The image that le bonheur calls up in the French mind. The official title of this organization in English is not very illuminating вЂ“В 'Swiss Solidarity'В вЂ“ but the French title, which came first, reflects both 'luck' and 'happiness', but mainly 'happiness': La ChaГ®ne du Bonheur. In Switzerland a large humanitarian aid organization calls itself in German the GlГјckskette. Mr Palmer's statement 'GlГјck comes close but really that means luck' is therefore nonsense, a fact that we can easily demonstrate empirically. In all these manifestations it expresses just the way that 'hap' does that causal link between good fortune and the mental state it produces. Whereas English acquired 'hap' from Scandinavian sources, German took 'GlГјck' from some unknown source via Middle High German, Middle Low German and Middle Dutch. This situation has its exact parallel in German. But, when you think about it, even that modest requirement is conditional upon that fickle hussy, FortunaвЂ“ the next bullet, the next shell, the next Woodbine.ДЄll the many synonyms of the happy words вЂ“В 'blessed', 'content' and so onВ вЂ“ stand on the base of good fortune: 'luck'. It is difficult to imagine a soldier up to his waist in the mud of Passchendaele being happy, except in the sense of 'currently still alive'. The normal human however, when deprived of chemical and spiritual assistance, requires the existence of desirable conditions to create happiness. Norman Rockwell, Freedom from Want, 1943. The state of happiness is contingent upon prior beneficial conditions. Or something else, who knows? 'Happiness is egg-shaped', Britons used to be told by their Egg Marketing Board. Perhaps Buddhism may be an influence in this, or our modern obsession with chemically altered states of mind, or both. Through time 'happy' and 'happiness' have developed further to describe some causeless state of grace. The state of pleasurable content of mind, which results from success or the attainment of what is considered good. Gradually, the 'hap' words accreted a further meaning: the state of someone who has had good fortune. We still use it with these meanings nowadays in words such as 'happen', 'happenstance' and phrases such as 'as it happens'. Its original meaning was chance, (good) luck, (good) fortune etc. According to the OED, the root of 'happy', 'happiness' and the rest of this tribe is 'hap', a Middle English word from the Nordic tradition, now designated 'archaic'. Let's waste some time in the cause of truth. If only on these grounds we could reasonably dismiss with a waft of the mouse both assertions about comparative vocabulary and go for a cup of tea. In the same way, the poor 'Eskimo' have to put up with the outsider's view of them as one homogeneous people speaking one homogeneous language, a people who, when they are not reading this blog, spend the long evenings in an igloo chatting about snow. Oh well, they've learned to live with German cultural domination down the ages. Mr Palmer has just upset about nine million Austrians and about five million Swiss who speak that language or a dialect of it as their mother-tongue. 'The Germans' is a sloppy personification of what really should be 'the German language'. Without hammering too hard on this walnut, let's try and prise it apart. The punctuation here seems OK, but that is about the only thing that is. They do, however, have several words for suicide. GlГјck comes close but really that means luck.

The Germans don't have a word for happiness. In a recent interview with the German composer Hans Zimmer, he started his piece by launching another comparative vocabulary meme: It's also wrong вЂ“ but inconsequentially so.Д®nter Ben Lawrence, the culture reviewer currently writing for the UK Telegraph. We've all heard or read that the Eskimo supposedly have words for 'snow'.

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