Technophile Monkey

Wer möchte Schweizerdeutsch lernen?

Wenn man nach alemannischen oder schweizerdeutschen Sachen sucht, findet man manchmal seinen Weg auf dieses Blog hier. Da freue ich mich natürlich, aber meine Schweizerdeutsch-Ergüsse waren bisher eher negativ. Mein Hobby in diesen Aritkeln war es, mich über die Germanisierung der schweizerdeutschen Sprache aufzuregen und hässlich Unschweizerisches z.B. in der Werbung anzuklagen.

Das finde ich nach wie vor alles grosse Scheisse, aber ich gebe es langsam auf, meine Nerven darauf zu vergeuden. Wir müssen uns wohl damit abfinden, dass Sprachen etwas Lebendiges sind und sich gegenseitig beeinflussen und vermischen. Der Dialekt gleicht sich ganz von selbst dem Standarddeutsch des grossen Nachbarn im Norden an. Könnte schlimmer sein. Auf den Philippinen mischen die Leute völlig selbstverständlich ganze englische Nebensätze in einen Filipino-Hauptsatz. Wie schräg ist das denn?

So lange es den Dialekt aber noch gibt: Sind Deutschsprechende im Publikum, die sich freuen würden, ab und zu einen alemannischen/schweizerdeutschen Sprachfetzen zu lernen? Dann bitte per Kommentar melden

Es gibt scheinbar kaum moderne Quellen, um zeitgemässes Schweizerdeutsch zu lernen. Ich behaupte nicht, meines sei besonders toll, denn ich habe nach zehn Jahren Zürich sicher Khûrer Ausdrücke verloren und mit Zürcher Eigenheiten (Zürichismen?) vermischt. Aber für eine Kurzeinführung ins Alemannische für Deutschsprechende sollte es noch reichen. Ausserdem wage ich die Behauptung, dass man vom deutschen oder österreichischen Deutsch aus gar keine soooo grossen Sprünge machen muss, damit es auch auf Schweizerdeutsch flutscht. Ein paar Grundregeln aufsaugen, ein paar Wörtli lernen, das wärs. Schon ist man total integriert

Und keine Angst, ich komme nicht mit “Chuchichäschtli” oder “Chääschüechli” und solchem Blödsinn. Das “Ch” existiert in meinem Dialekt überhaupt nicht. Da muss man sich auch nicht die Gurgel brechen bei der Aussprache. Khûrertütsch ist sehr arm an Lauten, die es im Hochdeutschen nicht gibt, und ausserdem einer der (gemäss Umfrage) schönsten Dialekte der Schweiz. Das dürfte sich sehr leicht lernen lassen.

Na, interessiert?

Update 2010-04-08: Gut, scheint keine Sau lernen zu wollen. Dann lassen wir das bleiben

Last week, the Swiss government passed a motion requiring it to work on a law to, at least, ban the sales of video games rated 18+ to minors. A second motion is in place that would forbid the sales, production or advertisement of games deemed “violent” (by whom?) in Switzerland.

I remember the 80s, when people were outraged about Rambo and films like it. They said it’ll turn children into killing machines. Did that happen? Naw. The government then had the foresight not to do anything drastic, and thus the exiting age rating system for films was all that it took. It’s a voluntary system, where a board of assessors gives each film an age rating, but there is no law forcing stores not to sell 18+ films to minors, except in the case of hardcore pornography. This works fine! Why would we need a law for video games when the same law doesn’t exist for films or books?

Even centuries ago, there was violence (rape, suicide, murder…) in the media — Shakespeare’s novels, for example. And is Shakespeare 18+ now? No, they teach the stuff to 15 year olds at school.

