Interestingly, the use of English in German (the opposite) is not nearly as awkward, and often comes off as quite intelligent and resourceful on the part of the speaker.

I think there is a cultural bias behind this, however. The English are not as inclined to learn other languages as is the case in the German-speaking world, and I think this really works in the German-speaking favor. For example, it is very difficult for an English-speaking native to come to Germany and start speaking German - everyone else would rather practice their English instead, meaning that .. the English learn German much slower than the Germans learn English.

So actually, it could be claimed that Sprachgefühl is one of those words that just should come into the English lexicon, and we ought to bloody get on with having a bit more of it, in our English-biased cultures, because it really does increase ones awareness of the world.

There's a lot of pseudo-English in German, though. The common German word for a cellphone is "Handy" and particularly in the former GDR, chicken meat is often called "Broiler". Both are obviously English words, but they aren't used that way in English.

That used to annoy me a bit (as a German), but it's actually quite resourceful from a linguistic point of view.

'Smoking' is another interesting pseudo-English German word.

Ahem, hand is a cognate of old German and Dutch ..

Also, the '-ing' part comes from the continent, as well. :)

Sure, there are lots of cognates. Some of the hardest to translate words are actually cognates.

For example it's almost impossible to properly translate the German word 'Brot' into English. It's a cognate of 'bread', but Germans mean something very different by 'Brot' than the British mean by 'bread'.

Loaning a word ad-hoc is much easier by comparison. Eg Bundeskanzler means exactly the same in English as it does in German. As does Prime Minister.

In defense of English speakers, one can use Spanish words relatively freely without seeming awkward: gracias, siesta, amigo, macho, etc.

It's worth pointing out that these are all practical day-to-day words. Perhaps the difference is there, also. Contrast cul-de-sac and ennui.

I think there is a certain stigma to English people using German words, on account of the fact that the nations have a long history of rivalry and open warfare against each other .. perhaps a linguist can pipe in and tell us if there was ever a period where Spanish words had a similar degree of stigma, after wars and so on ..

The Brits and the Germans historically got along like a house on fire during the vast majority of the last few hundred years. If anything, the stigma you talk about should exist between English and French.

Yes, I'm aware of that, I mean in the context of the last 100 years, apropos German-English, English-English, American-English, and so on. I think a bit of American vernacular has a German'ification phase, the languages seem to be intertwined, but this is just an opinion based on observation through personal life experience not some kind of academic point of view. I'd love to know the linguistics basis behind such intermingling.

I've seen some of what looked like Germanification of idioms. Eg 'couple' in British English seems to mean exactly two. In German 'paar' (lower cased!) is basically synonymous with 'a few', and the Americans seem to be using 'a couple' also in that wider sense?

That's easily complicated by the fact that the roots of the rivalry between France and England was in large part stoked by French-speaking Norman conquerors. Few native English speakers will read this paragraph and identify all these French-derived words as being 'French', since they have become such a plainly integral part of English:

complicate, fact, rivalry, part, conqueror, native, paragraph, identify, derive

TL;DR can't speak English without also speaking a bunch of French in the process, especially since French words represent all the elite, cultured words (e.g. 'cow' vs. 'beef')

It seems that "fact" doesn't belong in that list but rather it comes directly from medieval Latin

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/fact

https://www.peigencihui.com/word/fact

The Norman conquest was way back, and wasn't even the latest invasion. (The Dutch conquered Britain in the meantime.)

The Norman conquest played a role, especially in language, but the later major power / colonial empire rivalry would have developed regardless of history, just dictated by geography and clashing interests.

Your "preference" is a simplistic translation of the term, specially due to ignoring the whole "sprach" of it. I think given the context of the article the usage of that german word is justified. Let's learn something new.

The topic of language is carried by the context and topic of the entire post. Explicit emphasis is redundant.

Now, sprachgefühl is more abstract (after all, it refers to the "feeling", which while similar is not strictly the same as "preference"), but I'd argue that "preference" is a decent replacement conveying everything that was intended, and the best fit given the English vocabulary. If you find a need to be more explicit, try something along the lines of "opinions on language aesthetics".

"Sprachgefühl" is not a widely accepted loanword (it appears reserved for those that pick their own loanwords to show off their diverse linguistic skills—smartasses, so to speak), and it looks awfully out of place for those of us that understand German.

> (it appears reserved for those that pick their own loanwords to show off their diverse linguistic skills—smartasses, so to speak)

As I mentioned elsewhere in this thread, this is not the case. The word is an accepted loanword in linguistics jargon, and the linked article was written by a linguist mainly for other linguists. This German word was not picked to "show off" anything. Rather, since linguistics in the 20th century involved having to read material in, besides English, at least French and German as well, lots of German loanwords just naturally passed into the jargon of linguists because they seemed apt, not because anyone wanted to impress their peers (for it would hardly seem impressive, one’s peers being able to read German just as well).

It might feel a bit weird to a German speaker, but English is their language and if they want to add to it, let them pick whatever source of inspiration they want.

A bigger bug bear for me is the English pronunciation of French loanwords like accessoire. (And I do wonder how English speakers actually pronounce Sprachgefuhl. They probably mangle beyond recognition.)

Heh, loan words tend to fall into 3 categories:

1. Original pronunciation, but entirely different meaning 2. Original meaning, but entirely different pronunciation 3. Neither pronunciation nor meaning has anything to do with the original, but it's still spelled the same.

I like Japanese. They do #2 out of strict necessity due to their very limited sounds, and shorten the result so that we can't easily recognize it (e.g., personal computer -> pasonaru konnputaa -> pasokon).

As for sprachgefühle—I really don't think there is any need for that word. It's doesn't seem to fill a gap, other than an emerging love for German compounds.

Even if it doesn't fill any gap at the moment, words that start out as synonyms have a habit of diverging in meaning to fill different gaps.