Busting some myths about German
Hi, and welcome back!
News
Once again, there’s not much to report on the news front. I’m working on the writing guide when I can (mostly on Fridays). Spring has well and truly sprung in Berlin; the sun is up early and goes down late. The parks are filled with picnickers and people with portable speakers of varying quality. The evening park-rave that I can hear from my window is back. This is Berlin; here we speak untz-untz-untz.
This month, I want to talk a little bit about a topic near and dear to my heart: German. If you don’t already know, I have MAs in both German (2018) and linguistics (2019; both University of Georgia), and I wrote my linguistics thesis on a very specific category of German verb (which I will probably write up eventually, though it’s gonna be a long one).
There are a lot of things people get wrong about German, so I’m going to do a little mythbusting.
“There’s got to be a long German word for that!”
This is, as far as misconceptions go, not the worst thing in the world. People know that German allows you to mash a bunch of words together into a Frankenword, so the assumption is that any complicated feeling or whatever has a long word for it in German. But it’s also not exactly true. The explanation is going to be a little tricky without getting into a 20-page discussion of morphology (what words are made of and how they’re allowed to be put together), but I’ll do my best to keep it brief.
The formation of compound words in German is actually very similar to the formation of compound words in English. There are some grammar-specific differences in the mix, but the main difference is in how you spell them. Most compound words in English are written as separate words (“open compounds”), but German compound words are usually written as one word (“closed compounds”). Sometimes English compound words are hyphenated (as in “grammar-specific” above) or written as closed compounds (like “Frankenword” above), but mostly we write them open.
In both German and English, the main word in the compound is the last one in the phrase, and all the words before it modify it. You can build compounds with all parts of speech: adjective-noun, adjective-adjective, adverb-adjective, noun-verb…. You can also have multiply compound words, where A modifies B, but B modifies (CD), where C modifies D.
For example, a restaurant menu in New York City might have a cheese plate, but the same item on a menu in Berlin would be a Käseplatte. For a multiply compound word, say you go on a trip and need to submit a travel cost reimbursement. Here, you have travel modifying cost, and that phrase modifies reimbursement. In German, you have a Reisekostenerstattung, which is literally the same thing but in German. (And you can break reimbursement further down into component prefixes and suffixes, because morphology is fun.)
It’s a much more harmless misperception of the German language than the next one.
“German is a harsh/ugly/scary language!”
This is one of those memes that will probably never die. I’ve seen dozens of variations on this, and they all drive me nuts.
Words in any language, when shouted or growled, sound harsh and scary. German gets singled out a lot, probably because a lot of people associate it with WW2 movies or Castle Wolfenstein.
German has a lot of cute words, partly because it’s so easy to form compound words. Gloves are shoes for your hands (Handschuhe); skunks are stinky animals (Stinktier); sloths are lazy animals (Faultier) (and let’s not forget that sloth is just extreme laziness); raccoons are bears that wash (Waschbär). There’s a fun flow chart here with a lot of animal names.
German poetry is just as evocative as English poetry, and the classic German poets Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Schiller, and Heinrich Heine are routinely translated into English.
Heine is the person who wrote, in 1823, “Where they burn books, later they will burn people.” (The German Wikipedia page has more details than the English one, of course.)
Schiller is known for many things, including his translations of Shakespeare into German, but you may know him for the “Ode to Joy.”
Goethe’s poem “Wanderer’s Nightsong (2)” was translated into English by Longfellow, and it evokes a sense of beauty and calm and longing for the mountains. Another one of Goethe’s poems, “Prometheus,” contains a hapax legomenon, Knabenmorgenblütenträume, which means something like “the dreams that blossom in the morning of (male) youth.” Now tell me German is an ugly language!
“English is descended from German!”
Hearing this provokes the same effect in me that “humans are descended from monkeys!” does in an evolutionary biologist.
English and German are descended from Proto-West-Germanic (their last common ancestor). English evolved through what we now call Old English (Beowulf) and Middle English (Chaucer), before we get to Early Modern (Shakespeare) and Modern English. German evolved through Old High German (Hildebrandslied) and Middle High German (Nibelungenlied) before we get to Modern German around 1500. (Most periodizations of German don’t differentiate between Early Modern and Modern German.)
I’d have to get out one of those grids that shows first/second/xth cousins once/twice/xth removed to give you an exact relationship, but English and German are distant cousins, not great-x-grandparent/grandchild.
The family-tree model of language is useful to a first approximation, much like the Bohr model of the atom is what you learn before you learn about orbital clouds and quantum theory. The tree model was proposed by August Schleicher in 1853, and it’s still used today. It works in the same way that a genealogical tree works, with one parent branching into daughters, which branch further into more daughters, etc. Nice and tidy, right?
