Our merry exploration of the language known to English speakers as German continues with this familiar looking word.
Don't have time to finish reading this: "Primat" is German for "primate" and for "primacy" or "precedence" of politics.
It became the subject of this post because it tripped up TheEditor. Which sucked because TheEditor has the habit of thinking of itself* as bright and well educated.
When it read the latest Google bashing German newspaper articles, TheEditor paused at this construct: ..dass es den Primat der Politik gibt...
The grammar is not important, no worry. What stopped TheEditor is the fact that the article uses "Primat" with the masculine form "den".
Chalking this up to yet another error by a copy editor would have been the easy way out, but it was not to be. A check on the Duden German dictionary website revealed that both the masculine and the neural forms are used.
Dodgy education or too many nature documentaries had somehow convinced TheEditor that the masculine "der" was correct when talking about the animal, the primate (der Primat, pl.: die Primaten) and the neutral form was used for politics. The concept "primacy of politics", or the precedence of politics, is commonly used to express that politics has the ultimate supremacy over institutions like the military or in the famous statement "primacy of domestic politics". This concept is quite the fallacy but that's outside the purview of today's dig.
Further searching unearthed a mild joke in a Frankfurter Allgemeine comment piece, using the ambiguity as follows: Despite a common belief that "der Primat" might be an ape that managed to slip undetected into German parliament...
TheEditor detracted us momentarily with a primal growl, undetected, they put'em in suits and slicked back their hair...you serious?..., but we tried to answer the question why would anybody use the masculine form when the neutral is kind of the obvious choice?
Note: Duden does only specify "zoology" as the usage of the masculine form.
Could it be a penchant to pick the first of two consecutive choices? The Duden says noun, masculine, or noun, neutral. Their criteria for this are unknown. What if they had listed the entry the other way round?
Our preferred explanation, supported by Catholic treatises, is that using the masculine form for primate primal politics is the older, classic expression, a display of humanistic education - not necessarily behavior.
The Duden primate page does have another nugget for students: Herrentier. "Herren" being "master", "Tier" meaning animal. This one is marked as "obsolescent", a relief, although obsolete would be the correct designation.
After a number of posts on quirks of the German language, we are starting to get a feeling that we may inadvertently have discovered one explanation for the well established German love of rules.
Do Germans in part love rules so much because their own language so often betrays them by forcing them into strange gender choices in addition to the humungouscompoundnouns?
Are they collectively traumatized deep deep down by the realization that all the rules made through many generations only mask the absence of solid ground?
Just like Peach Orchard Drive or Cherry Blossom Lane in American suburbia really only mean one thing: no orchard near or far, not a single cherry blossom within a hundred miles.
* TheEditor insists on using the gender neutral it. Secondary advantage: "he says, she says" makes no sense when you criticize our post.
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