A Tramp Abroad
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
drawl 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 REISTE AB--which means departed. Here is
an example which I culled from a novel and reduced to English:
“The trunks being now ready, he DE- 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.”
However, it is not well to dwell too much on the separable verbs. One is
sure to lose his temper early; and if he sticks to the subject, and will
not be warned, it will at last either soften his brain or petrify
it. Personal pronouns and adjectives are a fruitful nuisance in this
language, and should have been left out. For instance, the same sound,
SIE, means YOU, and it means SHE, and it means HER, and it means IT,
and it means THEY, and it means THEM. Think of the ragged poverty of
a language which has to make one word do the work of six--and a poor
little weak thing of only three letters at that. But mainly, think of
the exasperation of never knowing which of these meanings the speaker is
trying to convey. This explains why, whenever a person says SIE to me, I
generally try to kill him, if a stranger.
Now observe the Adjective. Here was a case where simplicity would have
been an advantage; therefore, for no other reason, the inventor of this
language complicated it all he could. When we wish to speak of our “good
friend or friends,” in our enlightened tongue, we stick to the one form
and have no trouble or hard feeling about it; but with the German
tongue it is different. When a German gets his hands on an adjective,
he declines it, and keeps on declining it until the common sense is all
declined out of it. It is as bad as Latin. He says, for instance:
SINGULAR
Nominative--Mein gutER Freund, my good friend. Genitives--MeinES GutEN
FreundES, of my good friend. Dative--MeinEM gutEN Freund, to my good
friend. Accusative--MeinEN gutEN Freund, my good friend.
PLURAL
N.--MeinE gutEN FreundE, my good friends. G.--MeinER gutEN FreundE,
of my good friends. D.--MeinEN gutEN FreundEN, to my good friends.
A.--MeinE gutEN FreundE, my good friends.
Now let the candidate for the asylum try to memorize those variations,
and see how soon he will be elected. One might better go without friends
in Germany than take all this trouble about them. I have shown what a
bother it is to decline a good (male) friend; well this is only a third
of the work, for there is a variety of new distortions of the adjective
to be learned when the object is feminine, and still another when the
object is neuter. Now there are more adjectives in this language than
there are black cats in Switzerland, and they must all be as
elaborately declined as the examples above suggested.
Difficult?--troublesome?--these words cannot describe it. I heard a
Californian student in Heidelberg say, in one of his calmest moods, that
he would rather decline two drinks than one German adjective.
The inventor of the language seems to have taken pleasure in
complicating it in every way he could think of. For instance, if one is
casually referring to a house, HAUS, or a horse, PFERD, or a dog, HUND,
he spells these words as I have indicated; but if he is referring to
them in the Dative case, he sticks on a foolish and unnecessary E and
spells them HAUSE, PFERDE, HUNDE. So, as an added E often signifies the
plural, as the S does with us, the new student is likely to go on for a
month making twins out of a Dative dog before he discovers his mistake;
and on the other hand, many a new student who could ill afford loss,
has bought and paid for two dogs and only got one of them, because
he ignorantly bought that dog in the Dative singular when he really
supposed he was talking plural--which left the law on the seller's side,
of course, by the strict rules of grammar, and therefore a suit for
recovery could not lie.
In German, all the Nouns begin with a capital letter. Now that is a good
idea; and a good idea, in this language, is necessarily conspicuous from
its lonesomeness. I consider this capitalizing of nouns a good idea,
because by reason of it you are almost always able to tell a noun the
minute you see it. You fall into error occasionally, because you mistake
the name of a person for the name of a thing, and waste a good deal of
time trying to dig a meaning out of it. German names almost always do
mean something, and this helps to deceive the student. I translated a
passage one day, which said that “the infuriated tigress broke loose
and utterly ate up the unfortunate fir forest” (Tannenwald). When I was
girding up my loins to doubt this, I found out that Tannenwald in this
instance was a man's name.
Every noun has a gender, and there is no sense or system in the
distribution; so the gender of each must be learned separately and by
heart. There is no other way. To do this one has to have a memory like a
memorandum-book. In German, a young lady has no sex, while a turnip has.
