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

[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.