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 ♥

[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. *^_^*;;

[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

[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.

[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.

[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.

[tsubaki-ny.livejournal.com]

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