"The Awful German Language" is an 1880 essay by Mark Twain published as Appendix D in ''

A Tramp Abroad ''A Tramp Abroad'' is a work of travel literature, including a mixture of autobiography and fictional events, by American author Mark Twain, published in 1880. The book details a journey by the author, with his friend Harris (a character created ...

''. The essay is a humorous exploration of the frustrations a native speaker of

English English usually refers to: * English language * English people English may also refer to: Peoples, culture, and language * ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England ** English national ide ...

has with learning German as a second language.

Background

Twain made his first unsuccessful attempt to learn German in 1850 at age fifteen. He resumed his study 28 years later in preparation for a trip to Europe. Upon his arrival in Germany, the fruit of this recent scholarship was attested to in the advice of a friend: "Speak in German, Mark. Some of these people may understand English."Potsdam 2004 pp. 315–316 During this 1878 stay in Germany, Twain had a dream in which, according to his notebook, "all bad foreigners went to German Heaven—couldn't talk and wished they had gone to the other place." "The Awful German Language" was published in the second volume of Twain's ''A Tramp Abroad'', 1880, as appendix D. Gunnar Magnusson describes the work as "Twain's most famous philological essay". On October 31, 1897, Twain delivered a lecture titled "Die Schrecken der deutschen Sprache" ("The Horrors of the German Language" in English) to the Concordia Festkneipe in Vienna (the Vienna Press Club). Twain continued to give lectures into the 20th century regarding the language.

Text

Twain describes his exasperation with German grammar in a series of eight humorous examples that include

separable verb A separable verb is a verb that is composed of a lexical core and a separable particle. In some sentence positions, the core verb and the particle appear in one word, whilst in others the core verb and the particle are separated. The particle canno ...

s, adjective

declension In linguistics, declension (verb: ''to decline'') is the changing of the form of a word, generally to express its syntactic function in the sentence, by way of some inflection. Declensions may apply to nouns, pronouns, adjectives, adverbs, and ...

, and compound words. He is, as the subject suggests, focusing on German as a language, but Twain is also dealing with English to compare the two languages. This allows for an analysis in linguistic weight assigned to various typological and stylistic aspects of language which revolve around the difference between an analytic language like English with a language like German that is a synthetic language with some analytic characteristics. Twain emphasizes these changes through interlinear translation, a manner of translation which tries to preserve the original language without context and in a literal manner, and this method emphasizes the mechanics of the language translated.

Morphology

The German language contains a complex system of

inflection In linguistic morphology, inflection (or inflexion) is a process of word formation in which a word is modified to express different grammatical categories such as tense, case, voice, aspect, person, number, gender, mood, animacy, and ...

that is capable of frustrating learners in a manner similar to Twain's argument:Schmid 2002 p. 85

Surely there is not another language that is so slipshod and systemless, and so slippery and elusive to the grasp. One is washed about in it, hither and thither, in the most helpless way; and when at last he thinks he has captured a rule which offers firm ground to take a rest on amid the general rage and turmoil of the ten parts of speech, he turns over the page and reads, "Let the pupil make careful note of the following exceptions." He runs his eye down and finds that there are more exceptions to the rule than instances of it.

The inflections within the language are used to represent both syntax and semantics, and function is assigned in hard to grasp ways, which combine with Twain's claim about exceptions being rather common in the German language. Part of this stems from the language's word order, along with gender, number, and other linguistic aspects, being connected to the morphology of individual words.

Gender

One of the key emphases within the work is on German linguistic gender. Twain plays with the differences in natural or sexual gender and linguistic or

grammatical gender In linguistics, grammatical gender system is a specific form of noun class system, where nouns are assigned with gender categories that are often not related to their real-world qualities. In languages with grammatical gender, most or all noun ...

by pointing out that the German for "girl" is grammatically neuter, unlike many sexless items such as

turnips The turnip or white turnip (''Brassica rapa'' subsp. ''rapa'') is a root vegetable commonly grown in temperate climates worldwide for its white, fleshy taproot. The word ''turnip'' is a compound of ''turn'' as in turned/rounded on a lathe and ' ...

Every noun has a gender, and there is no sense or system in distribution; so the gender of each must be learned separately and by heart. There is no other way. To do this one has to have a memory like a memorandum-book. In German, a young lady has no sex, while a turnip has. Think what overwrought reverence that shows for the turnip, and what callous disrespect for the girl.

The problem with the linguistic gender is that it appears to make sense in theory, but it operates in an illogical manner. The actual relationship between gender and noun is unclear, and it is difficult for a learner of German to psychologically connect their understanding of the words with the gender rules. To Twain, there was no reason for concepts such as a fish's scale having a feminine gender but a

fishwife A fishwife, fish-fag or fishlass is a woman who sells fish. Some wives and daughters of fishermen were notoriously loud and foul-mouthed, as noted in the expression, ''To swear like a fishwife'' as they sold fish in the marketplace. One reaso ...

, an actual female, lacking any. When Twain translates the "Tale of the Fishwife and its Sad Fate", he expresses feelings of anger that result from his attempt to learn the language:

It is a bleak Day. Hear the Rain, how he pours, and the Hail, how he rattles; and see the Snow, how he drifts along, and oh the Mud, how deep he is! Ah the poor Fishwife, it is stuck fast in the Mire; it has dropped its Basket of Fishes; and its Hands have been cut by the Scales as it seized some of the falling Creatures; and one Scale has even got into its Eye. And it cannot get her out. It opens its Mouth to cry for Help; but if any Sound comes out of him, alas he is drowned by the raging of the Storm.

German is not special in this manner, but, as the linguist Guy Deutscher observes, it was simply the language that Twain was learning at the time of the work. Many other languages contain some or all of the idiosyncrasies that Twain mocks, including French, Russian, and Latin.Deutscher 2005 p. 42

References

Citations

Sources

* Anderman, Gunilla and Rogers, Margaret. ''Translation Today''. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 2003. * Deutscher, Guy. ''The Unfolding of Language''. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2005. * Housen, Alex and Pierrand, M. ''Investigations in Instructed Second Language Acquisition''. New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 2005. * LeMaster, J. R., Wilson, James. ''The Mark Twain Encyclopedia''. New York: Garland, 1993. * * Romaine, Suzanne. ''Communicating Gender''. Mahwah: Erlbaum, 1999. * Schmid, Monika. ''First Language Attrition, Use and Maintenance''. Philadelphia: Benjamins, 2002.

External links

* * 1897 German version, "''Die Schrecken der deutschen Sprache''", included in brochure published by U.S. Embassy, Berlin, Germany at {{DEFAULTSORT:Awful German Language, The Essays by Mark Twain German language Language reform 1880 works 1880 essays