>Early ‘90s, after “Die Wende”
It was a peaceful revolution. Wende is a term coined by the SED and misleading.
https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/sprachkritik-wer-wende-sagt-s... (in german tho)
It was a peaceful revolution. Wende is a term coined by the SED and misleading.
https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/sprachkritik-wer-wende-sagt-s... (in german tho)
It’s been a common word, which existed long before 1989, and while it is since then strongly linked to the events around the time when the Berlin wall fell, you’ll have a hard time finding a German who knows of how this word was used by the East-German political party (SED).
Spoiler: It was used to mean the opposite of what actually happened (i.e. more power to the party).
The parent comment’s link brings you to the transcript of an interview with a former German law professor who, knowing the SED’s usage of the word, made sure to always describe what happened in 1989 as a revolution.
This is actually one person begging other German speakers to start using what he thinks is the correct word.
Ain’t gonna happen.
If East-Germans stood up for themselves in the required numbers to overthrow their leaders, I guess Germans would use the word revolution.
But that’s not what transpired.
In 1989 a system collapsed. Communism. While that may also always qualify as a revolution in academic circles, German people chose Wende, which simply means turnaround.
Sure, but for something not directly related: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wende_(Bundesrepublik_Deutschl...
(might be dating myself there ;-}
Wende means turnaround and that’s good enough for the rest of us.
But today I learned that Hungarian is a Uralic not a Slavic language and so of course I had no chance discerning which word in «rendszerváltás» stood for system or change, which made me mad enough to want to look it up:
rendszer (“system”) + váltás (“change”)
Seems like adding -szer turns the meaning of the word into its enabler.
I checked on Wiktionary and this nice theory is not right; váltás has been traced back to Proto-Finno-Ugric roots and has known cognates in other distant Uralic languages. Oh well! At least we live in a miraculous time where one can easily check etymologies in various language families in five seconds. :-)
But amusingly, "revolution" itself also literally etymologically means ... turn!
"Revolution" also means "turnaround".