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German -erei nouns | ||
Tags: Morphology | German | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| Jinx Triglot Senior Member Germany reverbnation.co Joined 5694 days ago 1085 posts - 1879 votes  Speaks: English*, German, French Studies: Catalan, Dutch, Esperanto, Croatian, Serbian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Italian, Spanish, Yiddish | Message 1 of 3 06 November 2010 at 12:57am | IP Logged | ||
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One of my favorite things about German is the wonderful connotation of (some of) the nouns ending in -erei. Something that completely cracked me up was when I was watching an episode of Tatort Münster once and some people were standing around by Professor Boerne's computer, which then proceeded to break. The bystanders protested "We were only standing around!" (herumstehen) and the professor angrily responded with something like "Look what you've done with your stupid standaroundery!" (Herumsteherei).*
I have a question related to this: are there any hard-and-fast rules when it comes to turning verbs into "-erei" nouns? The reason I ask is that a friend of mine on Facebook is constantly "poking" me, and I want to ask "What's up with all this pokery?" in German. The word used for Facebook poking is "anstupsen," so I have to use that word, but I'm frankly drawing a blank when I try to put it into -erei form. Anstuperei? Anstupserei? Stupserei? Is this even possible at all? By the way, I don't care if it's slightly odd German, because I have a tendency to play with language and make up words, no matter what language I'm using. I just want to make sure that my made-up words are understandable and (as far as possible) follow the rules of the language in question. There's a difference between consciously playing with language and just getting it wrong. ;) Vielen Dank im Voraus! *(I guess this would more normally be translated into English as "standing around," but with this example I was really trying to communicate an example of the emotional connotation of this particular word ending.) 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Doitsujin Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5321 days ago 1256 posts - 2363 votes Speaks: German*, English | Message 2 of 3 06 November 2010 at 9:47am | IP Logged | ||
There are some rules, but since you cannot use the "erei" ending with all verbs, they probably won't help you much. If you're not sure, just google the word. ("Anstupserei" gets at least one Facebook related hit on the first page.) IMHO, Stupserei sounds a bit funny, but Anstupserei is OK in a Facebook context. BTW, "(an)stupsen" is actually "to nudge" in English (to poke = pieksen). 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Tropi Diglot Groupie Austria Joined 5432 days ago 67 posts - 87 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: Mandarin | Message 3 of 3 06 November 2010 at 10:48am | IP Logged | ||
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"Anstupserei" is probably the right word. "Stupserei" doesn't fit because "stupsen" is not the same as "anstupsen" (compare "to poke" and "to poke someone").
BTW, I checked the link above and some of the examples are really strange, especially the nouns. I haven't heard at least 80% of them and they also sound rather strange to me. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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