I went often to look at the collection of curiosities in Heidelberg
Castle, and one day I surprised the keeper of it with my German. I
spoke entirely in that language. He was greatly interested; and after
I had talked a while he said my German was very rare, possibly
a "unique"; and wanted to add it to his museum.
If he had known what it had cost me to acquire my art, he would also
have known that it would break any collector to buy it. Harris and I
had been hard at work on our German during several weeks at that
time, and although we had made good progress, it had been
accomplished under great difficulty and annoyance, for three of our
teachers had died in the mean time. A person who has not studied
German can form no idea of what a perplexing language it is.
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. So
overboard he goes again, to hunt for another Ararat and find another
quicksand. Such has been, and continues to be, my experience. Every
time I think I have got one of these four confusing "cases" where I
am master of it, a seemingly insignificant preposition intrudes
itself into my sentence, clothed with an awful and unsuspected power,
and crumbles the ground from under me. For instance, my book inquires
after a certain bird -- (it is always inquiring after things which
are of no sort of consequence to anybody): "Where is the bird?" Now
the answer to this question -- according to the book -- is that the
bird is waiting in the blacksmith shop on account of the rain. Of
course no bird would do that, but then you must stick to the book.
Very well, I begin to cipher out the German for that answer. I begin
at the wrong end, necessarily, for that is the German idea. I say to
myself, "Regen (rain) is masculine -- or maybe it is feminine -- or
possibly neuter -- it is too much trouble to look now. Therefore, it
is either der (the) Regen, or die (the) Regen, or das (the) Regen,
according to which gender it may turn out to be when I look. In the
interest of science, I will cipher it out on the hypothesis that it
is masculine. Very well -- then the rain is der Regen, if it is
simply in the quiescent state of being mentioned, without enlargement
or discussion -- Nominative case; but if this rain is lying around,
in a kind of a general way on the ground, it is then definitely
located, it is doing something -- that is, resting (which is one of
the German grammar's ideas of doing something), and this throws the
rain into the Dative case, and makes it dem Regen. However, this rain
is not resting, but is doing something actively, -- it is falling --
to interfere with the bird, likely -- and this indicates movement,
which has the effect of sliding it into the Accusative case and
changing dem Regen into den Regen." Having completed the grammatical
horoscope of this matter, I answer up confidently and state in German
that the bird is staying in the blacksmith shop "wegen (on account
of) den Regen." Then the teacher lets me softly down with the remark
that whenever the word "wegen" drops into a sentence, it always
throws that subject into the Genitive case, regardless of
consequences -- and that therefore this bird stayed in the blacksmith
shop "wegen des Regens."
N. B. -- I was informed, later, by a higher authority, that there was
an "exception" which permits one to say "wegen den Regen" in certain
peculiar and complex circumstances, but that this exception is not
extended to anything but rain.
There are ten parts of speech, and they are all troublesome. An
average sentence, in a German newspaper, is a sublime and impressive
curiosity; it occupies a quarter of a column; it contains all the ten
parts of speech -- not in regular order, but mixed; it is built
mainly of compound words constructed by the writer on the spot, and
not to be found in any dictionary -- six or seven words compacted
into one, without joint or seam -- that is, without hyphens; it
treats of fourteen or fifteen different subjects, each inclosed in a
parenthesis of its own, with here and there extra parentheses which
reinclose three or four of the minor parentheses, making pens within
pens: finally, all the parentheses and reparentheses are massed
together between a couple of king-parentheses, one of which is placed
in the first line of the majestic sentence and the other in the
middle of the last line of it -- after which comes the VERB, and you
find out for the first time what the man has been talking about; and
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. I suppose that this closing hurrah is in the nature of the
flourish to a man's signature -- not necessary, but pretty. German
books are easy enough to read when you hold them before the looking-
glass or stand on your head -- so as to reverse the construction --
but I think that to learn to read and understand a German newspaper
is a thing which must always remain an impossibility to a foreigner.
