Memories...

[stoutfellow]

I was born in Augsburg, in what was then West Germany; my father was stationed there at the time. We left when I was about two years old, so I have no memories of it. (One of these days I'll do the tourist thing again, and Germany will be on the list.)

The family did come away with some souvenirs, including some linguistic ones, bastardized German phrases that became part of our family language. ("Idiolect" is the word for one's own specific habits of speech; there ought to be one for a family's.) One that I remember, we used with the meaning "It doesn't matter" or "I don't care"; I recall it as "mox nix", but of course that's a monoglot child's interpretation. Nowadays I know a little German, but not enough to confidently reconstruct the original. Presumably "machen" and "nicht", in some form or another, are involved.

I know there are people who follow me who know more German than I do. What could the original phrase have been, bitte?

Comments

[sraun]

Macht Nicht - literally makes not. Mox nix is pretty close to how my wife pronounces it.

[ndrosen]

“Macht nichts” is German for “Makes nothing”, or “Doesn’t matter.” As your other follower has said, the pronunciation isn’t far from “Mox nix.”

“Nicht” means not, and “nichts” means nothing. I think that a German would say “Macht nichts,” but I could perhaps be mistaken, or there could be dialectical differences.

[jsburbidge]

"Macht nichts" is exactly the same idiom as the French "ça ne fait rien". The pronunciation I learned (Palatinate, age of about 2; my father studied at Heidelberg for a year) uses a front ch which is very un-English, and an English speaker without training would probably assimilate it to an x (or possibly to makt nikts by way of a back ch).

Odd what gets preserved. I grew up referring to a Volkswagen using the German pronunciation and "Entschuldigen Sie mich, bitte" but little else (other than some remembered children's stories like Max und Moritz) untill I studied German formally in High School.

[muckefuck]

As ndrosen has pointed out, the corresponding Standard German expression is "(Es) macht nichts".

Nix is common even in colloquial German. This could also be due to the use of nix (ultimately from the German) in American slang. I'm assuming the /xt/ of macht was altered to /ks/ by analogy with it.

("Idiolect" is the word for one's own specific habits of speech; there ought to be one for a family's.)

I've seen "oikolect" used for this purpose but it's not a standard term.