Re: German 'duzen' and 'siezen' - etymology ?

Hello!

On 10/20/06, Henrik Theiling <theiling@...> wrote:
> Hi!
>
> Lars Finsen writes:
> > Den 20. okt. 2006 kl. 11.41 skrev Henrik Theiling:
> > >
> > > But I really get annoyed by Ikea having started to address their
> > > customers as 'Du' on all the signs.  Probably that's considered much
> > > more cool(tm) and dynamic(tm).  It feels like an insult to me -- I
> > > don't know them anonymous advertising and managing people and my only
> > > potential interest is of purely commercial nature, so 'Du' is totally
> > > out of place.
> >
> > Is this specific for Ikea or do you see it in other advertising as
> > well? Maybe it's something the Ikea people are taking with them from
> > Sweden. ...
>
> Hmm, I thought about that, too, but it would surprise me if it was a
> simple translation problem.  E.g. I sincerely doubt that Ikea France
> would try to do this, so the idea behind this seemed a little more
> elaborate, i.e., I thing there is an idea behind this -- Ikea is
> likely not to have done this in all countries in parallel to Swedish.
> Plus, they *changed* it in Germany -- they used to use 'Sie'.  They
> did not start business in Germany just now.
>
> My guess is more that *German* advertising people at Ikea thought
> using 'Du' would be cool when they learned that the Swedish are so
> much more 'relaxed'.  Something like that.
Considering the degree of cheerful idiocy evident in the IKEA
commercials I've seen on German TV, it seems plausible that this idea
of "obligatory Du" would come from the same people. :-P

SCNR,
			Julia 8-)

PS. I have to do damage control for my German friends and relatives
    all the time -- no, almost nobody here wears horned helmets; no, a
    realistic Swedish (or otherwise Scandinavian) accent sounds
    NOTHING like that, I have no idea where that actor comes from; no,
    we don't have a spring festival called Flabberghasten (or
    whatever) that involves throwing old furniture out of third-storey
    windows and most certainly not subsequently buying new furniture
    at the nearest IKEA; and so on.

PPS. About formal and informal forms of address in Swedish and German:
     A while ago I met a Finnish woman (native speaker of Swedish)
     who, as it turned out, had just returned from Germany, where she
     had been living for a few years. We had started our conversation
     in Swedish, but eventually switched to German and carried over
     the 'Du' without giving it a second thought. After a while, she
     noticed and, apparently remembering something about politeness
     and Germans, apologized for calling me 'Du' in German as well.
     Which confused me a little, because, well, we're in Scandinavia,
     right? We're automatically on a first-name basis with everybody
     else anyway, right? Right? ;-)

     In Finnish, it seems to be pretty much the same. Occasionally
     people use the formal form of address for me, but that seems to
     be triggered by my foreign accent rather than (say) my age or the
     fact that we haven't been formally introduced or anything like
     that...

PPPS. Now that we've practised the fine art of postscripting, we can
      continue with the next lesson: writing a scientific paper that
      consists almost entirely of footnotes. ;-)

--
   Julia Simon (Schnecki) -- Sprachen-Freak vom Dienst
_@"  schnecki AT iki DOT fi / helicula AT gmail DOT com  "@_
si hortum in bybliotheca habes, deerit nihil
                                        (M. Tullius Cicero)

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