Mark Twain and The Awful German Language

And there I thought I was having a difficult relationship with German! Compared to Mark Twain I am a faithful and devoted admirer of its curiosities. In his essay The Awful German Language he spares no pains to prove its horrible shortcomings, complete disorder and lack of system; in fact Mark Twain takes his criticism as far as the boundaries of satire and his imagination will let him.

First off: I don't really know how I liked this "brilliantly witty piece of literature" as the blurb of my edition states. It is a very light, short and entertaining read for anyone who has ever had troubles learning an illogical and complicated language. While I of course could not relate to the problems any foreigner must have learning German (for I admit it has a horribly difficult grammar), I remembered a lot of similar difficulties I had with other languages such as French, Spanish and Italian. And this is where my criticism begins.
I am by no means influenced by national pride -there is hardly a harsher critic of my land and language than a true Austrian-  but for a native speaker of German some of Twain's remarks are simply ridiculous.

Mark Twain cannot have had much experience studying foreign languages, because the predominant part of his critique can be applied to almost any European language, not just German. The completely random distribution of sexes for example is a part of any language I have ever studied (except for Japanese, but that has its own stumbling blocks). That the English language is free from grammatical sexes of any kind is a wonderful relief, but then I don't know any other language whose grammar is so simple and clear as the English. I can tell you, though, that English has its own difficulties for eager students (vocabulary! You have so many words for one and the same thing! And then tenses! In my opinion there are roughly twenty ways of expressing that something will happen in the future...but I'm departing from the topic).

What really irritated me was that some of Twain's points of criticism are simply wrong. In one paragraph he talks for instance about the German habit of over-describing things.

"A German speaks of an Englishman as the Engländer; to change the sex, he adds inn, and that stands for Englishwoman -- Engländerinn. That seems descriptive enough, but still it is not exact enough for a German; so he precedes the word with that article which indicates that the creature to follow is feminine, and writes it down thus: "die Engländerinn," -- which means "the she-Englishwoman." I consider that that person is over-described."

Now, first of all the particle to signalise a woman is -in, not -inn (the multitude of spelling mistakes in this short essay makes Twain's authority as a competent judge of the language somewhat less believable). Secondly, "die" means exactly the same as "the", so "die Engländerin" translates literally to "the Englishwoman", which makes it exactly the same as in English. In my opinion it is even easier, because an -in at the end of a word always means that the person is a woman, which avoids a lot of confusion. I can have a male friend, "Freund", and a female friend, "Freundin" and instantly know the difference, whereas when someone talks in English about a friend I am always wondering whether this is a woman or a man.

Then at one point Twain moans about the long German words. It is true, we tend to use only one word when the English use several, but I don't really see why "Unabhängigkeitserklärung" which literally translates to "independencedeclaration" should be so much worse than "declaration of independence". And some of his remarks are nothing but inaccurate: contrary to Twain's claim there is no German word which changes its meaning depending on which syllable is emphasised. Also, I get the impression that he never learned French, which is far, far more intricate and haphazard, since he believes that "a gifted person ought to learn English (barring spelling and pronouncing) in 30 hours, French in 30 days and German in 30 years".

Obviously I cannot consider myself as gifted, for I have spent the last five years studying French and am nowhere near fluent. 

But who would dare to question Mark Twain's expertise in German, a language he has studied for nine whole weeks?

I have just noticed that this post sounds much harsher than I intended it to be. Who would have thought that? Perhaps I am a tiny little bit proud of my mother tongue after all? Anyway, I admit: German grammar is systemless and this essay really amusing, just don't take it too serious. It is probably more enjoyable and easier to dwell in Twain's dry humour for someone who cannot control the accuracy of all of his critical remarks.

Always read the small print or How to really annoy your potential readers

I love book buying, I love it almost as much as reading itself.
There is a pretty big book store in my town and whenever I enter it I feel as if I was on a long, relaxing holiday and surrounded only by the best of people: interesting, sophisticated  persons who all share my love for literature (because no one ever is in a bookshop just so they can buy a present for someone they don't know very well or some comics or maybe even a copy of the Playboy...).

