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