Regarding the German language

[feuervogel]

I may rant a bit here, so be forewarned.

I'm so tired of people saying German is an ugly language, a harsh language, not a poetic language. I'm tired of trying to explain how they're wrong and completely uninformed, ignorant, and clearly not remotely familiar with the actual German language.

Have they never heard of Friedrich Schiller, often referred to as the German Shakespeare? Or his friend Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who spawned an entire literary movement (introspection) and inspired the works of Mozart? Or Heinrich Heine, one of the most famous German Romantic poets and he who said "Where they burn books, they will ultimately also burn people"?

Leaving aside the copious examples of German poets, one aspect of the German language lends itself remarkably well to poetic expression: the (infamous) compound noun. There are nouns in German that require a full phrase (sometimes even a clause) to render in English. To take a well-known example, Schadenfreude: the (malicious) delight you take in someone else's misfortune.

Goethe contributed a delightful compound word to the corpus, which is a hapax legomenon (thanks joyeuse13 for the term!): Knabenmorgenblütenträume, in his poem Prometheus. (Yes, this is one of the poems I learned in college. My professor pointed out the uniqueness of the word, and it stuck in the back of my head.) A literal deconstruction of the word is boys' morning blossom dreams, which can sound a bit dirty. A better rendering is "the blossoming dreams of the morning of [my] youth."

The stanza:

Wähntest du etwa,
Ich sollte das Leben hassen,
In Wüsten fliehn,
Weil nicht alle Knabenmorgen-
Blütenträume reiften?

An approximate translation, not poetic:

Do you believe (implied: wrongly)
that I should hate life,
flee to the desert,
because not all the blossoming dreams of the
morning of my youth ripened?

The entire poem is about an angry Prometheus berating Zeus, asking why he should honor him. Interestingly, the entire compound noun only appears in the early version of the poem.

Don't disparage the language because of your ignorance. Make an effort to learn about it. You'll find you're rather wrong.

Comments

[sabeth]

:D ♥

[feuervogel]

:D

Ich hab vor, nach Berlin in April zu reisen, trotzdem ich es vielleicht nicht leisten kann. Ich hab seit einem Monat nicht gearbeitet. :P Wir sollten uns treffen!

[sabeth]

Oh noes, I hope I'm still here in April! I thought you were coming earlier in the year for some reason. Are you still doing the language course thing? (I've been thinking about whether to stay here or move back to Vienna for over a month now and I'm still not sure what to do, but I think I'll end up trusting my gut on this and that's saying it's homesick and tired of foreign countries. I ought to write a proper entry about this at some point.)

I still don't have a job, either. It's all part of my Big Plan (tm) to make the illustration career happen, but it's not the nicest of feelings. xD;;

[sabeth]

Er, which isn't to say that I definitely won't be here, just that I'm not 100% sure yet!

[feuervogel]

That's the plan, yeah. (I had the damnedest time making that comment, and I *still* think it's wrong, somehow.) I'd toyed with being over there now, but any time between, say, October and March it's too cold and dark. (For me, even April is too cold, and July isn't even properly hot!)

But! Even if you're gone, I've plans to go to Vienna with kirin in the beginning of May for our 10th anniversary. (Then off to Bratislava & Budapest.) And we can make a BPAL swap then :D

[annathepiper]

I liked German well enough to study it for two and a half years in high school, and I'd still really rather like to have time enough to do a proper refresher course! Until then I'll have to content myself with buying German editions of novels and seeing if I can trudge my way through remembering my vocabulary. *^_^*;;

[feuervogel]

I took it 5 years in HS, then double majored in college chem/German. :) I haven't used it much since then, sadly, though I can still read German websites (news, wikipedia) and the like. That's why I'm planning to spend April at the Goethe Institut in Berlin. I'm what you might call "between positions" at the moment.

[voxbaryton]

Here from Twitter...

I find that, thanks to the fact that German is probably THE stress-unstress language, that it also is a language that has a lot of depth to its texture, more so then many other languages I think. Yes, German can be quite ugly, and quite harsh. The remarkable thing is in the mouth of a different speaker that stresses or inflects things a touch differently, it can also sound like the most sensual bedroom talk you've ever heard in you life. So I've always very much respected it as a very dynamic language with a potential for lots of extremes.

