In Praise Of The German Language

For years, German has been mistakenly perceived as “ugly” or “difficult”. It is not hard to point to words or phrases that bear out this opinion, such as “Knoblauchzehe” (clove of garlic), “Wasserrutsche”, (water slide), “Verdauungskanal” (alimentary canal), “Unabhängigkeitserklärung” (declaration of independence), “Haftpflichtversicherung” (liability insurance), or “Sechstausendachthundertneunundzwanzig” (the number 6,829). To the untrained eye, it looks like someone at the Goethe-Institut forgot to use the space bar when codifying the language, but actually there is a certain unmistakable clarity and purposefulness about it. Before you decide to make some disparaging comments and close this page, let me explain…

English and French are the main working languages in a vast number of international institutions and organisations, such as the European Union, NATO, the EBU, and the African Union. Many linguists point out that it is often to the advantage of those organisations to continue using English and French, because if formulated well, rules, laws, publicity, reports and correspondence can be ambiguous enough to be interpreted in multiple ways. But this is almost impossible in German, as what you read is what you get.

Several translator friends of mine working at the EU have told me that they and many of their colleagues, when translating documents into their own languages, often wait until the German version comes out before they confirm publication, just to check they understood everything correctly. I also know that the German translators in one of the EU institutions know this, and as such they are extremely thorough-going in their execution of their work; living up to the stereotype, one might say. They have such a huge following among other linguistic staff (this is the nearest any translator will ever get to having a fan club), they are frequently on the phone to the English or French department to ask for clarification from the original writers.

German is a language which lays bare the very essence of a thing, either abstract or real, in a way that the Latin-derived languages cannot. Something similar can be said of other Germanic languages, and all this has overlaps in English: at least the Germanic side of that schizophrenic Anglo-Saxon-Norman-Danish-French-Friesian tongue spoken by billions worldwide. To demonstrate this, I will take several words or phrases and break them down.

BARE DEFINITIONS

To define a thing, like a tree that bears apples, English opts for “apple tree”, a very easy and logical compound noun. German settles on “Apfelbaum” in the same way. In both cases, the two words in the construction are nouns; but here’s the clever bit: the words in the first part “apple/Apfel” are treated as adjectives, with the difference that German clumps them together, whereas English divides them into two words. Sometimes. But not always. German is incredibly consistent in closing the gap in their compound nouns, whereas English is rather wishy-washy, often opting for two words, but sometimes joining them together (e.g. toothbrush, sunrise, shopkeeper), or annoyingly adding a hyphen (e.g. fire-fighter, care-giver), just to provide some flamboyant variety and give writers of English vocabulary books an air of indecisiveness.

Because German puts all these words together, not only are they very easy to locate in a search engine, they are also remarkably explanatory in their meanings. So let us take a look at one or two of the words above:

The German word for liability insurance is Haftpflichtversicherung. It may seem like quite a nightmarish thing to find as the title to an official letter from an insurance company, often attached to a bill, but it has a certain descriptive nature about it. There’s Haft, then there’s Pflicht, and finally Versicherung. Haft is the challenging part to explain – it means detention or imprisonment, but can also mean binding responsibility; Pflicht means duty or obligation; together they mean liability. And Versicherung is the insurance. So, breaking it down like this we can determine that this insurance is what you pay to get you out of trouble when you have been a naughty boy or girl.

German does its best to lay everything out bare so that there is very little room for misinterpretation. English and French are full of homophones, homographs and homonyms that can only be determined by looking at the context of the rest of the sentence or paragraph the word is found in.

PREFIXES ARE A GERMAN SPECIALITY

Let us run with this idea a little further: the last word, Versicherung, contains the prefix Ver-. This is a most remarkable and versatile trinity of letters, and can signify quite a lot of things, often negative, such as:

1. how a situation may end up

verarmen = to sink into poverty / verderben = to decay or go to waste

“Arm” means “poor”, so the “ver-“ gives it an element of bad luck. Add “-en” and it becomes a verb. It manifestly means “to end up poor”. The same with “Derb”, meaning “dirt”, so it more or less means “turn to dirt”.

2. doing something you disapprove of

verarschen = make fun of / verschlafen = oversleep / verspielen = gamble something away

“Arsch” means “arse”, and the “ver-“ lets you know it wasn’t a nice thing to do, so it would maybe end up in English as “to arse about with someone”. Therefore, “schlafen” and “spielen” mean “to sleep” and “to play” respectively, and the “ver-“ prefix giving us the idea that you slept or played in a way that ended badly. The explanation is long, but the end result is succinct and very easy to grasp.

But it’s not only negative:

3. to bring to a conclusion

vermelden = to announce something / verbleiben = to remain in place / verknüpfen = to link up

“Melden” means “report” or “notify” and the “ver-” prefix allows us to know it is something that reaches its conclusion, the same with the others.

Another very revealing prefix is Ur-. It appears in a lot of words, like Urwald, Ursprung, Ursache, Urquell. Its origins tell a very instructive tale too. Ur- means, at its most fundamental level “original” or “primary”, as in the very first or the earliest.

