Three Things German Taught Me About English

I had a teacher in school that said the main reason to study foreign language was to understand your own language better. It seems counter intuitive, but this does seem to be the best reason to study a language. In high school, we are unlikely to actually pick up a language. I took two terms of French, but unless you want me to name foods or count to a million I wouldn't be much help in Paris.

Even in college, fluency is often beyond our reach. Is there value in learning about a language without actually learning it? Absolutely. I have found that, after reading a little Chaucer, I understand English better with a little knowledge of German. German is a sister language to English. Modern English grew out of a collision between (primarily) Danish and French. (Danish being similar to German at the time. Less so now.)

Understanding Each Other

From Airplane, 1980

Ironically, studying language teaches us how to understand each other without understanding a word the other person is saying. It is an old debate: Does language change the way a person thinks? The answer to that question is better left to linguists. Logically it makes sense than if you are not accustomed to using personal pronouns in a sentence (Spanish), all verbals go to the end of a sentence (German), or your language does not have a "to be" (Russian, Arabic) then you probably approach communication differently at some level. It also means we must change the way we process communication before we can really speak another language. Understanding that learning a language is difficult and is more than a new set of words can only make us better, more tolerant humans.

Have you ever met someone who thought Spanish was just English with an A or O at the end of the word? Most people are smarter than that, but I have still seen some idiocy when language barriers come into play. This is a true story: I was in a hardware store in 1998. A gentleman who spoke only Spanish approached the clerk indicating he could not find the proper wrench for the bolt in his hand. The clerk said, "Go down to the end of this aisle, look to the left, and it is on the bottom shelf." The man said, "Lo siento. No entiendo." The clerk said, "Oh. YOU GO DOWN TO THE END OF THE AISLE...!" I can't make this stuff up. Why did he do that? Did the man understand it any better at eighty decibels than forty? The clerk did not understand that communication is more than the right set of words. 

Learning from German: Verbals

Today, English classes don't give quite the rigor to verbal forms as when I was a child. If you are lost already, blame your English teacher. A verbal noun or adjective is, simply put, a verb functioning as a noun or adjective. This sentence uses "write" as a noun, verb, and adjective in order: When writing, I write on a writing desk.

The failure of education contributes to our inability to understand other languages, where verbs have specific forms when they act as verbs. German verbs, for instance, end in -en when in most verbal forms. (In Spanish, they end in -ar, -ir, or -er.) Occasionally, you see constructions ending in -et as well. In English, we use several endings or constructions. Many of our most common verbs differ, but the rule thumb is: to ___ (infinitive), ___ (verb), ___ing (present participle), ___ed (past tense), and ___ed (past participle). So: To pour, pour, pouring, poured, and poured.

However, we know that the more common verbs in English actually change spelling to form the infinitive. The best example is the verb "to drink" or in German "trinken." If you think "trinken" sounds a lot like "drunken," then good job. Also, we see similarities in drunk and the past tense of trinken: trank or trunk. (Side note, Germans do not line up the tenses the same way Americans do. They use present tense where we use present progressive. They also split the what we consider past into two tenses.) 

The eyeopener was seeing the phrase Zeitunggeoffnet (literally "time opened") translated consistently as as "opening hours." To the American eye, that looks wrong. Why? Because we are uncomfortable with gerunds (verbs ending in -ing functioning as a noun such as: Writing is my hobby). 

Learning from German: Noun Phrases

Mark Twain spoke fluent German and French, and hated every minute of it. German does have a habit of stringing words together to create one word. Zeitunggeoffnet is one example. Every German number, when spelled, is a single word regardless of length. This Week carries an interesting list of extremely long and real German words. Many of the longest come from legal jargon (English is very much like German in that respect). Among my favorites (because it is one you are likely to encounter at some point) is Kaftfahrzeug-Haftpflichtversicherung: or motor vehicle liability insurance company.

Consequently, English does have a tendency to lengthen words unnecessarily by use of affixes. An example is antidisestablishmentarianism. From the view of a linguist (who works with morphemes, or a series of sounds with a meaning, rather than words) this is the same as the multiple nouns expressing the same sentiment. This is not a single word, but multiple morphemes. The longest word (with only one morpheme by my count) is possibly tintinnabulation.

However, we do not need to look to the annals of legal jargon for lengthy words. In Bavaria, you will see with surprising frequency: EinbahnstraBe (that is supposed to be a sharp S, not a B). In America, we would say "one-way street." Yesterday, I was warned to stay out of a certain area due to Steinbruchbetrieb or quarry operations. When we stop and look at these German words alongside our English phrases, there is functionally no difference in length.

The neophyte, American German language student might find this habit of making the entire subject of a sentence into a single word intimidating. For German grammatical forms, it is actually a necessity. If you haven't taken English in a while, you may not have heard the term "noun phrase." It was a new phrase (if not a new concept) to me when I moved to graduate school. Simply put, it is a noun with all the words that modify it and all the words that modify those modifiers. "The very quick, dark brown fox" is a single noun phrase. A native German speaker would likely see this as perfectly logical--and simply make it into a word.

Learning from German: Dangling Prepositions

It is difficult to pin down where the opinion that you cannot end a sentence with a preposition comes from. Clearly, you really can end a sentence with a preposition as people do it all the time. What is an even better test, people understand when this is done. We cannot underestimate that last point. English is oddly rigid in word order. A speaker cannot simply place all the words in any order and expect to be understood. In German, you are not allowed to do this, but because the language has case, we could likely understand.

One famous quote is that dangling prepositions are "the kind of nonsense up with which I will not put." With planning and thought, we can eliminate dangling prepositions somewhat more gracefully than this.  "Please pick that up" works better in many ways as "Please pick up that trash."

Then came technology to screw it up. We now ask when a plane will take off, a bus will get in, we order a pizza for carry out, and call a cab for a pick up. Not surprisingly, many grammarians decline to comment on these constructions. Why? Because it is simply very difficult to work around them.

Here is the key, our sister language does it all the time. Read a German train schedule. You will notice times listed thus similiarly to the following: an-1145, ab-1154. These are called separable verbs, and are used in some of the most common phrases/words. These verbs have a preposition attached to them which must be separated and placed at the end of a sentence. The word ankommen, or arrive, would fall in a question thus: Um wieviel uhr kommt der Zug an? means "At what time does the train arrive?" or even better "What time does the train come in?" (Note: that is very high German. Google translates it more simply.) Depart is abfahren; we could consider this leave out.

Just as in English we cannot simply remove or change prepositions ("What time does the plane take?" or "What time does the plane take off the ground?" make little sense), the attached preposition can vastly change the meaning. Absteigen means to descend, but aussteigen means to get off of a train, bus, etc. In English, we see this with "take": take off, take in, take up, take out, takeout, take down, take with, take aside, etc. 

It's history folks; the Germans do it so we can too.

Final Thoughts

This simply goes to prove that, although there is a time and place for proper grammar, there is a time and place for efficiency. Many of the same grammatical concepts we embrace come from other, sister languages (or actually the mysterious Indo-European language). The key is that these did not come to us from grammar books, but by usage. Dangle a preposition if you dare, but know why.