riddle@ut-sally.UUCP (Prentiss Riddle) (12/14/83)
Although I shouldn't try to pass myself off as a real expert (I'm far from a native speaker), I just got back this fall from nearly a year of speaking German on a daily basis, and here's my reaction to Steve Maurer's "Frau/Fraeulein/Maedchen" paradigm: I'm sure that's what it says in the textbook, but most people don't talk that way. "Frau" means (1) woman, (2) wife, and (3) Mrs. "Fraeulein" means (1) Miss and (2) waitress. (Both of these forms may be dying out.) "Maedchen" means (1) little girl and (2) young woman, etc., much like our confused English "girl". College students speak casually of "ein Maedchen in meinem Seminar" just as American college students refer to "a girl in my class". I can't imagine anybody saying "ein Fraeulein in meinem Seminar"! As for how the big "woman/girl" controversy translates into German, I suspect that we'd need a real expert to judge on that. I'm not sure, but the phrase "die Maedchen [plural] in meinem Buero" sounds less likely to my ear than the offending English usage "the girls in my office" (that is, using "girl" to refer to grown women). I suspect that there may be some vestigial use of "Fraeulein" in this way, but I wouldn't be surprised if someone who tried it didn't get his lights punched out for it! (By the way, the German vocabulary is complicated by many equivalents of "gal" and the like which vary a great deal in regional dialects, I'm sure.) ---- Prentiss Riddle {ihnp4,seismo,ctvax}!ut-sally!riddle