Yet even the German books are not entirely free from attacks of the
Parenthesis distemper -- though they are usually so mild as to cover
only a few lines, and therefore when you at last get down to the verb
it carries some meaning to your mind because you are able to remember
a good deal of what has gone before. Now here is a sentence from a
popular and excellent German novel -- which a slight parenthesis in
it. I will make a perfectly literal translation, and throw in the
parenthesis-marks and some hyphens for the assistance of the reader --
though in the original there are no parenthesis-marks or hyphens,
and the reader is left to flounder through to the remote verb the
best way he can:
"But when he, upon the street, the (in-satin-and-silk-covered-now-
very-unconstrained-after-the-newest-fashioned-dressed) government
counselor's wife met," etc., etc. [1]
1. Wenn er aber auf der Strasse der in Sammt und Seide gehüllten
jetzt sehr ungenirt nach der neusten Mode gekleideten
Regierungsräthin begegnet.
That is from The Old Mamselle's Secret, by Mrs. Marlitt. And that
sentence is constructed upon the most approved German model. You
observe how far that verb is from the reader's base of operations;
well, in a German newspaper they put their verb away over on the next
page; and I have heard that sometimes after stringing along the
exciting preliminaries and parentheses for a column or two, they get
in a hurry and have to go to press without getting to the verb at
all. Of course, then, the reader is left in a very exhausted and
ignorant state.
We have the Parenthesis disease in our literature, too; and one may
see cases of it every day in our books and newspapers: but with us it
is the mark and sign of an unpracticed writer or a cloudy intellect,
whereas with the Germans it is doubtless the mark and sign of a
practiced pen and of the presence of that sort of luminous
intellectual fog which stands for clearness among these people. For
surely it is not clearness -- it necessarily can't be clearness. Even
a jury would have penetration enough to discover that. A writer's
ideas must be a good deal confused, a good deal out of line and
sequence, when he starts out to say that a man met a counselor's wife
in the street, and then right in the midst of this so simple
undertaking halts these approaching people and makes them stand still
until he jots down an inventory of the woman's dress. That is
manifestly absurd. It reminds a person of those dentists who secure
your instant and breathless interest in a tooth by taking a grip on
it with the forceps, and then stand there and drawl through a tedious
anecdote before they give the dreaded jerk. Parentheses in literature
and dentistry are in bad taste.
The Germans have another kind of parenthesis, which they make by
splitting a verb in two and putting half of it at the beginning of an
exciting chapter and the other half at the end of it. Can any one
conceive of anything more confusing than that? These things are
called "separable verbs." The German grammar is blistered all over
with separable verbs; and the wider the two portions of one of them
are spread apart, the better the author of the crime is pleased with
his performance. A favorite one is reiste ab -- which means departed.
Here is an example which I culled from a novel and reduced to English:
"The trunks being now ready, he DE- after kissing his mother and
sisters, and once more pressing to his bosom his adored Gretchen,
who, dressed in simple white muslin, with a single tuberose in the
ample folds of her rich brown hair, had tottered feebly down the
stairs, still pale from the terror and excitement of the past
evening, but longing to lay her poor aching head yet once again upon
the breast of him whom she loved more dearly than life itself,
PARTED."
However, it is not well to dwell too much on the separable verbs. One
is sure to lose his temper early; and if he sticks to the subject,
and will not be warned, it will at last either soften his brain or
petrify it. Personal pronouns and adjectives are a fruitful nuisance
in this language, and should have been left out. For instance, the
same sound, sie, means you, and it means she, and it means her, and
it means it, and it means they, and it means them. Think of the
ragged poverty of a language which has to make one word do the work
of six -- and a poor little weak thing of only three letters at that.
But mainly, think of the exasperation of never knowing which of these
meanings the speaker is trying to convey. This explains why, whenever
a person says sie to me, I generally try to kill him, if a stranger.
Now observe the Adjective. Here was a case where simplicity would
have been an advantage; therefore, for no other reason, the inventor
of this language complicated it all he could. When we wish to speak
of our "good friend or friends," in our enlightened tongue, we stick
to the one form and have no trouble or hard feeling about it; but
with the German tongue it is different. When a German gets his hands
on an adjective, he declines it, and keeps on declining it until the
common sense is all declined out of it. It is as bad as Latin. He
says, for instance:
SINGULAR
Nominative -- Mein guter Freund, my good friend.
Genitive -- Meines guten Freundes, of my good friend.
Dative -- Meinem guten Freund, to my good friend.
Accusative -- Meinen guten Freund, my good friend.