Anyway, yesterday I went on a shopping spree again and since I am joining Kate's Chunkster Les Misérables Readalong I thought it was about time to get a copy of Hugo's long epic book.
Since they only had one edition the choice was easy and I bought a thick paperback with the beautiful title "Die Elenden" which is the exact German translation of "Les Misérables".
I decided on reading it in German because my French is far away from sufficient to understand such a book (I'm battling through Le Petit Prince at the moment) and it would be rather absurd for me to read the English translation of a French book which I would have to translate into German again in my head.
To be honest the book seemed a little too thin to me to be treated as the Chunkster of Chunksters but I thought that they had probably used really thin paper and also I didn't know the exact page number Les Misérables is supposed to have, so I bought it despite my little doubts.

When I had a closer look at home I grew more and more suspicious, the French original has about 1900 pages and although German is not quite as drawn-out a language as French, my edition was decidedly too short considering that it had not even 700 pages. Finally on the 4th page I found a note in about this font size saying that I had just bought a copy which had been "improved and abridged for better readability".

?!?!?

"Improved and abridged": Are they serious?!? How can anyone dare say that they have improved a book which is considered one of the greatest novels of French literature and the whole 19th century? And abridged: What kind of abbreviation is it to simply leave out two thirds of a novel? I mean, thousand pages are not quite a trifle, are they? 

I know that a lot of people think that Hugo's writing is too longsome and I am sure there are some boring scenes in Les Misérables, but I have got the feeling that if I read this abridged version I don't read Hugo's book at all, I read a renarration.

How can anyone assume they are able to decide 150 years later which parts of a book are relevant and which not? They have not felt what Hugo felt, they have not seen what he saw and they certainly don't know his thoughts. How can they arrogate to say "Oh, this part is boring, let's omit it!"?

And, more than anything: Why can't they write abridged version somewhere on the cover so people can choose if they want to read the thoughts of some arrogant German translator or of the real Victor Hugo?

Sorry that I am moaning so much today, but this really made me angry, I can hardly imagine what Monsieur Hugo would say if he was still alive! Oh, and I have kept the best to myself until now: After my disappointing discovery I looked for an unabridged German edition on Amazon and guess what? There is none. During the 1970s one which cost about 80€ existed, but it is no longer available. Apparently no German person was interested in reading Les Misérables in the last 30 years.

I am so angry with my parents for not being English.

Because he's right in general

I've been worrying for quite a long time how to read accurately. No, I don't want to start a philosophic discussion right now, don't worry, I'm tired and Dicken's Great Expectations are waiting for me.
I've been simply thinking a lot about whether I should read the German translations of English classics or the original versions. I'm learning a lot of languages (English, French, Spanish, Japanese, Italian, hell, I'm even learning Latin) and thankfully I'm pretty gifted in this area. My English is rather good (well, at least I hope so!) and I love it but German is my mother tongue and there are undoubtedly some fine literary nuances that escape my attention when I'm reading in English.
Anyway, after almost falling asleep over a dreadful translation of A Christmas Carol I swore never to read anything by Dickens again, but since my curiosity was stronger I couldn't resist buying a cheap English copy of the book when I saw it in a shop window. You kno what?
It turned out to be one of my favourite (Christmas) stories ever.
With the support of Robert Frost's wisdom I've finally come to a decision. I'm going to read the original versions of all books which were originally published in English but the German versions of all books whose original languages I don't know well enough (Spanish, Italian, Japanese and French if you don't count The Little Prince) or not at all (I couldn't animate myself yet to learn ancient Greek or Russian). I know that a translation, even a good one can never be more than a faint reflexion of the original work, so I'll do my best to concentrate and understand the English versions.There it is, after all:

Poetry is what gets lost in translation.

One does not argue with Robert Frost.