German helps you understand English

When native speakers of English study German they gradually become aware of the way in which their own language works. It is as with political systems – until you have a second system to compare with your own you are unaware of certain typical functions. In 1991 that entertaining American Anglophile Bill Bryson published his excellent book on the English language entitled Mother Tongue, which is full of fascinating thoughts and facts about this language of ours that has gone way beyond its early boundaries right across the globe.

English is spoken in many different accents and dialects and it commands a vast and highly expressive vocabulary. If you listen to the different speakers at the Commonwealth Conference, for instance, you cannot help being impressed with the way in which our own language is so fluently and competently spoken by nations to whom it was originally a foreign tongue. Listen, too, to the superb English spoken by our European neighbours. Richard von Weizsäcker, when he was President of the Federal Republic of Germany, addressed Parliament at Westminster in fluent English in a speech which was a match for any heard within those walls.

Many English-speakers are linguistically deprived, by which I mean not just that they only speak one language but that they have problems using the abstract range of vocabulary within that one language. The difficulty starts in childhood when trying to make the leap from concrete Anglo-Saxon based language for everyday happenings to conceptual terminology derived from Latin or French, especially Norman French. The brain retains an image longer if it has been categorised in words, ie. it is easier to remember concepts if they can be given a name. It follows that an inability to use abstract language confidently must make it difficult to retain complex ideas and arguments.

English children have at some time in their education, probably at the later primary stage, to make the jump from the language of early childhood, when their linguistic skills and their whole character are going through the most decisive period of development, to the language of abstract and analytical thought. They have to learn a whole new vocabulary of words towards whose meaning and spelling their own language gives them no help. Psychologists have shown how it is very much harder for the brain to retain information when it cannot recognise some system or pattern in it. Now that schools have largely given up teaching Latin, children can no longer infer any meaning or logic in the spelling of Latin derivatives. Compare the following two extracts, both from Ladybird Books, first The Gingerbread Boy and second The Story of Arms and Armour:

The little gingerbread boy hopped across the kitchen floor. He saw the door of the kitchen standing open and out he ran. Down the street ran the little gingerbread boy. After him ran the little old woman and the little old man.

The American Civil War of the 1860s saw the development of breech-loading mechanisms which paved the way for further improvements. During the closing years of the nineteenth century, more efficient chemical propulsion materials were discovered to replace gunpowder.

Notice the directness and repetitiveness of the first passage. Each sentence repeats elements of the previous one. Every word is specific and concrete in meaning, requiring no knowledge of intangibles, and exclusively Anglo-Saxon. The second passage is intended for late primary or early secondary schoolchildren. It contains fourteen Latin-French derivatives, most of which are generalised terms, abstract compounds made up of parts in no way connected to the sort of Anglo-Saxon based vocabulary of the first passage.

The German version of the second passage would be:

Der Amerikanische Bürgerkrieg der 1860er sah die Entwicklung des Hinterladers, die den Weg für weitere Verbesserungen bereitete. Während der letzten Jahre des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts wurden wirksamere chemische Treibstoffe entdeckt, die das Schießpulver ersetzen sollten.

The German gets by with only two non-Germanic words (not counting Amerikanische), namely chemische and Schießpulver, Pulver being a mediaeval Latin entry to the German language and chemische having come via Spanish and French from Arabic. A German child can easily spot the very basic word wickeln (to wrap) in entwickeln , and would have no problem seeing besser (better) in Verbesserungen or in making a hundred years out of Jahr + hundert. Treiben (to drive) would be familiar as would Stoff (stuff, matter). But what English child can cope, without translation by someone older, with development, century , and propulsion materials? They are in effect from a new language and contain all the usual difficulties involved in learning new vocabulary.

