January 15, 2004
Dutch or German?
I was laughing out loud when reading Marc Twain's essay about the difficulties he had with the German language. Seems as if my Dutch (and English for that matter) is pretty "German", as I found myself resounding with this brilliant quote from Twain's essay:
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 enclosed in a parenthesis of its own, with here and there extra parentheses, making pens with 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 haven geworden sein," or words to that effect, and the monument is finished.Via Stefan.
Comments
There are a lot of funny stories about Twain and German, including the one where Twain is with some friends at a boring opera; the friends want to go, but Twain says he wants to wait until the end to hear the verb.
Twain studied in Europe in an era when student discipline included incarceration. There are examples of Twain graffiti in "prison cells" in
Universities in Europe.
Posted by: Eric Foster-Johnson at January 15, 2004 05:35 PM