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Category: Diverse

Where St Nicholas puts presents under the pillow

In Germany, St Nicholas’ main task is to fill boots: Children place boots in front of the door on the night of 6 December and hope that St Nicholas will leave them with sweets and small gifts overnight. However, for some families he only arrives on the evening of St Nicholas’ Day itself: he wears a red coat, a beard and a red hat and hands over the presents personally or reminds children to work harder at school, for example. The rod with which he—or his companion Knecht Ruprecht—threatened previous generations remains outside the door. Christian churches commemorate the anniversary… Read More

Customs in the Advent season

The Advent season in Germany has many traditions and customs. Advent means “the coming of God”, referring to the birth of Jesus Christ, which many people in Germany celebrate on December 24th. Advent begins on the first Sunday after November 26th and is then celebrated on all four Sundays until Christmas. The celebrations have many customs. One of them is the Advent wreath, a beautifully decorated wreath made of fir branches with four candles on it. One candle is lit every Sunday, so that all four candles are lit by Christmas. Another custom, especially for children, is the Advent calendar,… Read More

The history of punctuation: How punctuation marks became increasingly important

By Oula Mahfouz Punctuation marks – periods, commas, colons, question marks, semicolons (semicolons), brackets, exclamation marks, dashes and quotation marks – are all essential in written communication. They are used to organize texts and make it possible to express thoughts and feelings precisely. Conversely, punctuation marks help considerably to understand texts and to be able to read them out loud. Without punctuation, many sentences are ambiguous and the internet is full of example sentences that can only be understood if a comma is inserted. The history of punctuation spans many centuries and is closely linked to the respective language and… Read More

Zaha Hadid: Ingenious architect with oriental roots

By Sameer Ibrahim Zaha Hadid (1950–2016), an Iraqi architect with British revolutionized the world of architecture and has left a visible mark in many cities around the world. She grew up in Baghdad in a wealthy family. Her father, Muhammad Hadid, was a prominent politician and former finance minister of Iraq. Even as a child she redesigned her own children’s room, which was used by a carpenter as a model for many other children’s rooms in Baghdad. At the age of eleven she wanted to become an architect. Zaha Hadid is known for her futuristic and unmistakable style. In an… Read More

German words from all over the world

By Ute Kaiser Rana and Nour are studying for their B2 exam. This is exhausting because the German language is complicated. That’s why the two women need a break. They sit on a sofa and nibble pistachios. Rana and Nour don’t need to know that sofa and pistachio were not originally German words. Sofa was adopted from Arabic like Bedouin, Kadi, mattress, saffron and many other terms. Pistachio, like pajama, paradise and pasha, comes from Persian. These words usually have a long migration behind them. They entered the German language via Greek, Latin and Italian. All words borrowed from other… Read More

End of August: “Blue Moon” and Supermoon

In the night from August 30 to 31 there is something special to marvel at in the sky in Germany: the supermoon and at the same time”Blue Moon”. Supermoon is the name for a full moon that appears larger and brighter than normal because the earth and the moon come especially close to each other. The moon is then only about 356,000 kilometers away from the earth, otherwise the distance can be up to 406,000 kilometers. The difference in distance is due to the fact that the moon orbits the Earth not in a circle, but in an ellipse, i.e.… Read More

The world’s largest cemetery is near Baghdad

By Sameer Ibrahim The Wadi Al-Salaam cemetery near Najaf in the southwest of the Iraqi capital Baghdad is one of the most important burial sites for Shiite Muslims and also the largest cemetery in the world. According to estimates, there are more than five million graves there, many times the population of the city of Najaf of one and a half million. Millions of Shiites make a pilgrimage to the cemetery every year, from all over the world and also from Iran. The cemetery is on Iraq’s proposed list of UNESCO World Heritage Sites. People have been buried in the… Read More

Originally a Syrian specialty: damask for kings and nobles

By Oula Mahfouz Damask is a traditional textile fabric known for its remarkable patterning and high quality. The name “damask,” which is also commonly used in German, comes from the Arabic term “damas,” which refers to the city of Damascus in ancient Syria. The word is first documented in German in the 15th century and was adopted from the Italian word “damasto”. This is because Italian merchants first brought the damask fabric to Germany. Originally, damask fabric originated in the ancient Orient and was further developed over time in different cultures. Traditionally, damask was made from threads of silk and… Read More

The mother tongue determines how the brain ticks

By Oula Mahfouz and Michael Seifert Brain researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, Germany, have used a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner to compare how language processing works in the brains of Arabic and German native speakers. In the process, they came across quite surprising results: “Arabic speakers have a strong connection between the two hemispheres of the brain, whereas in German native speakers the connections within the left brain hemisphere are more strongly developed,” explains Alfred Anwander, the head of the study in an interview with tünews INTERNATIONAL. “Our study is… Read More

Tübingen replaces Theodor in the spelling tablet

By Oula Mahfouz and Ute Kaiser Munich, Aachen, Hamburg, Frankfurt, Offenbach, Unna, Zwickau: This is how I have to spell my last name on the phone so that people can spell it correctly—M A H F O U Z. Until a year ago, it read like this: Martha, Anton, Heinrich, Friedrich, Otto, Ulrich, Zacharias. In May 2022, the German Institute for Standardization (DIN) abolished the old spelling table. City names replace given names in it. Since then, the T no longer stands for Theodor, but for Tübingen. The reason for the new version: The anti-Semitism commissioner of Baden-Württemberg had pointed… Read More

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