Joe Salmons

Jules Renard said German was the language he used when he wanted to remain silent. It certainly can seem complicated – all those odd, umlauted plurals, unguessable genders, and a weirdly regimented syntax that hanging on for the verb until the very end of the sentence keeps you. Where did it all come from?

This excellent historical overview incorporates up-to-date linguistic theory, plenty of quotes from German grammarians through the ages, and a full understanding of the wide range of German dialects. It impressed me constantly. It's so good, in fact, that I wouldn't be surprised if it was the best book of its kind even for German speakers.

Be warned, though – it is thorough. Salmons opens with more than fifty pages examining the phonology and morphology of Proto-Indo-European, which is a bit like writing a recipe for a ham sandwich that starts with a long description of how to raise a pig. For comparison, Peter Rickard's [book:A History of the French Language|2143608] dispenses with the subject in a sentence and a half on page one. Here nothing is taken for granted: laryngeals, Ferdinand de Saussure, spectrograms, all in glorious detail. If you have studied any of this before, none of the material is really new, but if you haven't, the first couple of chapters almost amount to a crash course in historical linguistics.

Of course this makes a lot of sense since German, like English, traces many of its features directly back to Indo-European, like the ablaut-grades (e.g. English sing, sang, sung, song). More generally though, it means that every new feature is introduced with the largest possible historical scope for context. This is important because, as its subtitle suggests, the book is not just about how German developed but about how its history is reflected today. At every point here, when we learn about a detail of Old High German morphology or a nicety of Lutheran syntax, Salmons is always concerned that we see how they explain features of the modern language.

Like most Indo-European languages, German has lost much of the complexity of cases and inflexions that its ancestral forms had (a process that continues apace today). This had, and continues to have, important implications for syntax and grammar generally, and some of the details of this were new to me. For instance, even something as basic as the use of articles may be linked to morphological simplification. Nowadays articles are the primary way for German to mark definiteness/indefiniteness (the difference between a and the, in English), but it's been argued that in Old High German this job was done primarily by noun case:

skancta sinan fianton bitteres lides (from the Ludwigslied)
‘He poured his enemies a bitter drink’, where the original has no article and a noun in the genitive; versus for instance

Inti dir gibu sluzzila himilo riches (Tatian)
‘And to you I give the key to the kingdom of heaven’; again, no article in the original but the noun this time in the accusative case.

This correspondence of genitive=indefinite, accusative=definite even survives in certain modern phrases, such as the difference between ‘Den ganzen Tag hat sie Fußball gespielt’ (where Tag is clearly not a direct object!) and ‘Eines Tages ging sie einfach weg’.

Especially welcome when we reach the present is Salmons's attitude to ‘standard’ German, which is often presented in traditional language histories as being the inevitable endpoint towards which earlier forms have been inexorably marching. This ‘threadbare myth’ (as he calls it) is replaced here with a much messier but more interesting story that takes in the dazzling range of different German standards and dialects that exist today.

(This was particularly important for me since I'm living in Switzerland: it's interesting in this book to follow the sound changes through history and see where the Swiss diverged, or rather, in most cases, where everyone else did. To take one example among many, the Middle High German monophthongisation which led to modern ‘liebe gute Brüder’ (with long vowels) never happened here; the Swiss version would, I think, be liebi gueti Brüeder where all three words still have diphthongs just as they did in the 1100s.)

Anyway, the point is that a standard language is always an artificial construct, and it's rare as a non-native speaker to get an insight into the real chaos underneath. This is because learning materials are usually concerned specifically with teaching the standard, while native speakers who get into a discussion about these things with a foreigner usually want to explain their idea of ‘proper’ language and often consider language change as simply bad grammar.

As in the English-speaking world, many Germans believe that the purity of their language is under threat from email, text slang, and foreign borrowings; Salmons is refreshingly dismissive of this panic and of prescriptivism in general, and he disinterestedly presents many fascinating examples of the language changes that are currently underway in modern German (e.g. the gradual loss of the preterite tense, which is slowly but surely disappearing from spoken language, as it already has in Swiss German; the loss of dative singulars in -e and similar weakening of other cases; reassignment of genders; further weakening of strong verbs; increasing use of brauchen as a modal verb; and many other interesting examples).

Despite lamentations about how language is going to hell in a handbasket, which seem to be a cross-cultural universal, German clearly has a pretty healthy future ahead of it. If you want to understand how its idiosyncrasies evolved, then look no further: this will give you all the info you could possibly want, sheaves of useful references, and all told with admirable neutrality on the subject of ‘standards’, ‘dialects’ and prescribed grammar. You may still want to remain silent in German, but at least you'll have a much better idea of what you're not talking about.… (plus d'informations)