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Date: | Wed, 3 Jan 2001 18:26:15 -0500 |
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Steve Schwartz wrote:
>Robert Peters:
>
>>The old German word "welsch" means "foreign" in general and "French"
>>in particular. So the quoted phrases are definitely and clearly both
>>anti-foreign and anti-French.
>
>Doesn't it have particular reference to Mediterranean peoples as well?
>Aren't, for example, Italians "waelsch?"
Thomas Mann uses the adjective to mean Italian in his novel *Doktor
Faustus* when describing the mother of Adrian Leverkuehn (the fictional
composer about whom the book is written) and Luca Cimabue, the assistant
to Leverkuehn's uncle, who owns a musical instrument shop.
Reading the novel recently, I was surprised to see both English
translations render "welsch" as "Italian" when first encountering it in
the description of L's mother. I checked my dictionaries and found them
all defining the adjective as meaning "French". I attributed the choice of
"Italian" to the translators' desire to create an atmosphere of the exotic
which among Germans could be accomplished by a reference to the French but
for Anglophones would have to be Italian. When, later in the novel I found
Cimabue also described as "Welsch" I had to conclude that the dictionaries
and I were misinformed.
However I'm sure that "die welsche Schweitz" refers exclusively to the
French speaking part of Switzerland and does not include the Italian
speaking Ticino.
Walter Meyer
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