Today’s spotlight
episode is not about the English language, but rather about my native tongue:
German.
Mark Twain knew
German and he had a few things to say about it. I will read you now some
excerpts from his essay The Awful German Language. It is in the public domain
and you can read the whole text at: http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Awful_German_Language
One word to the
wise: Not everything he wrote is actually true. But most of it is, and who can
blame him for making some mistakes concerning such an awful language.
I went often to
look at the collection of curiosities in Heidelberg Castle, and one day I
surprised the keeper of it with my German. I spoke entirely in that language.
He was greatly interested; and after I had talked a while he said my German was
very rare, possibly a "unique"; and wanted to add it to his museum.
If he had known
what it had cost me to acquire my art, he would also have known that it would
break any collector to buy it. Harris and I had been hard at work on our German
during several weeks at that time, and although we had made good progress, it
had been accomplished under great difficulty and annoyance, for three of our
teachers had died in the mean time. A person who has not studied German can
form no idea of what a perplexing language it is.
Surely there is
not another language that is so slipshod and systemless, and so slippery and
elusive to the grasp. One is washed about in it, hither and thither, in the
most helpless way; and when at last he thinks he has captured a rule which
offers firm ground to take a rest on amid the general rage and turmoil of the
ten parts of speech, he turns over the page and reads, "Let the pupil make
careful note of the following exceptions." He runs his eye down and finds
that there are more exceptions to the rule than instances of it. So overboard
he goes again, to hunt for another Ararat and find another quicksand. Such has
been, and continues to be, my experience.
Every time I think I have got one of these four confusing "cases" where I am master of it, a seemingly insignificant preposition intrudes itself into my sentence, clothed with an awful and unsuspected power, and crumbles the ground from under me. For instance, my book inquires after a certain bird—(it is always inquiring after things which are of no sort of no consequence to anybody): "Where is the bird?" Now the answer to this question—according to the book—is that the bird is waiting in the blacksmith shop on account of the rain. Of course no bird would do that, but then you must stick to the book.
Very well, I begin to cipher out the German for that answer. I begin at the wrong end, necessarily, for that is the German idea. I say to myself, "Regen (rain) is masculine—or maybe it is feminine—or possibly neuter—it is too much trouble to look now. Therefore, it is either der (the) Regen, or die (the) Regen, or das (the) Regen, according to which gender it may turn out to be when I look. In the interest of science, I will cipher it out on the hypothesis that it is masculine. Very well—then the rain is der Regen, if it is simply in the quiescent state of being mentioned, without enlargement or discussion—Nominative case; but if this rain is lying around, in a kind of a general way on the ground, it is then definitely located, it is doing something—that is, resting (which is one of the German grammar's ideas of doing something), and this throws the rain into the Dative case, and makes it dem Regen. However, this rain is not resting, but is doing something actively,—it is falling—to interfere with the bird, likely—and this indicates movement, which has the effect of sliding it into the Accusative case and changing dem Regen into den Regen." Having completed the grammatical horoscope of this matter, I answer up confidently and state in German that the bird is staying in the blacksmith shop "wegen (on account of) den Regen." Then the teacher lets me softly down with the remark that whenever the word "wegen" drops into a sentence, it always throws that subject into the genitive case, regardless of consequences—and therefore this bird stayed in the blacksmith shop "wegen des Regens."
Every time I think I have got one of these four confusing "cases" where I am master of it, a seemingly insignificant preposition intrudes itself into my sentence, clothed with an awful and unsuspected power, and crumbles the ground from under me. For instance, my book inquires after a certain bird—(it is always inquiring after things which are of no sort of no consequence to anybody): "Where is the bird?" Now the answer to this question—according to the book—is that the bird is waiting in the blacksmith shop on account of the rain. Of course no bird would do that, but then you must stick to the book.
Very well, I begin to cipher out the German for that answer. I begin at the wrong end, necessarily, for that is the German idea. I say to myself, "Regen (rain) is masculine—or maybe it is feminine—or possibly neuter—it is too much trouble to look now. Therefore, it is either der (the) Regen, or die (the) Regen, or das (the) Regen, according to which gender it may turn out to be when I look. In the interest of science, I will cipher it out on the hypothesis that it is masculine. Very well—then the rain is der Regen, if it is simply in the quiescent state of being mentioned, without enlargement or discussion—Nominative case; but if this rain is lying around, in a kind of a general way on the ground, it is then definitely located, it is doing something—that is, resting (which is one of the German grammar's ideas of doing something), and this throws the rain into the Dative case, and makes it dem Regen. However, this rain is not resting, but is doing something actively,—it is falling—to interfere with the bird, likely—and this indicates movement, which has the effect of sliding it into the Accusative case and changing dem Regen into den Regen." Having completed the grammatical horoscope of this matter, I answer up confidently and state in German that the bird is staying in the blacksmith shop "wegen (on account of) den Regen." Then the teacher lets me softly down with the remark that whenever the word "wegen" drops into a sentence, it always throws that subject into the genitive case, regardless of consequences—and therefore this bird stayed in the blacksmith shop "wegen des Regens."