My main knowledge of the sound of German is through choral works. I always think it's such a pity that most people associate German with the manic raving nature of Hitler's speech rather then the amazingly lush sound you'd find in say, Brahms. Oh, and Ode to Joy? German, duh.

Another case in point is this Brazilian Girls song here, I was actually told by an online friend of mine after he viewed it that he never realized German could sound so pretty. He thought at first it might be French! (Which, if you ask me, is highly overrated and crude sounding in comparison to lots of other languages, due to all those neutral vowels.)

Embedding for this video has been disabled, so you'll have to go here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCFAfFU-Xs4

[feuervogel]

Hi from Twitter!

Indeed! I think most people associate German with old WW2 movies and Castle Wolfenstein and Raiders of the Lost Ark, which is really a shame.

Regional accents may also play a role. I actually sat in on a lecture (on post-war German foreign policy, of all things) because the professor was from Austria and I liked his accent. It was round and soft.

I agree. French is overrated. It sounds like people talking with marbles in their mouths, but folks are all "French is beautiful! The language of love!" Ick. My guess is that it has a different cadence than English and fewer cognates, so it's different and "pretty," whereas German has a similar cadence and a lot of cognates (since English is a Germanic language, after all), so it sounds "ugly" because it's similar to our daily speech.

That video is interesting! I'd never heard of the band before. 99 Luftballons has a similar flowy sound, too.

[eirias.livejournal.com]

I get annoyed by that, too; I think German is one of the most beautiful sounding languages out there. It's caricatured as guttural but it's actually really soft! I think German is one of those cases where American parodies of the language sound almost nothing like the real thing. (Now Swedish, on the other hand...)

I only know a handful of words but these are my favorites: eichhörnchen, waffeln, fünf.

[smarriveurr.livejournal.com]

Pretty much my pet peeve, too. I memorized Goethe's "Willkommen und Abschied" (http://referateguru.heim.at/Willkommen.htm) in my second year of German in Highschool, and that was my go-to "Is this 'ugly' or 'rough'?" snippet. Maybe "Nebelkleid" isn't quite as good a word as "Knabenmorgenblütenträume", but it's fairly evocative as well.

[tammylee.livejournal.com]

To be fair, there are harsher sounding dialects. I have been deducted points in speech competitions for my Eastern accent; my teacher was Czech. There are softer dialects where the ch is almost an sh and growing up my granny spoke low German which is not very harsh-sounding to my ear at all. (Probably because there was often Dutch mixed in?)

I don't consider German to be the most musical of languages (unlike, say, Spanish) but on the whole it isn't as harsh as people stereotype it to be.

I think Chinese gets an unfair rap in this regard, as well. Some dialects sound quite harsh but others are soft and swishy.

Same with English. Some English dialects are harder on the ear than others.

[feuervogel]

Niederdeutsch & Plattdeutsch are very closely related to the *cough* dialect of German that evolved into modern Dutch.

My first German teacher was an American woman with a horrid accent - she couldn't pronounce Kuchen and Küche differently. My second German teacher came from Berlin. *THAT* was a transition, let me tell you, but it helped me learn a more native pronunciation. Then my college prof was from Kiel, so he had a very different accent, too. His spoken English had a British accent of sorts, which seems to be more common of northern Germans.

Yet all that was thrown into the wash when I lived in Hessen for a year and picked up their marble-mouthed accent.

It's possible that German doesn't sound musical because it sounds like English, with similar cadences and rhythm. The Romance languages are often cited as "prettier," possibly because the cadence is different and the word roots are different (except where English swiped various Latinate roots for fancy pants purposes, leaving the Germanic roots for the vulgar. cf excrement vs shit.)

ETA: All that, and I forgot to mention how awesome the Austrian accent is. It's rounder and almost drawled. Love it!

[tammylee.livejournal.com]

ha! My teacher seemed to hate the Bavarian accent. She always said it sounded like they're talking with their mouths full.

[tsubaki-ny.livejournal.com]

When I was in France, one of our teachers (Italian, but of course) told us this little, I dunno, ditty?

