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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![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
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:
An approximate translation, not poetic:
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.
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.
no subject
Date: 2009-11-05 04:59 am (UTC)From: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
no subject
Date: 2009-11-05 05:41 pm (UTC)From: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.