I dunno -- anybody who can drag up a quote from "The Genealogy of Morals" (hardly one of Freddie's more famous essays) is worth consideration.
What Birks (lazily?) describes as the structure of a language may not matter here, but I think that epistemiological echoes certainly do. We're possibly in the territory of faux amis here, as you say, but you don't have to be a Max Weber to associate "debt" and "guilt" via the Protestant Ethic ... which, of course, opens up the question of why the current German position is firmly based in the Bavarian and Catholic Rhenish heartlands.
In other words, as a first approximation, yes, I do think that Germans consider "debt" and "guilt" to be connected, much in the same way that they do not consider female genitalia and obnoxious prat to be connected. Otherwise, what is the point of language at all? What can it possibly express?
Of course, in this case, you might very well be right, and it's just standard Birks speculation. In which case, let's go to the second approximation and ask Joe Schmidt on the number 66 bus to Klaphammer.
I suspect that Herr Schmidt would concede a certain amount of truth to the statement.
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Date: 2012-06-03 04:04 pm (UTC)What Birks (lazily?) describes as the structure of a language may not matter here, but I think that epistemiological echoes certainly do. We're possibly in the territory of faux amis here, as you say, but you don't have to be a Max Weber to associate "debt" and "guilt" via the Protestant Ethic ... which, of course, opens up the question of why the current German position is firmly based in the Bavarian and Catholic Rhenish heartlands.
In other words, as a first approximation, yes, I do think that Germans consider "debt" and "guilt" to be connected, much in the same way that they do not consider female genitalia and obnoxious prat to be connected. Otherwise, what is the point of language at all? What can it possibly express?
Of course, in this case, you might very well be right, and it's just standard Birks speculation. In which case, let's go to the second approximation and ask Joe Schmidt on the number 66 bus to Klaphammer.
I suspect that Herr Schmidt would concede a certain amount of truth to the statement.