Mark Twain: The Awful German Language [1880] (1/2)
<html><blockquote><A NAME="x1">A little learning makes the whole world kin.</A><br>
-- <cite>Proverbs</cite> xxxii, 7.</blockquote>
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 <b>exceptions</b>." 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 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, "<b>Regen</b>
(rain) is masculine -- or maybe it is feminine -- or possibly neuter -- it is
too much trouble to look now. Therefore, it is either <b>der</b> (the) Regen,
or <b>die</b> (the) Regen, or <b>das</b> (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
<b>the</b> rain is <b>der</b> Regen, if it is simply in the quiescent state of
being <b>mentioned</b>, 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 <b>doing something</b> -- that is,
<b>resting</b> (which is one of the German grammar's ideas of doing
something), and this throws the rain into the Dative case, and makes it
<b>dem</b> Regen. However, this rain is not resting, but is doing something
<b>actively</b>, -- it is falling -- to interfere with the bird, likely -- and
this indicates <b>movement</b>, which has the effect of sliding it into the
Accusative case and changing <b>dem</b> Regen into <b>den</b> 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) <b>den</b> Regen." Then the teacher lets me softly down with the
remark that whenever the word "wegen" drops into a sentence, it <b>always</b>
throws that subject into the <b>Genitive</b> case, regardless of consequences
-- and that therefore this bird stayed in the blacksmith shop "wegen
<b>des</b> Regens."
N. B. -- I was informed, later, by a higher authority, that there was an
"exception" which permits one to say "wegen <b>den</b> Regen" in certain
peculiar and complex circumstances, but that this exception is not extended to
anything <b>but</b> rain.
There are ten parts of speech, and they are all troublesome. An average
sentence, in a German newspaper, is a sublime and impressive curiosity; it
occupies a quarter of a column; it contains all the ten parts of speech -- not
in regular order, but mixed; it is built mainly of compound words constructed
by the writer on the spot, and not to be found in any dictionary -- six or
seven words compacted into one, without joint or seam -- that is, without
hyphens; it treats of fourteen or fifteen different subjects, each inclosed in
a parenthesis of its own, with here and there extra parentheses which
reinclose three or four of the minor parentheses, making pens within pens:
finally, all the parentheses and reparentheses are massed together between a
couple of king-parentheses, one of which is placed in the first line of the
majestic sentence and the other in the middle of the last line of it --
<b>after which comes the VERB</b>, and you find out for the first time what
the man has been talking about; and after the verb -- merely by way of
ornament, as far as I can make out -- the writer shovels in "<b>haben sind
gewesen gehabt haben geworden sein</b>," or words to that effect, and the
monument is finished. I suppose that this closing hurrah is in the nature of
the flourish to a man's signature -- not necessary, but pretty. German books
are easy enough to read when you hold them before the looking-glass or stand
on your head -- so as to reverse the construction -- but I think that to learn
to read and understand a German newspaper is a thing which must always remain
an impossibility to a foreigner.
Yet even the German books are not entirely free from attacks of the
Parenthesis distemper -- though they are usually so mild as to cover only a
few lines, and therefore when you at last get down to the verb it carries some
meaning to your mind because you are able to remember a good deal of what has
gone before. Now here is a sentence from a popular and excellent German novel
-- which a slight parenthesis in it. I will make a perfectly literal
translation, and throw in the parenthesis-marks and some hyphens for the
assistance of the reader -- though in the original there are no
parenthesis-marks or hyphens, and the reader is left to flounder through to
the remote verb the best way he can:
"But when he, upon the street, the
(in-satin-and-silk-covered-now-very-unconstrained-after-the-newest-fashioned-dressed)
government counselor's wife <b>met</b>," etc., etc. [1]
<blockquote>1. Wenn er aber auf der Strasse der in Sammt und Seide
gehüllten jetzt sehr ungenirt nach der neusten Mode gekleideten
Regierungsräthin begegnet.</blockquote>
That is from <cite>The Old Mamselle's Secret</cite>, by Mrs. Marlitt. And
that sentence is constructed upon the most approved German model. You observe
how far that verb is from the reader's base of operations; well, in a German
newspaper they put their verb away over on the next page; and I have heard
that sometimes after stringing along the exciting preliminaries and
parentheses for a column or two, they get in a hurry and have to go to press
without getting to the verb at all. Of course, then, the reader is left in a
very exhausted and ignorant state.