PLURAL
N. -- Meine guten Freunde, my good friends.
G. -- Meiner guten Freunde, of my good friends.
D. -- Meinen guten Freunden, to my good friends.
A. -- Meine guten Freunde, my good friends.
Now let the candidate for the asylum try to memorize those
variations, and see how soon he will be elected. One might better go
without friends in Germany than take all this trouble about them. I
have shown what a bother it is to decline a good (male) friend; well
this is only a third of the work, for there is a variety of new
distortions of the adjective to be learned when the object is
feminine, and still another when the object is neuter. Now there are
more adjectives in this language than there are black cats in
Switzerland, and they must all be as elaborately declined as the
examples above suggested. 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.
The inventor of the language seems to have taken pleasure in
complicating it in every way he could think of. For instance, if one
is casually referring to a house, Haus, or a horse, Pferd, or a dog,
Hund, he spells these words as I have indicated; but if he is
referring to them in the Dative case, he sticks on a foolish and
unnecessary e and spells them Hause, Pferde, Hunde. So, as an added e
often signifies the plural, as the s does with us, the new student is
likely to go on for a month making twins out of a Dative dog before
he discovers his mistake; and on the other hand, many a new student
who could ill afford loss, has bought and paid for two dogs and only
got one of them, because he ignorantly bought that dog in the Dative
singular when he really supposed he was talking plural -- which left
the law on the seller's side, of course, by the strict rules of
grammar, and therefore a suit for recovery could not lie.
In German, all the Nouns begin with a capital letter. Now that is a
good idea; and a good idea, in this language, is necessarily
conspicuous from its lonesomeness. I consider this capitalizing of
nouns a good idea, because by reason of it you are almost always able
to tell a noun the minute you see it. You fall into error
occasionally, because you mistake the name of a person for the name
of a thing, and waste a good deal of time trying to dig a meaning out
of it. German names almost always do mean something, and this helps
to deceive the student. I translated a passage one day, which said
that "the infuriated tigress broke loose and utterly ate up the
unfortunate fir forest" (Tannenwald). When I was girding up my loins
to doubt this, I found out that Tannenwald in this instance was a
man's name.
Every noun has a gender, and there is no sense or system in the
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. See how it looks in
print -- I translate this from a conversation in one of the best of
the German Sunday-school books:
"Gretchen.
Wilhelm, where is the turnip?
Wilhelm.
She has gone to the kitchen.
Gretchen.
Where is the accomplished and beautiful English maiden?
Wilhelm.
It has gone to the opera."
To continue with the German genders: 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; a person's mouth,
neck, bosom, elbows, fingers, nails, feet, and body are of the male
sex, and his head is male or neuter according to the word selected to
signify it, and not according to the sex of the individual who wears
it -- for in Germany all the women either male heads or sexless ones;
a person's nose, lips, shoulders, breast, hands, and toes are of the
female sex; and his hair, ears, eyes, chin, legs, knees, heart, and
conscience haven't any sex at all. The inventor of the language
probably got what he knew about a conscience from hearsay.
Now, by the above dissection, the reader will see that in Germany a
man may think he is a man, but when he comes to look into the matter
closely, he is bound to have his doubts; he finds that in sober truth
he is a most ridiculous mixture; and if he ends by trying to comfort
himself with the thought that he can at least depend on a third of
this mess as being manly and masculine, the humiliating second
thought will quickly remind him that in this respect he is no better
off than any woman or cow in the land.
In the German it is true that by some oversight of the inventor of
the language, a Woman is a female; but a Wife (Weib) is not -- which
is unfortunate. A Wife, here, has no sex; she is neuter; so,
according to the grammar, a fish is he, his scales are she, but a
fishwife is neither. To describe a wife as sexless may be called
under-description; that is bad enough, but over-description is surely
worse. 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.
Well, after the student has learned the sex of a great number of
nouns, he is still in a difficulty, because he finds it impossible to
persuade his tongue to refer to things as "he" and "she," and "him"
and "her," which it has been always accustomed to refer to it
as "it." When he even frames a German sentence in his mind, with the
hims and hers in the right places, and then works up his courage to
the utterance-point, it is no use -- the moment he begins to speak
his tongue flies the track and all those labored males and females
come out as "its."