1. “Urwald” is what we call rain forest, but German speakers label “primary forest”.

2. “Ursprung” means “origin” or “provenance”, so think about this: in the “-sprung” part of Ursprung, like the English -spring from the word “offspring”, it means exactly that; something like a combination of “transferral”, “separation” or “jump” with a preposition on the beginning, so Ursprung means “source” or “provenance”: literally “original leap”.

3. “Ursache” means “cause” or “reason”. “Sache” means “thing” or “issue”, so “Ursache” says exactly what it’s supposed to: by adding “ur” to “sache”, it literally means “original matter”.

4. “Urquell”, if anyone doesn’t already know, is the second word of one of Czechia’s most famous beers, Pilsner Urquell. The word Quell or Quelle means spring or water source, and adding “Ur” on the beginning turns it into a well. The Czech name for this beer, Prazdroj, means exactly the same thing: pra- is the Slavic equivalent of Ur- and zdroj means “spring” or “water source” too.

COINAGES

German is a language that does exactly what it says in the handbook. The difference between German and the Latin languages, though, is that because of this, nearly no new words can be coined in German unless you take two or three existing words and put them together. So any new coinages tend to be borrowed from other languages, mainly English, French or Latin. What I mean is German has a propensity for recycling already existing words to create new senses. For example, the German word for “glove” is “Handschuh”, literally “hand shoe”. Why invent a new word, when this creation fits like a… uhm… a glove?!

However, German is by no means a poor language: there are a great number of words in German that require explanations in other languages, and here are some of my favourites:

Sollbruchstelle: this is a word every language needs. It means the predetermined point that a machine or device will break or stop working properly. Cynics often believe their fridge or dishwasher is programmed to stop working one day in order to make you buy another one. That’s more or less what this means. Among other significations, “Soll” can be translated as “target”, “Bruch” means “break” or “crash”, and “Stelle” can mean “point”, so put all the words together, and there you have it: “target breaking point” in one word.

Sturmfrei: a great word, literally “storm-free”, used by kids and teens to say “I’m the only one at home; so if you want to come over, we can get up to all kinds of shenanigans”.

Fernweh: another one we should consider using, it means the opposite of “Heimweh”, what English calls “homesickness”. “Heim” means “home” and “Weh” means “pain”, so if we replace it with “Fern”, meaning “far” or “distant”, it means something we nearly all experienced in 2020: the sadness of not being in one of your favourite locations far away.

Verschlimmbessern: such a brilliant word, this takes the prefix “Ver-“ that we saw above, then adds two adjectives before we discover it’s a verb… “schlimm” means bad, and “besser” means “better”, and the “-n” tells us it’s an infinitive. It means that you make something a whole lot worse by foolishly attempting to improve it, like the botched restoration of the Ecce Homo fresco in Spain a few years ago, or when you inexplicably decide that what your carbonara sauce really needs is some cinnamon.

Schadenfreude: this word, like Kindergarten, Wanderlust, Doppelgänger and Weltschmerz, has made it to some other languages, although not everyone knows what it means. Schadenfreude is taken from “Schade”, meaning “shame” or “pity” and “Freude” meaning “joy”. So it means, in plain German, gaining pleasure from someone else’s misery or pain. We borrowed it from German, because no British person ever thought about doing such a thing in the history of the country. Ever. Really…

I lie. Anyhow, some other languages have an equivalent, like Dutch (leedvermaak), Croatian (zluradost), Hungarian (káröröm) and Czech (škodolibost)*, but others just use the German word, including French, Portuguese, and most surprisingly of all, Japanese シャーデンフロイデ – sha-den-fu-roi-de, if you can believe it.

LEARNING THROUGH CULTURE

Finally, it is my opinion that German should be considered as the Latin of the Germanic languages – not because of its age, or being the original Germanic language, neither of which is proven, but because Latin is the basis and foundation for all the other Romance languages, and provides a springboard to better understanding and learning the others. If you know German, it is really not a big leap to learn Danish, Dutch, Luxembourgish, Friesian, Swedish or Norwegian. Despite being a great distance away from Scandinavian languages, on the level of vocabulary there are strong similarities. The same goes for Latin with its descendants, or any of the mightily intertwined Slavic languages.

If you want to learn German or any other language for that matter, the best way to do it is to become familiar with the mindset and mentality of its users. And that is best achieved by learning not only about the history of the country where it is spoken, but also the types of words used by the speakers. And as a very last point, never ever translate word-for-word in your head to try to express or decipher something; because very often when we translate literally what is expressed in one language, it can end up being misconstrued in the target language!

* All of these words are also compounds of other words:

The Dutch “leed” means “suffering” and “vermaak” means “amusement”.

The Croatian word “zlo” means”evil” and “radost” is “happiness”.

The Hungarian “kár” means “damage” and öröm means pleasure.

And the Czech word škoda, yes, that of the car company, means “shame” or “pity” (imagine Czechs saying “I’m off for a drive in my shame”). Oh yes, and “libost” means “pleasure”.