”The Awful German Language”. Was Mark Twain right?

1. ”The Awful German Language”. Was Mark Twain right? Department of German, University of Bristol 6 December 2011 Professor Martin Durrell University of Manchester

2. The DATIVE case In the first place, I would leave out the Dative case. It confuses the plurals; and, besides, nobody ever knows when he is in the Dative case, except he discover it by accident – and then he does not know when or where it was that he got into it, or how long he has been in it, or how he is going to get out of it again. The Dative case is but an ornamental folly – it is better to discard it.

3. Learning German 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.

4. The inventor of the language seems to have taken pleasure in complicating it in every way he could think of. [...] after the verb – merely by way of ornament, as far as I can make out – the writer shovels in haben sind gewesen gehabt haben geworden sein or words to that effect, and the monument is finished. In my note-book I find this entry: July 1. – In the hospital yesterday, a word of thirteen syllables was successfully removed from a patient – a North German from near Hamburg; but as most unfortunately the surgeons had opened him in the wrong place, under the impression that he contained a panorama, he died. The sad event has cast a gloom over the whole community.

5. German adjective declensions Difficult? – troublesome? – these words cannot describe it. I heard a Californian student in Heidelberg say, in one of his calmest moods, that he would rather decline two drinks than one German adjective.

6. Gender “[...] there is no sense or system in the distribution [...] 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 [...] a tree is male, its buds are female, its leaves are neuter; horses are sexless, dogs are male, cats are female - tomcats included, of course [...]

7. Tale of the fishwife and its sad fate

8. der Löffel, die Gabel, das Messer der Mund, die Wange, dasKinn derin der bayrischen Hauptstadt geborene Dichter

9. Genders in Dyirbal

10. Endings and gender

11. The exception and the rule A person who has not studied German can form no idea of what a perplexing language it is [...] 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. Could there be a language so perverse, so twisted, so sadistic that it inflicts irregular forms on its speakers a majority of the time? [...] German textbook authors have made heroic efforts to impose order on this mess, but [...] the counterexamples outnumber the examples. One linguist eked out ten rules but tacked on 17 lists of exceptions.

13. Rules for German noun plurals a) Feminine nouns add -(e)n (e.g.: die Frau - die Frauen) b) Neuter nouns add -e, without Umlaut (e.g.: das Jahr - die Jahre) c) Masculine nouns add -e, with Umlaut if possible (e.g.: der Stuhl - die Stühle) EXCEPT: d) Masculine and neuter nouns in -el, -en and -erhave no ending (e.g.: der Lehrer - die Lehrer, das Segel - die Segel) Every language has a different mixture of regular and irregular forms

14. Noun plurals in Welsh I: add an ending a) -au siop ‘shop’ siopau b) -iau beic ‘bicycle’ beiciau c) -us nyrs ‘nurse’ nyrsus d) -ion cyw ‘chicken’ cywion e) -ed pryf ‘insect’ pryfed f) -iaid eos ‘nightingale’ eosiaid g) -on modur ‘car’ moduron h) -edd bys ‘finger’ bysedd i) -ydd afon ‘river’ afonydd j) -aint gof ‘blacksmith’ gofaint k) -iadau dosbarth ‘class’ dosbarthiadau l) -od teigr ‘tiger’ teigrod m) -i parsel ‘parcel’ parseli n) oedd gorsaf ‘station’ gorsafoedd II: change a vowel bachgen ‘boy’ bechgyn bardd ‘poet’ beirdd ffordd ‘road’ ffyrdd III: change a vowel and add an ending (a) -au botwm ‘bottom’ botymau (b) -iau bws ‘bus’ bysiau (c) -on lleidr ‘thief’ lladron (d) -od cwch ‘boat’ cychod (e) -ydd gwlad ‘country’ gwledydd (f) -oedd cwm ‘valley’ cymoedd (g) -eydd swyddfa ‘office’ swyddfeydd IV: drop a singular ending mochyn ‘pig’ moch V: drop a singular ending and change a vowel aderyn ‘bird’ adar VI: change a singular to a plural ending cwningen ‘rabbit’ cwningod etc.

