A winning word in German

 

Viviane Namaste, a part-time faculty member in the Simone de Beauvoir Institute, wrote an essay for a contest run by a German publisher seeking "the most beautiful German word." Entrants had to suggest a word, and provide justification for choosing it.

It was an enormously popular contest, with 22,838 entries from 111 countries. Namaste’s essay was among the 170 selected for a book published by Hueber last year, titled, appropriately, Das schönste deutsche Wort (The Most Beautiful German Word).

She explained, “Entries also had to include a justification. My word was Vorstellungsvermögen. It refers to the capacity to imagine, but also to the very richness of imagination.

“I chose it because of what it signifies, of course, as well as what it implies: that imagination is central to any language.”

Namaste’s accomplishment is all the more impressive, because she is not a native speaker of the language, and learned her German at the Goethe Institute.

“It is relatively easy to have access to German culture here in Montréal. The Goethe Institute offers courses, a library, a bookstore, and audio-visual materials on loan.”

There was some merriment among supporters of other languages, including French and English, when this contest was announced.

Namaste responded, “Yes, I am aware that some have difficulty in describing German as beautiful. Generally, these difficulties base themselves on phonetics, on how the language sounds. Part of what makes the German language so interesting for me is its syntactic and grammatical structure.

“There is a complexity embedded in the grammar itself that allows for the articulation of very nuanced arguments, in my view. And especially for intellectuals, languages which allow the expression of nuance and complexity are, quite simply, beautiful.”

Namaste has taught at the Simone de Beauvoir Institute since 2002. She teaches two courses: Feminist Thought, Feminisms and Research Methods, and Health Issues: Feminist Perspectives.