Germany: And Now for Sprachvergnugen

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.

— Mark Twain

So judged Missouri’s greatest cultural critic in 1880 regarding what he called “the Awful German Language,” and it is probably safe to say that the popular appraisal of the tongue has not moved far since. A fair verdict? As Germany emerges from the partial eclipse known as “the Postwar,” the question has fresh urgency: politicians, businessmen and, dare it be whispered, even journalists now need German more than they have for half a century. One of the hallmarks, after all, of great-power status is that others — even those who hail from other great powers — must learn to speak your language.

That is sure to occasion anguished edification for those who study the language of Goethe, Kafka and Freud, but it may provide a few pleasant surprises as well. As my own recent and none-too-elegant plunge into the language at the Goethe-Institut in Berlin demonstrated, learning German is hardly the ordeal of a lifetime, but neither is there an escalator up the magic mountain of fluency.

True, some of the hoariest complaints about German are as applicable today as they were when Twain wrote. To the student, nouns evince an urge for unification, glutinizing into tongue-wrenching heaps of meaning, while the dreaded trennbare, or separable, verbs divide into pieces — a kind of linguistic mitosis that leaves clumps of information floating around the sentence. Finding that truffle among words, a truly regular verb that pulls no tricks in the past perfect tense and behaves in the preterit as a preterit should, is a moment of sublime pleasure — provided that one can remember how regular verbs are conjugated.

Although German prose styles tend toward relative sparseness these days, a sentence can still stretch on well beyond the patience of the English speaker. One may be left exhausted and bewildered after navigating through cascades of clauses that lead to the elusive verb at the very end that explains everything. For sheer frustration, however, little compares with the task of remembering what gender each noun is and hence whether a der (masculine), die (feminine) or das (neuter) needs to be affixed in front of it. And then, of course, there are the declensions . . .

So what are the compensating virtues? For an English speaker, there is only one, but it is quite substantial: basic vocabulary. As linguistic cousins, German and English share a large stock of cognates, words that are spelled alike and mean the same thing — for example, person, winter and arm. Plenty of words have only slight differences: if you’re nervous in English, you’re nervos in German. With a little imagination, one can find any number of common roots. Take, for example, the verb to smell: riechen, from the same root as the English reeks. The malodorousness does not exist in the German word, but the odor does.

As with many languages, German vocabulary in the 20th century has become even more accessible to English speakers. In addition to all those words with a common etymology, the ranks of German words that are easily recognizable have been swelled by hundreds of borrowings from computer to frustrieren, a particular favorite among verbs. All in all, roughly a quarter of the most commonly used words in English and German are identical or similar enough to be understandable. Thus for the uninitiated, it is probably easier to pick up the gist of a conversation in German than one in most other languages. No small satisfaction.

However new initiates fare — and enrollment in German courses around the world is rapidly increasing — one thing is certain: Germany’s regained prominence will give a fillip to wider usage of the language, and is bound as well to contribute more words to other tongues. Already television viewers in the U.S. have seen signs of a heightened linguistic confidence on the part of the Germans. One example: a Volkswagen ad campaign that centers on the word Fahrvergnugen, or joy in driving — however mispronounced it may be in the commercials. Only a few years ago, the use of a German word in an advertisement in English would have been avoided, if only because the sound of German was associated with the bad guys in World War II movies. Today Fahr — and other Vergnugen — may be here to stay.