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LANGUAGE AND CULTURE

‘Gate’ named Germany’s English word of the year

The English suffix "gate" has been named Germany's Anglicism of the Year. The quirky, linguistic award honours the positive contributions English had made to the German lexicon.

'Gate' named Germany's English word of the year
Handygate, the alleged tapping of Chancellor Merkel's phone by US secret services helped propel "gate" to victory. Photo: DPA

Gate is no newbie on German turf, having arrived in 1972 with the reporting of the Watergate scandal.

But Germans were slow to take it into their own language and it wasn't until many years later that gate gained widespread acceptance as a bona fide suffix.  

In 2010, former president Christian Wulff was criticized for rejecting Berlin-made bread rolls – known colloquially as Schrippen – in favour of those originating in his home town of Hannover.

The resulting controversy was dubbed Schrippengate.

More recently, revelations that US intelligence agencies had been bugging Chancellor Merkel's phone were referred to as Handygate, a combination of the victorious suffix with another word borrowed from English, handy, which means mobile phone in Germany.

As well as gate, the jury of four academics paid tribute to the English words fake, selfie and hashtag, which have recently crept into the German, or at least the Denglisch-speaking, domain.

They pointed out that fake used in German has embraced a more abstract meaning, as for example in the term Fake-Preußentum, meaning literally fake Prussianism.

Further evidence of how embedded fake has become in the German language is in the emergence of the term Fake-Leberwurst, referring to a sub-standard and inauthentic liver sausage.

Selfie, having won the prestigious title of 2013 Word of the Year in both Britain and the Netherlands, was also acknowledged for finally providing Germans with a term to describe amateur photographers with a penchant for self-display.

Hashtag was also lauded for offering a useful summation of online movements and activism.

The jury pointed to the success of the #Aufschrei movement on Twitter, which documents incidents of everyday sexism. 

Hashtag was also honoured for its introduction into spoken language "to add (ironical) meta comments to statements".

Although the jury chose gate as Anglicism of the Year, the popular vote went to the word whistleblower.

Following the leaking of information about government spying by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, the term rapidly became associated with debates about data protection and government spying.

The "Anglizismus des Jahres" is an annual prize dedicated to the English word which most enriched the German language that year. Previous winners include Crowdfunding, leaken and shitstorm.

"I started the Anglicism of the Year to shine a positive light onto our borrowed words as a mirror of social change in the face of the cultural conservatism which usually accompanies the discussion," said jury chairperson Anatol Stefanowitsch, who teaches English linguistics at Berlin's Free University. 

READ MORE: 'Denglisch is for losers, it has to stop'

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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.

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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