L'italienne est pour chanter
Le français est pour parler
L'allemand est pour lui cracher
L'anglais est à vomir


It's interesting what hits people's ears in what way. ^___^

[fluffymaru.livejournal.com]

I think it's rather bold to tell someone they're *wrong* on something that pretty much amounts to their opinion.

The "ugly" and "harsh" descriptions have nothing to do with whether or not the language is complex, or whether or not it has produced excellent writers or poets. It simply is an opinion based on what that person likes to hear from a language.

That's like telling someone they're WRONG because they hate country music.

[feuervogel]

It depends: Is the opinion based on parodies from American popular media, or is it based in hearing actual native German speakers speaking natively? If it's based on the former, then, yes, I suggest they're misinformed and basing their opinion on untruths and ignorance, and therefore, yes, wrong. If it's based on the latter, well, de gustibus. French sounds like a guy with marbles in his mouth to me, but, oh, it's the Language of Love! So beautiful! Whatever. (My organic chemistry lecturer in Germany was a Frenchman. He lectured in German. It was very strange, and it took a while to understand him. He was from Alsace-Lorraine, so he had a German-ass name: Paul Knochel.)

The majority of people I've encountered who say that German is harsh or ugly fall into category A, and think Castle Wolfenstein is representative of real German.

[joyeuse13.livejournal.com]

Exactly--most Americans' only associations for German is old WWII movies. Of course the language of the Nazis sounds harsh and ugly! Even if they're not barking military orders, they're *Nazis*.

[feuervogel]

Linguistics question: In the first sentence there I used "based on parodies" then "based in hearing." I have no idea where the "in" came from, because "based on hearing" sounds just as natural. Do you have any thoughts?

[joyeuse13.livejournal.com]

Only that prepositions in most languages are largely arbitrary--more to do with traditional usage than any actual meaning inherent in the words.

[feuervogel]

Hmm, true. I did a quick google on "based in" and other than based in [city], the most common result was based in reality, which sort of counts as a place in that context. Maybe I should send it to Language Log as a potential breakfast experiment...

[leora.livejournal.com]

I don't like French. I'm biased against it. I studied Spanish so I didn't have to study French (when I started a foreign language we were only given two options).

I also dislike Alsace-Lorraine for completely and utterly unfair reasons. I just could not keep track of what the deal was with it in European history class. I don't know why. But I know it had some historical significance, but I have no idea what it was.

[thesmallwonder.livejournal.com]

When I hear people say that German is a harsh language I always thought they were referring to literally how it sounds.

Hard sounds versus soft sounds and all of that. I haven't heard A LOT of German but I would agree that it has a lot of hard sounds to it where as something like say French has a lot of soft sounds. Even compared to English in my experience it has a lot of harder sounds. I don't know if "hard sounds" is the right way to phrase it, but it's the only way i can think to put it.

It doesn't make it an ugly language or anything, it doesn't devalue it's worth. It just often sounds harsh or a little jarring to those who haven't heard it very much or grew with a softer sounding language.

Granted I have no idea who you're referring to in your post, and no idea what their intentions were when they said what they said. But that's just always how I thought of it.

[eirias.livejournal.com]

Have you ever heard native German? I had the same impression as you when I was a kid, from the German I heard in movies and from bad American speakers, but when actual Germans speak it's very soft. The "ch" sound, for instance, isn't really guttural like it is in Dutch or Hebrew or something, it's a pretty soft sound, in some dialects even approaching "sh."

I'm pretty sure that German isn't what's harsh and ugly -- that's just how it sounds when Americans bungle it.

Also, American English sounds really ridiculous to people who don't know it, I think. A lot of errrrs.

[thesmallwonder.livejournal.com]

I think languages just sound different no matter what if you didn't grow up with it.

I used to sit in on a friends German class in high school during my free period, the teacher was Native and moved over to America in his adult hood. So I'm fairly certain that counts as native German.

To me it still sounded "harsh" lol though your right, it was nothing compared to how it sounds in most movies.


To those who speak German or are really accustomed to it I bet it doesn't sound harsh at all.

Just like I don't hear the "errrr" sounds in English.

It's all about perspective and whats "normal" to the individual I think.

[tsubaki-ny.livejournal.com]

LOLOL -- I wouldn't blame the stereotyping wholly on the Yanks. Have you SEEN British comedy?