When has anything about language ever been nice and tidy?
The Germanic languages, especially the ones around the North Sea, present quite the dilemma when you try to separate them strictly into North or West Germanic. The way historical linguists do this is by comparing features of a language (or differences between them) and saying whether the feature belongs to North or West Germanic, and then slotting it into the right place.
Except that the North Sea Germanic languages are a messy mixture of features, because the Danes invaded England, and the continental Saxons and Friesians (the modern Benelux area, mostly) traded with the Danes and the English and the Norwegians AND the continental Germans. Their languages were all in contact with each other, and the North Sea languages were pretty similar to each other, so there was probably some influence from them on each other. The wave model, attributed to Schuchardt and Schmidt (late 19th/early 20th century), is more reflective of this actuality.
“German is a complicated language to learn!”
Well, that one’s not a myth. Much of it is fairly straightforward, and the spelling makes a lot more sense than English spelling, but there are many aspects that English native speakers have trouble with. I’ll argue that it’s less complicated than you may think, at least at the basic level, but getting to high proficiency is indeed complicated. Even the Germans say, “Deutsche Sprache, schwere Sprache” (German is hard).
German, unlike its cousins, has retained a nearly full verbal inflection paradigm (a fancy way of saying “conjugation”). The verb form is different for nearly every person and number (I, you (singular), he/she/it; we, you (plural), they) in both the present and past tenses. Unlike its cousins, German also has retained a robust 4-case system, although one of the cases is likely to die out in the next hundred years. Case is a marking system for a word’s function in a sentence; languages that robustly mark for case have fewer restrictions on word order than languages that don’t mark for case. The cases in German are nominative (the subject), accusative (direct object and some prepositional objects), dative (indirect object and some prepositional objects), and genitive (possessive and some (rare) prepositional objects). You can still see remnants of English’s case marking system in pronouns: I/me/mine, she/her/hers, he/him/his, they/their/theirs.
German also has retained a grammatical gender system with 3 genders. English only has grammatical gender on pronouns; the Scandinavian languages and Dutch have 2 grammatical genders (some Norwegian dialects have 3). Grammatical gender is a way of classifying nouns based on the form of the root word, and it goes back to Proto-Indo-European. You could just as easily refer to the grammatical genders as first, second, or third declension (as you do in Latin, though Latin has more than 3 declensions). The historical Germanic languages are grouped by the stem of the root word (e.g., a-stems, o-stems, and i-stems), and the adjectives and pronouns decline to match the stem of the root word. But there are three main patterns that these declensions follow, and one of them included masculine animate objects (men, bulls, etc.), and another of them included feminine animate objects (women, cows, etc.), so these various stems were then grouped by the philologists who analyzed them into masculine, feminine, and neuter based on which of the patterns they followed. (This is an extreme simplification!)
So if you’re coming to German, with its verbal inflection, case system, and noun genders, from a language that doesn’t have these things, yeah, it’s gonna be a hurdle. As I always told my students, you gotta memorize it. (I haven’t even mentioned the 8 different ways to make plurals in German.)
On the other hand, pronunciation in German is a lot more logical than in English. Words are usually pronounced like they’re spelled. Sure, you have your borrowings from French that are pronounced French-ly, like Balkon, but then you have your other borrowings from French that are pronounced German-ly, like Pommes Frittes (pomm-es fritt-es) ‘French fries’. But if you’ve learned the basics of German spelling and pronunciation, you can sound out a new word well enough most of the time.
I hope this little dive into why I like German was interesting to you! I’ll leave you with two German puns (based on splitting compound words in the wrong place) that really don’t work in English.
What kind of tomatoes can’t you eat? ATMs. (Was für Tomaten kann man nicht essen? Bankautomaten.)
What kind of horses can’t you ride? Potting soil. (Was für Pferde kann man nicht reiten? Blumentopferde.)
Media I have enjoyed recently
I just read my dear friend John Wiswell’s debut novel Someone You Can Build a Nest In, and it’s absolutely the most adorable story about a gelatinous shape-shifting monster who falls in love with the monster hunter who’s out to kill her. It’s horror, for sure, and I am emphatically not a horror reader, and I didn’t find it too scary.
I’m currently playing Pentiment, because I know so many people who’ve enjoyed it and it’s set in early 16th-century Bavaria, so I bought it when it was on a good sale on Steam. I’m in act 6 I think? I’m enjoying it so far, although a lot of the dialogue options are too modern in attitude.
Until next time!
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