15. s

16. The definite article Die Butter kostet 3 Euro das Pfund Das Auto ist der Fluch der modernen Stadt Cars are the curse of modern cities

17. Linking verbs in English

18. GHOTI

19. How (not) to arrive at the German for:“when we had come with our friends” 1) The formation of the past participle of kommen 'come', memorised from tables of irregular verbs: gekommen 2) The use of sein as the perfect auxiliary of kommen, as an intransitive verb of motion 3) The form of the past tense of sein to form the pluperfect tense, memorised from tables of irregular verbs - war 4) The ending for the finite verb, memorised from the table, agreeing with the subject of the verb - waren 5) The identification of mit 'with' from the memorised list of prepositions taking the dative case 6) The dative plural form of the possessive unser 'our', as memorised from the appropriate table - unseren 7) The formation of the plural of Freund 'friend', memorised with the noun itself - Freunde 8) Adding the ending -n for the dative plural of a noun whose plural stern does not end in -n or -s - Freunden 9) The placing of the verb in final position in a subordinate clause, with the auxiliary following the main verb 10) The placing of the pronoun subject immediately after the conjunction, and before the prepositional phrase, in a subordinate clause [...], als wir mit unseren Freunden gekommen waren

20. Learning strategies and language awareness What determines progress is insight into pattern in language It is good practice to arouse learners’ curiosity about the contrasting patterns of the mother tongue and the foreign language Different people learn a language in different ways - you need to find your own strategy

21. FIND THE SUBJECTWho is doing what in sentences 2 - 6? 1. Diesem Nachbarn begegnete Manfred nun öfters 2. Gendarmen attackierte in der Nacht auf Donnerstag in Amstetten ein alkoholisierter Arbeitsloser 3. Im konkreten Fall stellten Rauschgiftfahnder der Landshuter Kripo dem minderjährigen Jakob H. am 30. April 1000 Euro zur Verfügung 4. Unmittelbar vor dem Hauptportal des Parlamentsgebäudes wird bis etwa Mitte 2010, so ein schriftlicher Bahn-Vermerk, ein riesiges Loch klaffen 5. Als er über den Minister schimpfte, hat ihn das nicht sein Amt in der Armee gekostet, sonder ihm viel Beifall von seiten der Orthodoxen eingebracht 6. Mächtigen Kabinettsfürsten, allen voran Justizminister Jack Straw, erschien diese Politik gleichbedeutend mit der Aufgabe sozialdemokratischer Identität

22. Noun plural exercise It has been claimed that there are 4 simple rules for forming the plural of nouns in German: a) Feminine nouns add -(e)n (e.g.: die Frau - die Frauen) b) Neuter nouns add -e, without Umlaut (e.g.: das Jahr - die Jahre) c) Masculine nouns add -e, with Umlaut if possible (e.g.: der Stuhl - die Stühle) EXCEPT: d) Masculine and neuter nouns in -el, -en and -er haue no ending (e.g.: der Lehrer - die Lehrer, das Segel - die Segel) Test how valid these rules are either by checking against all the simple nouns given under the letter L in a dictionary, or by checking how many of the simple nouns in a passage of 1000 words from a novel or a newspaper follow them.

23. The Nuss test Possible plurals: Nusse Nussen Nüsse Nüsser Possible genders: der Nuss die Nuss das Nuss

24. Relative difficulty of foreign languages

25. Lutz Götze on learning languages Die Fähigkeit, seine eigenen Gedanken in einer oder mehreren fremden Sprachen auszudrücken, ist eine Gabe und ein Wettbewerbsvorteil. Voraussetzung dafür aber ist, dass man die Gedanken zunächst in der eigenen Sprache fassen kann.

26. Thank you