Lasky changes her unwieldy Teutonic birth name, and suddenly she is transmogrified by this Hollywood god into Mary Astor.

In Brazil, a tongue derived from German immigrants, Riograndenser Hunsrückish, blends Portuguese words with Teutonic suffixes and the lilt of Italian.

Teutonic meets tectonic when filmmaker Werner Herzog explores how volcanoes have shaped geography as well as indigenous cultures in the new documentary “Into the Inferno.”