This law represents one step into the direction of state censorship. The more drastic version of the law that is being suggested would forbid the production and sales of very vaguely defined “violent games” in Switzerland. Is it violent to be a fat Italian plumber that jumps onto mushrooms? Is it violent to play as Jade, a reporter battling human trafficking and other horrors and quite definitely smacking aliens in the skull with various weapons because they would kill her otherwise? One of the few games with a believable female lead character, a true miracle in gaming, which is rated 7+ now would be illegal under this new law? Or for a more popular example, Half-Life 2, one of the greatest advances in game storytelling and depth in a first-person game ever to grace the screens of the world, would be illegal just because you need to sometimes crack a mutant’s skull with a crowbar to save your character’s life and the lives of those your character loves?

I think we’re talking generation gap here. These politicians have never played any of the games I’ve mentioned. They have no clue how the medium works. None of these politicians ever stood on top of the Citadel and saw their own character’s fate roll out before them. None of them ever felt a chill run down their spine when they glimpsed the G-Man silently observing them from afar. None of them ever had that odd feeling in the pit of their stomach approaching a an eerile Combine police officer in the introduction scene to Half-Life 2. They don’t even know these scenes exist, or that there is more to game storytelling than simply shooting the limbs off your enemy. James Bond also kills people, but the audience applauds. It’s because he doesn’t kill in cold blood. What a boring Bond film that would make.

I’d wager that 99.5% of the games released today, and a significant portion of the games that would be affected by the ban, are not the kind of games the politicians are thinking of when they talk about these issues. If they would actually play some of them, they’d know that. If they prefer to simply ban what they don’t know and don’t understand, I’d be losing some confidence in our government.

Recently I went shopping at Migros (one of the largest Swiss store chains, covering nearly 50% of the market) and was, once again, unable to find any chicken meat from Switzerland. What’s worse, products with processed chicken meat (such as chicken nuggets) are usually made with chicken meat from Brazil. This begs one very deep question: What the fuck? Excuse the expletive, but how come that in one of the world’s richest countries, we cannot afford locally produced chicken meat? Migros presumably buys Brazilian meat because it’s cheaper to raise chickens in god-awful conditions in Brazil, kill them, freeze them and ship them over to Switzerland than it is to abide by the (pretty restrictive) Swiss animal protection laws regarding chickens and produce the meat here.

Migros is a company that works under the pretense that they have some moral standards. They don’t sell alcohol or cigarettes, for example. Instead, in order not to lose face but to cash in on those markets, they bought their competitor Denner who makes a lot of its annual profits exclusively from alcohol and tobacco. The Denner deal shows that Migros has no right to call themselves morally superior, and the Brazilian chicken meat isn’t helping that.

Because of issues like these, I’ve often pondered becoming vegetarian, simply because it would mean I don’t have to think about all these animal problems anymore, at least for my little world. But Migros’ and Coop’s vegetarian products won’t help me at all, because most of them contain milk! So for a lactose-intolerant vegetarian, the Swiss supermarket landscape looks very bleak. Out of sixteen Migros products, only three were without milk, and they were the most basic and most boring ones. At Coop it looks worse, of 23 products I’ve seen, only four are without milk, milk serum, cream or fresh cheese. This is not counting non-specific vegetarian products — I was only looking at meat replacements.

The best solution to the problem would be to create every single dish yourself, but that means you’re missing out on (very yummy) Quorn and tofu products from these major supermarket chains. Small and expensive specialized stores with other products do exist, but Quorn-based products aren’t really available there, and many of the meat replacements they offer have the same milk problem as the major players’ ones. You’re also looking at prices between 10 and 50% higher than what you’d pay at the major chains, so for people with less money, this probably won’t work at all.

I’ve written Migros an e-mail asking whether they might be adding milk-free vegetarian products to their product lines. Let’s see what they write back.

Update: Migros answers! Here’s the key sentence:

Um unsere Produkte für Allergiker und Veganer interessanter zu machen, werden wir zukünftig auf Milchprodukte im Vegi-Sortiment weitestgehend verzichten.

Migros will stop using milk products in their vegetarian product lines as far as possible. This is in order to make their products more interesting for vegans and people with allergies. That’s great news It means the mythical lactose-intolerant vegetarian might actually be able to.. err.. not starve. And thus exist.