17 May 2010

der Mensch & das Mensch

Recently, I've played around in learning German. Don't ask why, it is just my continuous curiosity of foreign language on the surface. When I said on the surface, usually I only played around with the beginning of the language learning process. If it is the 30 days of dummy book, then I've played around only for the presumably 5 days of learning process.

Let's go to the thought. The word men, human or human being in German inherits its masculinity. Thus, I know that Mensch will be 'der Mensch' in German. However, it comes to the fact that I arrived knowing that there is also 'das Mensch' in German but has a different meaning. Literally, it means 'slut'. I got the term from reading Simon Mawer's The Glass Room. The book itself had been shortlisted for Booker Prize 2009. To anyone speak German, the term 'das Mensch' is never been a correct term or noun.

Let's have a thinking that the term exists, it's the reason why I want to write about this small phenomenon. If 'das Mensch' literally means slut, then the condition from being masculine in the word/noun toward the neutral, das, send forth the status of whom being addressed. Lucky that English or Indonesian stand neutral in their noun collections. In German, is it there because they need a stand for everything determined, whether it's masculine, feminine or neutral? Well, almost any other language has its own gender partition. But to consider this phenomenon, a shift from masculine to neutral, thus lowering the meaning of the noun is something a bit outlandish to me. Then, it was a human being, the next thing you are a subhuman by being a slut (if the translation applies for the respective noun - der Mensch, das Mensch).

Thus, to recreate the polemic, those German language need a firm stand to be a man (or in conformity of masculine) by applying a proper indication to its noun. If you are undecided, you are out of their confined structure. It applies that if you are being apolitical or neutral, then you are subhuman, a collection of human in the specific term like a slut in 'das Mensch'. This coin put these subhumans lower than dogs since 'the dog' (der Hund) never become 'das Hund' as those dogs are always stand on what they are supposed to be, the dog. It's only human, a thinking creature that can shift buoyantly according to their belief in time and space.
It's good to be a human.

Well, it's only my blubbering, the term coined itself has not been properly defended. My friends who learn German has never noticed that there is 'das Mensch' for a noun. But this blabbering is quite a phenomenon for as I applied it to my knowledge of German political history throughout 20th century. I will stop now before I become too pretentious.
Allez ist Gut...sehr Gut.