Today I received an email from my mom. Apparently my neith Sara-Mia, a 2 year old found a picture of me in my mom’s car. It is now her “comfort-item” in the BMW. She holds it in her hands and says, “ Mati – Honolulu”. That would be me then. Sara-Mia calls me “Mati”. My sister tried to teach her ‘Tante Marion aus Honolulu’ (Aunti Marion from Honolulu -in English), but even if she is able to toss in whole sentences in the middle of a conversation, she kind of refuses to pick up ‘Tante Marion’. This is a good thing. Being called “Tante” in Germany has something negative on it. We call fat slow people Tante. We call old fat slow people Tante. Not sure why Germans do that.
Today, I spend time thinking about Sara-Mia on my long Pali-Loop ride. Long rides are always dangerous for getting into some serious thinking. So here is the second good reason, why ‘Mati’ is preferred to ‘Tante Marion’. Obviously “Mati” is shorter than saying “Tante Marion”. About 50% shorter. Lets say we would condense 2 or 3 words into just 1 word. Lets think further: if my professor cut his blablabla-privat-stuff by 50% during a usually 3 hour lasting lecture, I would save 1.5 hours. Figure that out, I could go for a nice run or swim or bike ride or just sleep longer!! It would be of high interest to me which language actually uses the least amount of words. I would love to learn it!! Time for googling it out.