I have this German news channel available on the new computer - I didn't ask for it, it was just there when I bought it, and it occasionally it flashes up intros to some interesting and informative articles.
Yesterday it produced the four-word header (accompanied by the usual grotesque image of some idiot in military fatigues) "Belgien will Gotteskrieger stoppen".
Translation? Not actually as easy as you might think. "Belgium wants to stop" .... that bit is easy.
"Gotteskrieger"? Literally "warriors (or fighters) for God". Sounds like the Christian missionaries who head off to Asia to persuade Buddhists that Christianity is the true path to follow (IMHO if owt it should be the other way round, but anyway ....). Can't be that surely - why the cretin in the military fatigues? For example?
So .... where's the moronic jihadist Islamic connection?
"Gotteskrieger" is actually a word that has appeared in German in recent years - this is not a word with a longstanding history. Let me quote the ever-reliable Wikipedia (cough, splutter!):
"Mit Gotteskrieger werden Menschen bezeichnet, die Kriege oder allgemein Waffengewalt befürworten, um den Einfluss ihrer Religion auszubauen, zu festigen oder zu verteidigen"
Translation (I should charge you for this, but I am feeling generous today!):
"The word Gotteskrieger refers to people who support war or the general use of armed force in order to expand, consolidate or defend the influence of their religion".
In other words dangerous maniacs/morons/cretins who believe in enforcing people to submit to their silly superstitious beliefs by (very) violent means.
You would think that the Belgians would actually be glad to get rid of these people, provided that they never came back (alive anyway). Of course at the same time you do not want to encourage people to leave if they are going to involve themselves abroad in activities such as kidnapping, rape and murder (including the beheading of anyone who works for a charity organisation committed to helping people). Assuming, that is, that they are not going to start conducting such activities at home (and that, I am afraid, is probably only a matter of time - some moron speaking German with a Sächsisch accent was encouraging this on the Internet 'tother day).
Anyway back to Gotteskrieger.
The common usage of the word started, apparently, during the Afghan War (the recent one, not those that the British managed to lose in the 19th century).
I spent a bit of time trying to find an English equivalent. The recommended translation is "holy war". I actually do not like it - not as a concept, which is an accurate description, but as the word "Gott" ("God") is missing in English.
In German there is the obvious criticism - there is a word missing. It maybe takes an atheist to notice it, but in a land with a large number of them that should not be a problem. So the next line is for any Gotteskrieger reading this:
THERE IS NO GOD!!!!!
Repeat:
THERE IS NO GOD!!!!!
There are plenty of other articles on this blog where I go into the issues regarding the issue of a God ("was that thunder? ****, it must be Thor riding his chariot again ...."). Go and read them. Then go and read Diderot, D'Holbach, Bertrand Russell, Richard Dawkins, Michel Onfray usw .... (These are only books? So is the Koran - a 1500-year-old volume of myths and murderous methodology from a time when the world knew little science and had little understanding of humanity. We have moved on since that time. You haven't?).
So if you go off and kidnap, rape and murder people as a Gotteskrieger, then you are delusional. The actual word for you is Straftäter! New words like Gotteskrieger we do not need! (For non-German speakers "Straftäter" means "criminal").
If the word must exist we could place something like "sog." in front of it ("sogenannt" - "so-called" in English - with the appropriate adjectival ending), but for the vicious delusional maniacs who fit this term, that gives them too much credit. Really it needs a word like the equivalent of "alleged". Or "delusional" or "self-delusional" or "cretinous, self-delusional". I found loads of German possibilities - a native German would probably be able to find "le mot juste" and maybe construct one of those wonderful German compound nouns which could find its way eventually into Duden ....
And on the subject of compound nouns I came across "Unwort" this week. "Wort" in German means "word", "un" as in English indicates a negative. So my immediately translation for it was "non-word", although www.linguee.de, which I use quite frequently, suggested alternatives such as "misnomer" and "bad word".
This is usually a word that has risen into public usage despite its seemingly previous non-existence and is questioned by the academics who watch over the progress of the language to prevent (or at least criticise) the arrival of such words into the language when they are apparently not needed. I am not sure whether they also object to the awful habit that they have here of just stealing the English equivalent - it would be better if they did.
Anyway they even have a jury which selects summat called the "Unwort des Jahres" (the non-word of the year). This has been selected each year since 1991. Gotteskrieger won the award in 2001. Merited, I would suggest.
Whether Unwörter should be stopped, on the other hand, I would question. Languages evolve. They have done so since language first appeared and will continue to do so. The classical Latin that I learned at school (from about 2,000 years ago - read Livy, Ovid and the like) had become a substantially different language in the Middle Ages when it was still in use. Foreign influences play a part, popular usage does also.
Between my student days in France in 1969-70 and my working there on and off between 1989 and 1993, there were obvious differences in the colloquial everyday French spoken, and even "Le Monde" seemed to have changed in its style. Languages often become richer due to the greater number of alternatives available, and German (with its ability to form compound nouns) has loads of interesting possibilities. And encourages bright, intelligent minds to experiment with concepts.
So really it is a question of the logic in place as to whether the word really deserves to be a word or a non-word - but Gotteskrieger is inexact and inaccurate in my opinion, and could easily be seen as a non-word for which a better alternative should be forthcoming. All suggestions welcome!
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