My favorite German word-why do you need it? Do you commonly run into them? What’s the SD on these creatures, anyway?
I don’t really get what you’re asking. It seems you know what “Doppelgänger” means, so are you asking why we have a word for it, given that it’S rare to meet one’s own Doppelgänger?
It’s a common word in German, but it’s not only used in the narrow sense of someone being your exact lookalike. One might, for example, also refer to the impersonator of a celebrity to be the celebrity’s Doppelgänger (if he’s a good impersonator). It can also refer to things which appear very similar. From looking at the article on Doppelgänger in the English version of Wikipedia, it seems that the word is used in a more narrow sense in English, roughly synonymous to “evil twin.”
I though “double” was a translation of doppelgänger (German), or dubbelgångare (Swedish), or any other language. Don’t we all have them?
As in Cohen:
I stumbled out of bed
I got ready for the struggle
I smoked a cigarette
And I tightened up my gut
I said this can’t be me
Must be my double
It’s a concept that was sometimes used in literature of the German Romantic period, and also the German equivalent of the English “double” (in the sense of a person intentionally employed to impersonate - but nowadays in that sense the English word is much more commonly used). One of the large proportion of German loan words whose exact meaning and connotations have significantly changed after incorporation into English.
That there’s a German word doesn’t say as much as it is often perceived to IMO. For example there are German words for the concepts of
“a sandwich which has been made before departing for a trip or for work, but that has been taken back uneaten” = Hasenbrot (noun, n, mostly North Germany)
“flowers bought to propitiate one’s lady when returning home from a late night out” = Drachenfutter (noun, n)
but there is no indication that instances of these concepts are more common in the German-speaking countries than elsewhere.
Heck, English has ‘defenestrate’. How often do you throw someone/something out a window?
Dragon food? ARE YOU SAYING THAT I’M A DRAGON? SOME KIND OF REPTILE? IS THAT IT? DO I BREATHE FIRE? </angry wife>
Seriously, this is an awesome word, and absolutely German in its character. In the New World, we never really had dragons, except for quetzlcoatl, and they stay south of the border usually. The fact that America is such a country of immigrants leads us to forget that our hills are just as old as Germany’s. We don’t have any traditions going back six or seven centuries that say that (e.g) long ago, this or that village was founded where an animal was killed that was too heavy to drag anywhere, and the church was build where the pagans used to do their sacrifices. So the idea of the metaphor – that the husband is bringing food back to the den to soothe a dragon – is ruined by the idea that very few American husbands would put the concept into those words, and if they did they’d have to explain the joke. Also, here in America, the concept of dragons is sadly tainted by a heavy stigma of nerdiness, so the person using the metaphor would be seen as goofy rather than sly.
For the benefit of non-native speakers, this translates directly as “dragon feed.”
I love German.
I venture to say that both words must be in use mostly in North Germany - I’m from the south, and I have never heard either of them. OTOH, I am well aware that there are many words from South Germany which are never used in the north - many of my university mates are from the north, and even after several years of studying together, we occassionally have problems of understanding each other.
I also second the idea that the existence of a word doesn’t need to be justified by any frequency with which you encounter the thing to which the word refers. I’m confident nobody here has ever met a unicorn, but that doesn’t stop us from having a word for that notion.
There are several English words, for example the nouns ‘fetch’ and ‘wraith,’ which in traditional English folklore have almost the same meaning as the German döppelganger. Most people are more familiar with other meanings of these words, but a good dictionary will describe them.
So to answer the OP, the straight dope on these creatures is that they are a common phenomenon in international folklore with a variety of interpretations (from the naturalistic “coincidental look-alike” to the supernatural “your separable soul out wandering” or “an evil spirit who has assumed your form”). It is usually bad luck to run into them, and sometimes fatal, though they can be driven away without harm if you speak to them firmly and sharply. Sabine Baring-Gould’s book of folklore is online with some more information: A Book of Folklore: Fetches, though you should ignore the interpretations as hopelessly outdated and just look at the examples.