We have the Parenthesis disease in our literature, too; and one may see
cases of it every day in our books and newspapers: but with us it is the mark
and sign of an unpracticed writer or a cloudy intellect, whereas with the
Germans it is doubtless the mark and sign of a practiced pen and of the
presence of that sort of luminous intellectual fog which stands for clearness
among these people. For surely it is <b>not</b> clearness -- it necessarily
can't be clearness. Even a jury would have penetration enough to discover
that. A writer's ideas must be a good deal confused, a good deal out of line
and sequence, when he starts out to say that a man met a counselor's wife in
the street, and then right in the midst of this so simple undertaking halts
these approaching people and makes them stand still until he jots down an
inventory of the woman's dress. That is manifestly absurd. It reminds a
person of those dentists who secure your instant and breathless interest in a
tooth by taking a grip on it with the forceps, and then stand there and drawl
through a tedious anecdote before they give the dreaded jerk. Parentheses in
literature and dentistry are in bad taste.
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 <b>other half</b> 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 <b>reiste ab</b> --
which means departed. Here is an example which I culled from a novel and
reduced to English:
<blockquote>"The trunks being now ready, he <b>DE-</b> 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, <b>PARTED</b>."</blockquote>
However, it is not well to dwell too much on the separable verbs. One is
sure to lose his temper early; and if he sticks to the subject, and will not
be warned, it will at last either soften his brain or petrify it. Personal
pronouns and adjectives are a fruitful nuisance in this language, and should
have been left out. For instance, the same sound, <b>sie</b>, means
<b>you</b>, and it means <b>she</b>, and it means <b>her</b>, and it means
<b>it</b>, and it means <b>they</b>, and it means <b>them</b>. Think of the
ragged poverty of a language which has to make one word do the work of six --
and a poor little weak thing of only three letters at that. But mainly, think
of the exasperation of never knowing which of these meanings the speaker is
trying to convey. This explains why, whenever a person says <b>sie</b> to me,
I generally try to kill him, if a stranger.
Now observe the Adjective. Here was a case where simplicity would have
been an advantage; therefore, for no other reason, the inventor of this
language complicated it all he could. When we wish to speak of our "good
friend or friends," in our enlightened tongue, we stick to the one form and
have no trouble or hard feeling about it; but with the German tongue it is
different. When a German gets his hands on an adjective, he declines it, and
keeps on declining it until the common sense is all declined out of it. It is
as bad as Latin. He says, for instance:
<UL><LI>SINGULAR
<UL>
<LI>Nominative -- Mein gut<b>er</b> Freund, my good friend.
<LI>Genitive -- Mein<b>es</b> gut<b>en</b> Freund<b>es</b>, of my good
friend.
<LI>Dative -- Mein<b>em</b> gut<b>en</b> Freund, to my good friend.
<LI>Accusative -- Mein<b>en</b> gut<b>en</b> Freund, my good friend.
</UL>
<LI>PLURAL
<UL>
<LI>N. -- Mein<b>e</b> gut<b>en</b> Freund<b>e</b>, my good friends.
<LI>G. -- Mein<b>er</b> gut<b>en</b> Freund<b>e</b>, of my good friends.
<LI>D. -- Mein<b>en</b> gut<b>en</b> Freund<b>en</b>, to my good friends.
<LI>A. -- Mein<b>e</b> gut<b>en</b> Freund<b>e</b>, my good friends.