The difficulties do not stop with the completion of school education. The everyday language spoken by the average adult Briton is dominated by a vocabulary largely derived from Anglo-Saxon, that is, from a Germanic language. However, most formal, technical, legal and academic vocabulary in English is derived from Latin based languages. To anyone without knowledge of etymology there is no obvious connection between, for example, a word such as year and annual, mother and maternal , or easy and facilitate . When words have no obvious relation to real life their meanings can only be retained by learning them parrot-wise and by repeated use, rather a hit-and-miss method which leads to problems with spellings and to the confusion of similar-sounding words, for example effect and affect , omit and emit , apprise and appraise , fortunate and fortuitous and so on. The result is twofold: antipathy toward Latin derivatives in general because they incur the risk of mistakes and thus a feeling of being constantly at a disadvantage; and imitation without understanding the exact meaning, so that increasingly the mistaken use of abstract vocabulary in public, as on television or radio, spreads like wildfire until even the normally quite literate listener becomes uncertain.

European languages have a neat device for upgrading simple words. They add prefixes. And another neat device adds specific detail by changing either a key vowel or an ending. A great many more such attachments to words are used in Latin to indicate relationships between words in a sentence. In modern European languages many of those clever additions to individual words have, over the centuries since the early Roman Empire, been replaced by the little interconnecting words called articles or prepositions. If you look at a classical Latin sentence and then at its translation into English it immediately strikes you that the English version needs several more separate words, whereas Latin achieves the same meaning by changing certain endings: mater non servis sed puellis prandium dedit = The mother did not give any dinner to the slaves but to the girls – seven words in Latin but fourteen in English. The ending –is on servis and puellis accounts for to the while non…dedit covers did not give . Latin saw no need to use the or any .

Even neater is the way Latin upgrades its verbs: mittere (to send) becomes emittere (to send out), the e- being the short form of ex (out of), or ire (to go) becomes abire (to go away). If you know how this works and have some knowledge of Latin you are less likely to misspell English words of Latin origin. It is surprising how many people make mistakes such as dissapear for disappear (from dis - = not + ad - = to/in addition to + parere = to be visible), or interrupt for interupt (from inter - = between + ruptus from rumpere = to break, split).

Unfortunately Latin is not competing well on the English school curriculum so that the chances of an improvement in spelling and understanding of Latin derivatives via the original language are dwindling. Fortunate are those who learn German as a school subject since German functions in a way similar to Latin. German can be a useful aid to English schoolchildren, not to mention English adults, in understanding why some of our more difficult vocabulary has such a multitude of apparently incomprehensible syllables. Compare the following pairs of words: hole – puncture = Loch – durchlöchern ; follow – consequence = folgen – Folge ; town –municipal = Stadt – städtisch ; arm – embrace = Arm – umarmen ; break – interrupt = brechen – unterbrechen ; wander – emigration = wandern – auswandern ; ever – perpetuate = ewig – verewigen . You notice at once how the German compound word contains as its main element the original concrete idea. If a German meets städtisch for the first time he has no difficulty in spotting that it has something to do with Stadt . The abstract or figurative words grow naturally out of the basic everyday language, which you really couldn’t say about municipal , which, even if you know the Latin word municipium , still has no connection with the English town (from the Anglo-Saxon tun ). German (and, incidentally, Slavonic languages) has its own version of the Latin device for adding meaning to simple verbs by attaching a selection of prefixes, as in gehen = to go, ausgehen = to go out, vorgehen = to go ahead, weggehen = to go away, hingehen = to go there, hineingehen = to go inside, hinuntergehen = to go down, mitgehen = to go with someone, entlanggehen = to go along, aufgehen = to open , and so on.

These compound verbs can be used in the teaching of German to explain the workings of English verbs based on Latin such as proceed from pro = in front and cedere = to go , or contradict from contra = against and dicere = to speak , or circumvent from circum = around and venire = to come . The process is exactly the same – take a simple verb and add a preposition or other particle to the front. English itself retains a number of Germanic compound verbs such as those which start with under , as in undertake which is the exact equivalent of the German unternehmen , or overbear, foresee, withstand (where with has the old meaning against ), but most English verbs adapt their meaning by using a separate preposition, as in get up, get out, get in etc. And, by the way, how many people know the origin of et cetera = and the rest (German usw. = und so weiter )? And ie. = id est = that is (German d.h. = das heißt )?

