The hilarious German language

Four months after throwing my toys out of the pram and emigrating to Berlin, I am finding the German language confounding and frustrating, but as often wonderful and hilarious.

Confounding and frustrating because...well, where to start?:

• the rearranging of sentences when a modal (auxiliary) verb is used in conjunction with a normal verb;
• some verbs just straight up splitting in two, with one half bogging off to the end of a sentence without warning;
• making nouns male, female or neutral (so, Germany, when you can tell me why a table has a gender – tisch: male – but a young girl doesn't – mädchen: neutral, then I will tell you why we don't pronounce the b in thumb),
• using half a dozen different words for go, depending on to where one is going (a person's house, a bakery, some mountains...)...

And as for dative, genitive, accusative and nominative cases and when to use them, they can just get right in the sea!

'Just follow the rules' they say. But, of course, there are as many exceptions to any one rule as there are adherents.




The problem is that, by even the natives' admission, German grammar is so vast and unwieldy. My old German language teacher (old as in, a few months ago) compared English and German as two triangles, one normal, and one inverted. The English language is constructed like the latter: a small amount of grammar to learn, but hung on that is a ponderous and voluminous level of vocabulary.

German, on the other hand, is the base-heavy triangle: a buttload of basic grammar to learn, and then a more limited amount of vocab on top.

In Mark Twain's brilliant and witty lament The Awful German Language, he decries the density of German, and lambasts the labyrinthine complexity of its grammar:

My philological studies have satisfied me that a gifted person ought to learn English (barring spelling and pronouncing) in thirty hours, French in thirty days, and German in thirty years. It seems manifest, then, that the latter tongue ought to be trimmed down and repaired. If it is to remain as it is, it ought to be gently and reverently set aside among the dead languages, for only the dead have time to learn it.

And what is most fascinating is that there is such a dialectic gulf across Germany that someone speaking Bavarian German would struggle to make him or herself understood in Berlin, so vast is the country. Germany is made up of lots of previously independent regions; the unified German state, more or less that we know today, has only been in existence for some 200 years or so, which accounts for the wildly varying dialects.

But I digress.

It's clear that me and German grammar aren't getting along terribly well. 

But German vocabulary, on the other hand, is outstanding.

English & German – 1500 years of separation

English is a Germanic language at its root. In about the 5th Century, after the Romans sodded off, the British Isles were colonised by settlers and invaders from what is now north west Germany and Holland, bringing with them what would become the Old English language and dialect (of Beowulf fame).

In the 6th Century, Christianity arrived on our shores, infusing the fledgling Anglo-Saxon with latin flourishes, and not long after that, the Vikings arrived from Scandinavia all raping and a-pillaging. They, too, added to the burgeoning new language.

However, the second most profound effect on the English language came, 500 years after the arrival of the Angles, Saxons and Jutes, from our old friends from France: 1066 and all that. William the Conqueror brought with him French and England became a dual-language country; the common-or-garden proles continued to speak in the same Germanic (and viking) dialect, while royalty, the aristocracy and the inbred now spoke the new fashionable French and Latin language.

Even after the French were finally seen off from Albion after the 100 years war in the 14th (and 15th) Century, the Latin and French influences in English remained and happily jumped into bed with the Germanic dialect to eventually become the one glorious language, and it's been growing and evolving ever since. 

I think it is this mongrel DNA that allows the English to absorb so many other cultures and languages along the way, and also its flexibility lends itself to being co-opted by other distant lands and people for their own uses (76 different global varieties of English, at the last count!).

Consequently, one of the many curiosities of having these odd bedfellows in the language is that we have ended up with two words or phrases – one Germanic: straightforward, logical and to the point, and one Latin: usually just one word summing up the Germanic phrase – for much the same thing.