The Germans have
another kind of parenthesis, which they make by splitting a verb in two and
putting half of it at the beginning of an exciting chapter and the other half
at the end of it. Can any one conceive of anything more confusing than that?
These things are called "separable verbs." The German grammar is
blistered all over with separable verbs; and the wider the two portions of one
of them are spread apart, the better the author of the crime is pleased with
his performance. A favorite one is reiste ab—which means departed. Here is an
example which I culled from a novel and reduced to English:
"The trunks
being now ready, he DE- after kissing his mother and sisters, and once more
pressing to his bosom his adored Gretchen, who, dressed in simple white muslin,
with a single tuberose in the ample folds of her rich brown hair, had tottered
feebly down the stairs, still pale from the terror and excitement of the past
evening, but longing to lay her poor aching head yet once again upon the breast
of him whom she loved more dearly than life itself, -PARTED."
The inventor of
the language seems to have taken pleasure in complicating it in every way he
could think of.
Every noun has a
gender, and there is no sense or system in the distribution; so the gender of
each must be learned separately and by heart. There is no other way. To do this
one has to have a memory like a memorandum-book. In German, a young lady has no
sex, while a turnip has. Think what overwrought reverence that shows for the
turnip, and what callous disrespect for the girl.
There are some
exceedingly useful words in this language. Schlag, for example; and zug. There
are three-quarters of a column of schlags in the dictionary, and a column and a
half of zugs. The word schlag means Blow, Stroke, Dash, Hit, Shock, Clap, Slap,
Time, Bar, Coin, Stamp, Kind, Sort, Manner, Way, Apoplexy, Wood-cutting,
Enclosure, Field, Forest-clearing. This is its simple and exact meaning—that is
to say, its restricted, its fettered meaning; but there are ways by which you
can set it free, so that it can soar away, as on the wings of the morning, and
never be at rest. You can hang any word you please to its tail, and make it
mean anything you want to. You can begin with schlag-ader, which means artery,
and you can hang on the whole dictionary, word by word, clear through the
alphabet to schlag-wasser, which means bilge-water—and including schlag-mutter,
which means mother-in-law.
That paragraph
furnishes a text for a few remarks about one of the most curious and notable
features of my subject—the length of German words. Some German words are so
long that they have a perspective. Observe these examples:
Freundschaftsbeze[u]gungen.
Dilettantenaufdringlichkeiten.
Stadtverordnetenversammlungen.
These things are
not words, they are alphabetical processions. And they are not rare; one can
open a German newspaper at any time and see them marching majestically across
the page—and if he has any imagination he can see the banners and hear the
music, too. They impart a martial thrill to the meekest subject. I take a great
interest in these curiosities. Whenever I come across a good one, I stuff it
and put it in my museum. In this way I have made quite a valuable collection.
When I get duplicates, I exchange with other collectors, and thus increase the
variety of my stock. Here are some specimens which I lately bought at an
auction sale of the effects of a bankrupt bric-a-brac hunter:
Generalstaatsverordnetenversammlungen.
Altertumswissenschaften.
Kinderbewährungsanstalten.
Unabhängigkeitserklärungen.
Wiederherstellungbestrebungen.
Waffenstillstandsverhandlungen.
Of course when one
of these grand mountain ranges goes stretching across the printed page, it
adorns and ennobles that literary landscape—but at the same time it is a great
distress to the new student, for it blocks up his way; he cannot crawl under
it, or climb over it, or tunnel through it. So he resorts to the dictionary for
help, but there is no help there. The dictionary must draw the line
somewhere—so it leaves this sort of words out. And it is right, because these
long things are hardly legitimate words, but are rather combinations of words,
and the inventor of them ought to have been killed. They are compound words
with the hyphens left out. The various words used in building them are in the
dictionary, but in a very scattered condition; so you can hunt the materials
out, one by one, and get at the meaning at last, but it is a tedious and
harassing business.
[About swearing:]
"Verdammt," and its variations and enlargements, are words which have
plenty of meaning, but the SOUNDS are so mild and ineffectual that German
ladies can use them without sin. German ladies who could not be induced to
commit a sin by any persuasion or compulsion, promptly rip out one of these
harmless little words when they tear their dresses or don't like the soup. It
sounds about as wicked as our "My gracious." German ladies are
constantly saying, "Ach! Gott!"
"Mein Gott!" "Gott im Himmel!" "Herr Gott"
"Der Herr Jesus!" etc. They think our ladies have the same custom, perhaps; for I once heard a
gentle and lovely old German lady say to a sweet young American girl: "The
two languages are so alike—how pleasant that is; we say 'Ach! Gott!' you say
'Goddamn.'"
My philological
studies have satisfied me that a gifted person ought to learn English (barring
spelling and pronouncing) in thirty hours, French in thirty days, and German in
thirty years. It seems manifest, then, that the latter tongue ought to be
trimmed down and repaired. If it is to remain as it is, it ought to be gently
and reverently set aside among the dead languages, for only the dead have time
to learn it.
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