We are moving in exalted terminology! But that is precisely the point. Few schoolchildren, particularly in state schools, are being taught the mechanics of language and are unable to cope with higher levels of their own language. Why? Because most of their teachers have not been taught them either. England is already into the second or third generation of a population largely unfamiliar with the workings of its own language, picking up grand words it has heard someone use and then applying the same words wrongly in its own speech. The effect (not affect!) is similar to that of an infection passing from one person to many more.

To know your own land or language it is necessary to have experienced others so as to become aware of typical characteristics through comparison. One of my pet aversions among the many mistakes that make me wince when listening to television or radio is the lie/lay confusion. Encountering the German liegen/legen usually cures it, and at the same time makes you aware that some verbs can affect (not effect) an object directly while others merely act on their own, as in The egg lies in the nest because the bird laid it there. Where is the egg? It is lying in the nest.

And we still haven’t mentioned Greek, upon which most scientific words in English are based. Perhaps it is unrealistic to expect much Greek scholarship in English schools today, but learning at least one other language in the right way ought to be sufficient to make children conscious of how words are made up, and maybe make them want to find out more about them in a good dictionary, or at least use it to check their own spelling. Then we wouldn’t have government ministers talking about a phenomena when they mean a phenomenon . (I am glad to see that my spell check thinks it pretty awful too.)

Finding out about words is akin to archaeology. You dig back through layers of earlier languages till you get to the hypothetical Indo-European from which both German and English have developed, not to mention most other languages of Europe and Central Asia as well. The pre-historic people who are presumed to have spoken Indo-European are a marvellous mystery. We only know about their language because linguistic specialists have found recurrent elements in our present-day languages which point to a common ancestor, but we can fairly safely make certain assumptions about their way of life. A number of particular words are found in the languages of all or many of their descendants. It seems, and nothing is one hundred per cent certain about these distant ancestors, that they lived in extended families, since the words for father, mother, son, daughter, brother, sister, son-in-law, daughter-in-law, father-in-law, mother-in-law, husband’s brother, husband’s brother’s wives and widow are all found in succeeding generations of ancient languages, among them Sanskrit, the ancient language of India, Greek, Latin, Celtic, Teutonic, Lithuanian, Tocharian, a language thought to have originated in Chinese Turkestan, and Armenian.

The Indo-Europeans appear to have had almost no words for any kind of metal, but several names for trees and animals, and they possibly lived in small communities surviving on some sort of farming. They probably inhabited an area somewhere between the Black Sea and Northern India. Everything “known” about them is little more than guesswork, open to endless discussion, which is what makes them so fascinating. But apart from the names they had for concrete things, it is particularly interesting to look at the verbs we seem to have inherited from them. Verbs in English and German have two main ways of indicating tense: either by adding an ending to form the past such as –ed in learned , -te as in German lernte ; or by changing the vowel sound as in sing, sang, sung or singen, sangen, gesungen in German. The latter type are called strong verbs and are believed to have come down to us all the way from those pre-historic relatives of ours somewhere in Central Asia. So next time you eat, ate or have eaten (German essen, aßen, haben gegessen ) a meal, or you bear, bore, have borne (German gebären, gebaren, haben geboren ) a child, be conscious that you are using excedingly old verbs, ones that link you to some very distant ancestors.

Anyone wanting more details about where our present-day languages come from could well begin with the section in Wikipedia on Indo-European Languages, or get a copy of Colin Renfrew's Archaeology & Language (1987). My interest was first aroused by C.L.Barber's The Story of Language which first appeared in Pan Books in 1964.