekom and the rest of corporate Germany – but it is the Bahn that causes me most anguish.

The use of English – or rather BSE, Bad Simple English – is supposed to show what exactly? That Deutsche Bahn is now a global player? Or that its staff is competent to help non-German-speaking passengers? Neither reason seems to be true.

Deutsche Bahn, despite the pre-privatisation trumpeting and clashes of cymbals from the Mehdorn Symphony orchestra, has little international clout, and even that is evaporating because the Bahn management is failing to deliver at home. I know that people across Europe are dissatisfied with their train services at the moment. But Germany seems to be complaining the loudest. Perhaps it is a sense of a great national institution crumbling.

According to the best-seller Schwarzbuch Deutsche Bahn, train drivers have to pee into bottles because they are not given adequate toilet breaks – they could endanger punctuality. A case, perhaps, of “Piss and Ride.”

The DB English is I think not just a joke, a buffoonish attempt to be interconnected with the outside world, but an instrument of power; part of a system that says to customers – you have to do things our way because we have a monopoly. You can’t understand the ticket tariff system? Just pay up. You would rather be served by a human than a machine? Tough luck. You can’t understand a word that we’re saying on the platform loudspeakers? You must not speak German properly. Every company, but especially one that enjoys a monopoly, should have a monthly meeting with customers to ask: are we doing this right? What impact is this or that policy having on ordinary passengers?

The full absurdity of this refusal to enter a dialogue with customers emerged the other day when the train service to Berlin’s Schönefeld Airport did not stop there. The engineer apparently didn’t want to be late on his way to the provincial town of Königs Wusterhausen. That is when you need Deutsche Bahn staff who can speak English – to explain to foreign travellers that they’ve missed their international flights in order to create the illusion of efficiency.

For more Roger Boyes, check out his website here.

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LANGUAGE AND CULTURE

Le Havre rules: How to talk about French towns beginning with Le, La or Les

If you're into car racing, French politics or visits to seaside resorts you are likely at some point to need to talk about French towns with a 'Le' in the title. But how you talk about these places involves a slightly unexpected French grammar rule. Here's how it works.

Published: 30 November 2021 13:04 CET
Updated: 4 December 2021 17:47 CET
An old WW2 photo taken in the French port town of Le Havre.
An old WW2 photo taken in the French port town of Le Havre. It can be difficult to know what prepositions to use for places like this - so we have explained it for you. (Photo by AFP)

If you’re listening to French chat about any of those topics, at some point you’re likely to hear the names of Mans, Havre and Touquet bandied about.

And this is because French towns that have a ‘Le’ ‘La’ or ‘Les’ in the title lose them when you begin constructing sentences. 

As a general rule, French town, commune and city names do not carry a gender. 

So if you wanted to describe Paris as beautiful, you could write: Paris est belle or Paris est beau. It doesn’t matter what adjectival agreement you use. 

For most towns and cities, you would use à to evoke movement to the place or explain that you are already there, and de to explain that you come from/are coming from that location:

Je vais à Marseille – I am going to Marseille

Je suis à Marseille – I am in Marseille 

Je viens de Marseille – I come from Marseille 

But a select few settlements in France do carry a ‘Le’, a ‘La’ or a ‘Les’ as part of their name. 

In this case the preposition disappears when you begin formulating most sentences, and you structure the sentence as you would any other phrase with a ‘le’, ‘la’ or ‘les’ in it.

Masculine

Le is the most common preposition for two names (probably something to do with the patriarchy) with Le Havre, La Mans, Le Touquet and the town of Le Tampon on the French overseas territory of La Réunion (more on that later)

A good example of this is Le Havre, a city in northern France where former Prime Minister, Edouard Philippe, who is tipped to one day run for the French presidency, serves as mayor. 

Edouard Philippe’s twitter profile describes him as the ‘Maire du Havre’, using a masculine preposition

Here we can see that his location is Le Havre, and his Twitter handle is Philippe_LH (for Le Havre) but when he comes to describe his job the Le disappears.

Because Le Havre is masculine, he describes himself as the Maire du Havre rather than the Maire de Havre (Anne Hidalgo, for example would describe herself as the Maire de Paris). 

For place names with ‘Le’ in front of them, you should use prepositions like this:

Ja vais au Touquet – I am going to Le Touquet

Je suis au Touquet – I am in Le Touquet 

Je viens du Touquet – I am from Le Touquet 

Je parle du Touquet – I am talking about Le Touquet

Le Traité du Touquet – the Le Touquet Treaty

Feminine

Some towns carry ‘La’ as part of their name. La Rochelle, the scenic town on the west coast of France known for its great seafood and rugby team, is one such example.

In French ‘à la‘ or ‘de la‘ is allowed, while ‘à le‘ becomes au and ‘de le’ becomes du. So for ‘feminine’ towns such as this, you should use the following prepositions:

Je vais à La Rochelle – I am going to La Rochelle

Je viens de La Rochelle – I am coming from La Rochelle 

Plural

And some places have ‘Les’ in front of their name, like Les Lilas, a commune in the suburbs of Paris. The name of this commune literally translates as ‘The Lilacs’ and was made famous by Serge Gainsbourg’s song Le Poinçonneur des Lilas, about a ticket puncher at the Metro station there. 

When talking about a place with ‘Les’ as part of the name, you must use a plural preposition like so:

Je suis le poinçonneur des Lilas – I am the ticket puncher of Lilas 

Je vais aux Lilas – I am going to Les Lilas

Il est né aux Lilas – He was born in Les Lilas  

Islands 

Islands follow more complicated rules. 

If you are talking about going to one island in particular, you would use à or en. This has nothing to do with gender and is entirely randomised. For example:

Je vais à La Réunion – I am going to La Réunion 

Je vais en Corse – I am going to Corsica 

Generally speaking, when talking about one of the en islands, you would use the following structure to suggest movement from the place: 

Je viens de Corse – I am coming from Corsica 

For the à Islands, you would say:

Je viens de La Réunion – I am coming from La Réunion 

When talking about territories composed of multiple islands, you should use aux.

Je vais aux Maldives – I am going to the Maldives. 

No preposition needed 

There are some phrases in French which don’t require any a preposition at all. This doesn’t change when dealing with ‘Le’ places, such as Le Mans – which is famous for its car-racing track and Motorcycle Grand Prix. Phrases that don’t need a preposition include: 

Je visite Le Mans – I am visiting Le Mans

J’aime Le Mans – I like Le Mans

But for a preposition phrase, the town becomes simply Mans, as in Je vais au Mans.

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