Speaker 1: Section two of the Awful German Language by Mark Twain.
Speaker 1: This LibriVox recording is in the public domain recording by
Speaker 1: Kirsten Webber. Section two. There are ten parts of speech,
Speaker 1: and they are all troublesome. An average sentence in a
Speaker 1: German newspaper is a sublime and impressive curiosity. It occupies
Speaker 1: a quarter of a column. It contains all the ten
Speaker 1: parts of speech, not in regular order, but mixed. It
Speaker 1: is built mainly of compound words constructed by the writer
Speaker 1: on the spot and not to be found in any dictionary,
Speaker 1: six or seven words compacted into one without joint or seam,
Speaker 1: that is, without hyphens. It treats of fourteen or fifteen
Speaker 1: different subjects, each enclosed in a parenthesis of its own,
Speaker 1: with here and there extra parentheses, making pens within pens. Finally,
Speaker 1: all the parentheses and re parentheses are masked together between
Speaker 1: a couple of king parentheses, one of which is placed
Speaker 1: in the first line of the majestic sentence and the
Speaker 1: other in the middle of the last line of it,
Speaker 1: after which comes the verb and you find out for
Speaker 1: the first time what the man has been talking about.
Speaker 1: And after the verb, merely by way of ornament as
Speaker 1: far as I can make out, the writer shovels in
Speaker 1: hobbins into keeviz and gehaptaben goebodensign or words to that effect,
Speaker 1: and the monument is finished. I suppose that this closing
Speaker 1: hurrah is in the nature of the flourish to a
Speaker 1: man's signature. Not necessary but pretty. German books are easy
Speaker 1: enough to read when you hold them before the looking
Speaker 1: glass or stand on your head so as to reverse
Speaker 1: the construction. But I think that to learn to read
Speaker 1: and understand a German newspaper is a thing which must
Speaker 1: always remain an impossibility to a foreigner. Yet even the
Speaker 1: German books are not entirely free from attacks of the
Speaker 1: parenthesis distemper, though they are usually so mild as to
Speaker 1: cover only a few lines. And therefore, when you at
Speaker 1: last get down to the verb, it carries some meaning
Speaker 1: to your mind, because you are able to remember a
Speaker 1: good deal of what has gone before. Now Here is
Speaker 1: a sentence from a popular and excellent German novel with
Speaker 1: a slight parenthesis in it. I will make a perfectly
Speaker 1: literal translation and throw in the parenthesis marks and some
Speaker 1: hyphens for the assistance of the reader. Though in the
Speaker 1: original there are no parenthesis marks or hyphens, and the
Speaker 1: reader is left to flounder through to the remote verb
Speaker 1: the best way he can quote. But when he upon
Speaker 1: the street, the open parentheses in satin and silk covered
Speaker 1: now very unconstrained. After the newest fashion dressed close parentheses
Speaker 1: government councilor's wife met end quote, et cetera, et cetera.
Speaker 1: Footnote one. Then eh abba af de strasser the zamptun
Speaker 1: zaide geherten yets zia unginier nachtenoustenmordege claiditten regierungsreetin bigiknit end
Speaker 1: of footnote one. That is from the old Mamselle's Secret
Speaker 1: by missus Marlott, and that sentence is constructed upon the
Speaker 1: most approved German model. You observe how far that ver
Speaker 1: verb is from the reader's base of operations. Well, in
Speaker 1: a German newspaper they put their verb away over on
Speaker 1: the next page. And I have heard that sometimes after
Speaker 1: stringing along the exciting preliminaries and parentheses for a column
Speaker 1: or two, they get in a hurry and have to
Speaker 1: go to press without getting to the verb at all.
Speaker 1: Of course, then the reader is left in a very
Speaker 1: exhausted and ignorant state. We have the parenthesis disease in
Speaker 1: our literature too, and one may see cases of it
Speaker 1: every day in our books and newspapers. But with us
Speaker 1: it is the mark and sign of an unpracticed writer
Speaker 1: for a cloudy intellect, whereas with the Germans it is
Speaker 1: doubtless the mark and sign of a practiced pen and
Speaker 1: of the presence of that sort of luminous intellectual fog
Speaker 1: which stands for clearness. A mine these people, for surely
Speaker 1: it is not clearness. It necessarily can't be clearness. Even
Speaker 1: a jury would have penetration enough to discover that a
Speaker 1: writer's ideas must be a good deal confused, a good
Speaker 1: deal out of line and sequence. When he starts out
Speaker 1: to say that a man met a counselor's wife in
Speaker 1: the street and then write in the midst of this
Speaker 1: so simple undertaking halts these approaching people and makes them
Speaker 1: stand still until he jots down an inventory of the
Speaker 1: woman's dress that is manifestly absurd. It reminds a person
Speaker 1: of those dentists who secure your instant and breathless interest
Speaker 1: in a tooth by taking a grip on it with
Speaker 1: the forceps and then stand there and draw through a
Speaker 1: tedious anecdote before they give the dreaded jerk. Parentheses in
Speaker 1: literature and dentistry are in bad taste. The Germans have
Speaker 1: another kind of parenthesis, which they make by splitting a
Speaker 1: verb in two and putting half of it at the
Speaker 1: beginning of an exciting chapter and the other half at
Speaker 1: the end of it. Can any one conceive of anything
Speaker 1: more confusing than that? These things are called separable verbs.
Speaker 1: The German grammar is blistered all over with separable verbs,
Speaker 1: and the wider the two portions of one of them
Speaker 1: are spread apart, the better the author of the crime
Speaker 1: is pleased with his performance. A favorite one is este up,
Speaker 1: which means departed. Here is an example, which I called
Speaker 1: from a novel and reduced to English quote. The trunks
Speaker 1: being now ready, he d after kissing his mother and sisters,
Speaker 1: and once more pressing to his bosom. His adored Gretchen,
Speaker 1: who dressed in simple white muslin with a single tuberose
Speaker 1: in the ample folds of her rich brown hair, had
Speaker 1: tottered feebly down the stairs, still pale from the terror
Speaker 1: and excitement of the past evening, but longing to lay
Speaker 1: her poor aching head, yet once again, upon the breast
Speaker 1: of him whom she loved more dearly than life itself, parted.
Speaker 1: End end of Section two.