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

[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. ^___^