</UL>
</UL>
Now let the candidate for the asylum try to memorize those variations, and
see how soon he will be elected. One might better go without friends in
Germany than take all this trouble about them. I have shown what a bother it
is to decline a good (male) friend; well this is only a third of the work, for
there is a variety of new distortions of the adjective to be learned when the
object is feminine, and still another when the object is neuter. Now there
are more adjectives in this language than there are black cats in Switzerland,
and they must all be as elaborately declined as the examples above suggested.
Difficult? -- troublesome? -- these words cannot describe it. I heard a
Californian student in Heidelberg say, in one of his calmest moods, that he
would rather decline two drinks than one German adjective.
The inventor of the language seems to have taken pleasure in complicating
it in every way he could think of. For instance, if one is casually referring
to a house, <b>Haus</b>, or a horse, <b>Pferd</b>, or a dog, <b>Hund</b>, he
spells these words as I have indicated; but if he is referring to them in the
Dative case, he sticks on a foolish and unnecessary <b>e</b> and spells them
<b>Hause</b>, <b>Pferde</b>, <b>Hunde</b>. So, as an added <b>e</b> often
signifies the plural, as the <b>s</b> does with us, the new student is likely
to go on for a month making twins out of a Dative dog before he discovers his
mistake; and on the other hand, many a new student who could ill afford loss,
has bought and paid for two dogs and only got one of them, because he
ignorantly bought that dog in the Dative singular when he really supposed he
was talking plural -- which left the law on the seller's side, of course, by
the strict rules of grammar, and therefore a suit for recovery could not
lie.
In German, all the Nouns begin with a capital letter. Now that is a good
idea; and a good idea, in this language, is necessarily conspicuous from its
lonesomeness. I consider this capitalizing of nouns a good idea, because by
reason of it you are almost always able to tell a noun the minute you see it.
You fall into error occasionally, because you mistake the name of a person for
the name of a thing, and waste a good deal of time trying to dig a meaning out
of it. German names almost always do mean something, and this helps to
deceive the student. I translated a passage one day, which said that "the
infuriated tigress broke loose and utterly ate up the unfortunate fir forest"
(<b>Tannenwald</b>). When I was girding up my loins to doubt this, I found out
that Tannenwald in this instance was a man's name.
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. See how it looks in print -- I translate this from a
conversation in one of the best of the German Sunday-school books:
<DL COMPACT><DT>"<b>Gretchen</b>. <DD>Wilhelm, where is the turnip?
<DT><b>Wilhelm</b>. <DD>She has gone to the kitchen.
<DT><b>Gretchen</b>. <DD>Where is the accomplished and beautiful English
maiden?
<DT><b>Wilhelm</b>. <DD>It has gone to the opera."</DL>
To continue with the German genders: a tree is male, its buds are female,
its leaves are neuter; horses are sexless, dogs are male, cats are female --
tomcats included, of course; a person's mouth, neck, bosom, elbows, fingers,
nails, feet, and body are of the male sex, and his head is male or neuter
according to the word selected to signify it, and <b>not</b> according to the
sex of the individual who wears it -- for in Germany all the women either male
heads or sexless ones; a person's nose, lips, shoulders, breast, hands, and
toes are of the female sex; and his hair, ears, eyes, chin, legs, knees,
heart, and conscience haven't any sex at all. The inventor of the language
probably got what he knew about a conscience from hearsay.
Now, by the above dissection, the reader will see that in Germany a man may
<b>think</b> he is a man, but when he comes to look into the matter closely,
he is bound to have his doubts; he finds that in sober truth he is a most
ridiculous mixture; and if he ends by trying to comfort himself with the
thought that he can at least depend on a third of this mess as being manly and
masculine, the humiliating second thought will quickly remind him that in this
respect he is no better off than any woman or cow in the land.
