The gender debate has the potential to get on your nerves. Otherwise you don’t have to worry. At least in this context it comes to mind that the gender assignment in the dialect often differs from the standard language. This also applies to many nouns that prefer to follow the example of other European languages. In Bavarian it is called butter, analogous to le beurre in French. The series could be continued as desired (the plate, the chocolate, the cutting, the zero).
Recently an older gentleman on the S-Bahn in Markt Schwaben asked a fellow passenger: “And where is Dei today?” De Dei, that means: your wife. The dialectal tendency towards abbreviation is also expressed in a curiosity concerning the third person singular. There is no gender distinction there. For each gender only the form “be” exists. The statement “Am Hans is a woman” therefore has the counterpart “Anni is Mo”. In science we speak of an asexual pronoun. Anyone who loves the language will always enjoy it. “Des is ihra seim Bruadan sei Bua” – that’s her brother’s boy.
Tragl
The educator Rudolf Mühlstrasser, a loyal companion to this column, recently died. When the term Biertragl came up, it brought back vivid memories for him, as he once worked as a beer driver during the semester break. “In the Schwabing delivery district, there were a lot of staircases that wanted to be climbed,” he wrote to us. And further: “You left one tragl hanging on the handle, the other was held under your arm. Sheet metal or even plastic tragl were a rarity back then (1956-1960).
It wasn’t just rain that made the wooden ones more difficult – beer that was to be pasteurized was placed in the hot water tub in the Tragln, where they soaked up vigorously. The tragl of that time contained 25 bottles and had snap caps that weighed several times more than today’s capsules. This resulted in a total weight of up to half a hundredweight. If you had completed your number of flights, consuming calories in the form of beer could do no harm,” Mühlstrasser concluded his informative letter.