All They Are Saying IsGive Frieden a Chance-findmost beautiful German word

The German Language Council is riffling through 22,000 entries in an international competition to find the most beautiful German word. (Oxymoron is not German.- and as Twain noted - in German a woman is a female; but a wife (weib) is not — "which is unfortunate. A wife, here, has no sex; she is neuter; so, according to the grammar, a fish is he, his scales are she, but a fishwife is neither"... of course 100 years later we use frau for wife rather than weib - and frau is femine - but unmarried - the "young" maiden - is not!)


http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-language10aug10.story

All They Are Saying Is Give Frieden a Chance

By Jeffrey Fleishman, Times Staff Writer


BERLIN — The languages of Europe are supple: the musical playfulness of Italian, the nasal sensuality of French, the pitter-patter of Portuguese. And then there's the harsh, infinite knot of vowels and consonants that inspired the Mark Twain screed "The Awful German Language."

But German is the tongue of Goethe and Thomas Mann. There is poetry. Verbal splendor hides amid syllables jammed like train cars on a cluttered track.

To prove it, the Deutscher Sprachrat, or German Language Council, is riffling through 22,000 entries in an international competition to find the most beautiful German word. (Oxymoron is not German.)

"We're getting people to think about the beauty of the German language," said Rolf Peter, a competition organizer. "By choosing words to , people are confronted with the richness of the language…. For too long, the impression of German has not been positive." <snip>

Beautiful-sounding words in German (and there aren't many of them, admittedly) tend to represent beautiful things. For example, schon, with an umlaut over the 'o', means "beautiful". And Blumen, pronounced 'bloomen', means "flowers". Those are a few off the top of my head, anyway.