In the German it is true that by some oversight of the inventor of the
language, a Woman is a female; but a Wife (<b>Weib</b>) is not -- which is
unfortunate. A Wife, here, has no sex; she is neuter; so, according to the
grammar, a fish is <b>he</b>, his scales are <b>she</b>, but a fishwife is
neither. To describe a wife as sexless may be called under-description; that
is bad enough, but over-description is surely worse. A German speaks of an
Englishman as the <b>Engländer</b>; to change the sex, he adds
<b>inn</b>, and that stands for Englishwoman -- <b>Engländerinn</b>. That
seems descriptive enough, but still it is not exact enough for a German; so he
precedes the word with that article which indicates that the creature to
follow is feminine, and writes it down thus: "<b>die</b>
Engländer<b>inn</b>," -- which means "the <b>she-Englishwoman</b>." I
consider that that person is over-described.
Well, after the student has learned the sex of a great number of nouns, he
is still in a difficulty, because he finds it impossible to persuade his
tongue to refer to things as "<b>he</b>" and "<b>she</b>," and "<b>him</b>"
and "<b>her</b>," which it has been always accustomed to refer to it as
"<b>it</b>." When he even frames a German sentence in his mind, with the hims
and hers in the right places, and then works up his courage to the
utterance-point, it is no use -- the moment he begins to speak his tongue
flies the track and all those labored males and females come out as
"<b>it</b>s." And even when he is reading German to himself, he always calls
those things "<b>it</b>," where as he ought to read in this way:
<h4><A NAME="x2">TALE OF THE FISHWIFE AND ITS SAD FATE</A> [2]</h4>
<blockquote>2. I capitalize the nouns, in the German (and ancient English)
fashion.</blockquote>
It is a bleak Day. Hear the Rain, how he pours, and the Hail, how he
rattles; and see the Snow, how he drifts along, and of the Mud, how deep he
is! Ah the poor Fishwife, it is stuck fast in the Mire; it has dropped its
Basket of Fishes; and its Hands have been cut by the Scales as it seized some
of the falling Creatures; and one Scale has even got into its Eye, and it
cannot get her out. It opens its Mouth to cry for Help; but if any Sound
comes out of him, alas he is drowned by the raging of the Storm. And now a
Tomcat has got one of the Fishes and she will surely escape with him. No, she
bites off a Fin, she holds her in her Mouth -- will she swallow her? No, the
Fishwife's brave Mother-dog deserts his Puppies and rescues the Fin -- which
he eats, himself, as his Reward. O, horror, the Lightning has struck the
Fish-basket; he sets him on Fire; see the Flame, how she licks the doomed
Utensil with her red and angry Tongue; now she attacks the helpless Fishwife's
Foot -- she burns him up, all but the big Toe, and even <b>she</b> is partly
consumed; and still she spreads, still she waves her fiery Tongues; she
attacks the Fishwife's Leg and destroys <b>it</b>; she attacks its Hand and
destroys <b>her</b> also; she attacks the Fishwife's Leg and destroys
<b>her</b> also; she attacks its Body and consumes <b>him</b>; she wreathes
herself about its Heart and <b>it</b> is consumed; next about its Breast, and
in a Moment <b>she</b> is a Cinder; now she reaches its Neck -- <b>he</b>
goes; now its Chin -- <b>it</b> goes; now its Nose -- <b>she</b> goes. In
another Moment, except Help come, the Fishwife will be no more. Time presses
-- is there none to succor and save? Yes! Joy, joy, with flying Feet the
she-Englishwoman comes! But alas, the generous she-Female is too late: where
now is the fated Fishwife? It has ceased from its Sufferings, it has gone to a
better Land; all that is left of it for its loved Ones to lament over, is this
poor smoldering Ash-heap. Ah, woeful, woeful Ash-heap! Let us take him up
tenderly, reverently, upon the lowly Shovel, and bear him to his long Rest,
with the Prayer that when he rises again it will be a Realm where he will have
one good square responsible Sex, and have it all to himself, instead of having
a mangy lot of assorted Sexes scattered all over him in Spots.
