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August 26, 2006
The End of the German Language?
Not subscribing to a daily newspaper I must admit I hadn't noticed the apparent debate about Denglish (see The Monk's post from yesterday) going on in the media. I think of language as a living thing which will of course change over years especially when you are surrounded by quite a number of foreign states with whom you trade and have relationships in many fields like science, technology etc. At the moment we just incorporate a number of English expressions into our language and subject them to German grammar, like
Ich downloade, ich downloadete, ich habe downgeloadet
I download, I download, I have downloaded
So what? At the moment they are these phrases are only used in spoken German but may eventually find their way into the Duden, the authoritative reference on written German. We must not forget that it has worked the other way round as well. The English language has adopted the German 'Kindergarten' and turned it into 'kindergarden'. And I bet the plural is 'kindergardens' and not 'Kindergärten' as it is in German.
We have even incorporated words from the French language into our own, there was quite an exchange of soldiers and warriors in the past centuries on our western border, as for example Portemonnaie (a purse). The word even looks French and I've always found it interesting to try and find out where words came from originally. But about 10 years ago the bureaucrats decided to change the orthography of German to make it easier for the students to learn proper writing. Therefore the good old Portemonnaie has changed into 'Portmonee' which is closer to its actual pronunciation.
I don't mind if the writing changes over the years by itself. That's a natural process. But to think up new rules and then impose them onto the people is the height of stupidity. The bureaucrats were quite astonished when their wonderful new rules met with a lot of opposition. People just wouldn't comply - after all we live in a democracy not a tyranny. Even big newspapers refused point blank to comply with the new spelling rules. Over the years the 'reform' has been reformed several times and only this summer at last an agreement was reached. Many of the proposal from the original version were taken back again.
The process had its funny but also very annoying moments. The ones who really suffered where the kids who started school during the last ten years. They must be totally confused by now. They are probably the generation that writes as it likes and will have to rely heavily on spell-checker programmes.
After all this I think we'll easily survive the Denglish phase. So many words from different languages (Arabic, Latin, Greek, French) have found their way into German that a few more English ones will not matter in the least. In the seventies I went to England for the first time on a pupils' exchange programme. My English friend told me that there were many foreign words in German but that English was just English and nothing else. And I thought, oh dear, and that one of the things I had always liked about the English language was that whenever I could not think of the correct English word I just had to take the Latin one and pronounce it English and could usually made myself understood.
Posted by Mausi at August 26, 2006 11:57 AM
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