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- Topic: German >
- "Alle sind begeistert."
30 Comments
329
AFAIK, "geist" = "ghost". The German and the English words share the same origin. So, if something has a "geist", it means it has a spirit, or a heart, then it is "enheartened", "animated" (remembering that the Latin word "anima" means "spirit" too), thus "excited".
1097
I think it is. It's not typical for conversational speech but for certain written passages or descriptive speech such as coverage of an event, it is certainly used.
14
after almost two decades of on and off german, this is the first time I have ever seen the word for 'excited' in german
just saying
1097
I don't think so. It seems to be just a matter of convention. English and German both treat a lot of collective nouns as singular. But I see more instances in German where the plural is used.
I put down 'everyone is captivated', I thought this could also be used for 'begeistert' and on linguee they do use begeistern as well as the more commonly used gefesselt (both meaning captivate). I'm not sure how wrong I am here, because I have used the word like this in German conversation before. That is not to say that I agree that 'excited' is the better translation here, im just wondering if captivated should also be considered correct.