<HR>
There, now, the reader can see for himself that this pronoun business is a
very awkward thing for the unaccustomed tongue. I suppose that in all
languages the similarities of look and sound between words which have no
similarity in meaning are a fruitful source of perplexity to the foreigner.
It is so in our tongue, and it is notably the case in the German. Now there is
that troublesome word <b>vermählt</b>: to me it has so close a
resemblance -- either real or fancied -- to three or four other words, that I
never know whether it means despised, painted, suspected, or married; until I
look in the dictionary, and then I find it means the latter. There are lots
of such words and they are a great torment. To increase the difficulty there
are words which <b>seem</b> to resemble each other, and yet do not; but they
make just as much trouble as if they did. For instance, there is the word
<b>vermiethen</b> (to let, to lease, to hire); and the word
<b>verheirathen</b> (another way of saying to marry). I heard of an Englishman
who knocked at a man's door in Heidelberg and proposed, in the best German he
could command, to "verheirathen" that house. Then there are some words which
mean one thing when you emphasize the first syllable, but mean something very
different if you throw the emphasis on the last syllable. For instance, there
is a word which means a runaway, or the act of glancing through a book,
according to the placing of the emphasis; and another word which signifies to
<b>associate</b> with a man, or to <b>avoid</b> him, according to where you
put the emphasis -- and you can generally depend on putting it in the wrong
place and getting into trouble.
There are some exceedingly useful words in this language. <b>Schlag</b>,
for example; and <b>Zug</b>. There are three-quarters of a column of
<b>Schlag</b>s in the dictionary, and a column and a half of <b>Zug</b>s. The
word <b>Schlag</b> 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 <b>exact</b> 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 <b>Schlag-ader</b>, which means
artery, and you can hang on the whole dictionary, word by word, clear through
the alphabet to <b>Schlag-wasser</b>, which means bilge-water -- and including
<b>Schlag-mutter</b>, which means mother-in-law.
Just the same with <b>Zug</b>. Strictly speaking, <b>Zug</b> means Pull,
Tug, Draught, Procession, March, Progress, Flight, Direction, Expedition,
Train, Caravan, Passage, Stroke, Touch, Line, Flourish, Trait of Character,
Feature, Lineament, Chess-move, Organ-stop, Team, Whiff, Bias, Drawer,
Propensity, Inhalation, Disposition: but that thing which it does <b>not</b>
mean -- when all its legitimate pennants have been hung on, has not been
discovered yet.
One cannot overestimate the usefulness of <b>Schlag</b> and <b>Zug</b>.
Armed just with these two, and the word <b>also</b>, what cannot the foreigner
on German soil accomplish? The German word <b>also</b> is the equivalent of
the English phrase "You know," and does not mean anything at all -- in
<b>talk</b>, though it sometimes does in print. Every time a German opens his
mouth an <b>also</b> falls out; and every time he shuts it he bites one in two
that was trying to <b>get</b> out.
Now, the foreigner, equipped with these three noble words, is master of the
situation. Let him talk right along, fearlessly; let him pour his indifferent
German forth, and when he lacks for a word, let him heave a <b>Schlag</b> into
the vacuum; all the chances are that it fits it like a plug, but if it doesn't
let him promptly heave a <b>Zug</b> after it; the two together can hardly fail
to bung the hole; but if, by a miracle, they <b>should</b> fail, let him
simply say <b>also</b>! and this will give him a moment's chance to think of
the needful word. In Germany, when you load your conversational gun it is
always best to throw in a <b>Schlag</b> or two and a <b>Zug</b> or two,
because it doesn't make any difference how much the rest of the charge may
scatter, you are bound to bag something with <b>them</b>. Then you blandly say
<b>also</b>, and load up again. Nothing gives such an air of grace and
elegance and unconstraint to a German or an English conversation as to scatter
it full of "Also's" or "You knows."
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