My favourite examples:

A book that you hold in your hand that gives instructions

Germanic: handbook

Latin: manual

To leave home for a holiday

Germanic: go abroad/take a trip

Latin: travel

To help

Germanic: give a hand

Latin: assist

To eat

Germanic: break bread

Latin: dine

And now, here in Berlin, with an unbridled etymologic joy that is only bettered by the next discovery, in learning German I am discovering the same searing, unshakeable Germanic logic that built the sturdy foundations of English.

Here's what I mean:

The fridge: der Kühlschrank. Literally means 'the cold cupboard'.

The wardrobe: der Kleiderschrank. Literally, 'the clothes cupboard'.

The vacuum: der Staubsauger. Literally, 'the dust sucker'.

The kettle: der Wasserkocher. Literally, 'the water cooker'.

The aeroplane: das Flugzeug. Literally, 'the flying thing'.

The car: das Fahrzeug. Literally, 'the driving thing'.

The watch: die Armbanduhr. Literally, ''the armband clock'.

The ambulance: der Krankenwagen. Literally, 'the sick van'.

Gloves: – Handschuhe. Literally, 'hand shoes'.

Then there's the wonderfully lyrical:

The lightbulb: die Glühbirne. Literally, 'the glow pear'.

The turtle: die Schildkröte. Literally, 'the shield toad'.The headlamps/lights: der Scheinwerfer. Literally, 'the shine thrower'.

And then there's:

Arsehole (as in, 'You arsehole!'). Literally, the 'the arse violin'.

But the awesomeness doesn't stop there. I've discussed compound nouns in a previous blog post – the practice of slamming a bunch of words together to create one word which, more often than not, provides concise and direct language to a familiar abstract or concept for which an English speaker would need a paragraph to describe. 

For instance, the most common German compound noun that we use in English describes the concept of laughing at the glorious misfortune of others: Schadenfreude.

My other favourites (so far):

Treppenwitz

How many times does this happen? When you have a chance encounter with an attractive person of the opposite sex, or get into an argument with someone, then the best jokes, lines, and comebacks always occur to you sometime afterwards? That’s the Treppenwitz. It’s the joke that comes to your mind on the way down the stairs after talking to your neighbour in the hallway two floors up.

Literal meaning: Staircase joke

Fernweh

That feeling of wanting to be somewhere else. It’s kind of like a reverse homesickness; a longing for a place that isn’t where you are right now.

Literal meaning: Distance pain

Kummerspeck

When a relationship ends or during other times of sadness, anger, or worry, it’s common to put on a few pounds of Kummerspeck. What it means is the excess weight put on by emotional overeating. So when you find yourself on the couch watching “Bridget Jones’ Diary” with a tub of ice cream, you are in fact feeding your grief bacon.

Literal meaning: Grief bacon

Lebensmüde

This word literally means being tired of life and was used to describe the dramatic and soul-crushing emotional agony of young Romantic poets. Nowadays lebensmüde is what you call your friends when they are attempting something especially stupid and possibly life threatening. Most people in fail videos on YouTube suffer from latent Lebensmüdigkeit.

Literal meaning: Life tired

Erklärungsnot 

Erklärungsnot is a state shared by cheating spouses, lying politicians, and school children without their homework alike. It’s what you find yourself in when put on the spot without a sufficient explanation or excuse for something you have done or failed to do.

Literal meaning: Explanation poverty

(found and taken from http://www.fluentu.com/german/blog/weird-german-words-vocabulary/)

And, in a language of rough edges and jagged light, here are a few of my favourite beautiful-sounding words to soothe:

Schmetterling - butterfly

Gummistiefeln – rubber boots

Blumen - flowers

Pfefferminze – peppermint

As a keen lover of language, every day new discoveries of German brings so much joy and hilarity, often to the total bemusement of my German friends. 

My German language learning is coming along, then. Slowly, mind, but coming along. I've more or less given up learning straight grammar now, preferring instead to learn the language, as it were, on the shop floor, or just out and about in Berlin.

Which, honestly, is so much more enjoyable.