Think what overwrought reverence that shows for the turnip, and what
callous disrespect for the girl. See how it looks in print--I translate
this from a conversation in one of the best of the German Sunday-school
books:
“Gretchen. Wilhelm, where is the turnip?
“Wilhelm. She has gone to the kitchen.
“Gretchen. Where is the accomplished and beautiful English maiden?
“Wilhelm. It has gone to the opera.”
To continue with the German genders: a tree is male, its buds are
female, its leaves are neuter; horses are sexless, dogs are male, cats
are female--tomcats included, of course; a person's mouth, neck, bosom,
elbows, fingers, nails, feet, and body are of the male sex, and his head
is male or neuter according to the word selected to signify it, and NOT
according to the sex of the individual who wears it--for in Germany all
the women wear either male heads or sexless ones; a person's nose, lips,
shoulders, breast, hands, and toes are of the female sex; and his hair,
ears, eyes, chin, legs, knees, heart, and conscience haven't any sex
at all. The inventor of the language probably got what he knew about a
conscience from hearsay.
Now, by the above dissection, the reader will see that in Germany a
man may THINK he is a man, but when he comes to look into the matter
closely, he is bound to have his doubts; he finds that in sober truth
he is a most ridiculous mixture; and if he ends by trying to comfort
himself with the thought that he can at least depend on a third of this
mess as being manly and masculine, the humiliating second thought will
quickly remind him that in this respect he is no better off than any
woman or cow in the land.
In the German it is true that by some oversight of the inventor of
the language, a Woman is a female; but a Wife (Weib) is not--which is
unfortunate. A Wife, here, has no sex; she is neuter; so, according
to the grammar, a fish is HE, his scales are SHE, but a fishwife is
neither. To describe a wife as sexless may be called under-description;
that is bad enough, but over-description is surely worse. A German
speaks of an Englishman as the ENGLÄNNDER; to change the sex, he
adds INN, and that stands for Englishwoman--ENGLÄNDERINN. That seems
descriptive enough, but still it is not exact enough for a German; so he
precedes the word with that article which indicates that the creature to
follow is feminine, and writes it down thus: “die Engländerinn,”--which
means “the she-Englishwoman.” I consider that that person is
over-described.
Well, after the student has learned the sex of a great number of nouns,
he is still in a difficulty, because he finds it impossible to persuade
his tongue to refer to things as “he” and “she,” and “him” and “her,”
which it has been always accustomed to refer to as “it.” When he even
frames a German sentence in his mind, with the hims and hers in the
right places, and then works up his courage to the utterance-point, it
is no use--the moment he begins to speak his tongue flies the track and
all those labored males and females come out as “its.” And even when he
is reading German to himself, he always calls those things “it,” whereas
he ought to read in this way:
TALE OF THE FISHWIFE AND ITS SAD FATE [2]
2. I capitalize the nouns, in the German (and ancient English) fashion.
It is a bleak Day. Hear the Rain, how he pours, and the Hail, how he
rattles; and see the Snow, how he drifts along, and of the Mud, how
deep he is! Ah the poor Fishwife, it is stuck fast in the Mire; it has
dropped its Basket of Fishes; and its Hands have been cut by the Scales
as it seized some of the falling Creatures; and one Scale has even got
into its Eye, and it cannot get her out. It opens its Mouth to cry
for Help; but if any Sound comes out of him, alas he is drowned by the
raging of the Storm. And now a Tomcat has got one of the Fishes and she
will surely escape with him. No, she bites off a Fin, she holds her in
her Mouth--will she swallow her? No, the Fishwife's brave Mother-dog
deserts his Puppies and rescues the Fin--which he eats, himself, as his
Reward. O, horror, the Lightning has struck the Fish-basket; he sets him
on Fire; see the Flame, how she licks the doomed Utensil with her red
and angry Tongue; now she attacks the helpless Fishwife's Foot--she
burns him up, all but the big Toe, and even SHE is partly consumed; and
still she spreads, still she waves her fiery Tongues; she attacks the
Fishwife's Leg and destroys IT; she attacks its Hand and destroys HER
also; she attacks the Fishwife's Leg and destroys HER also; she attacks
its Body and consumes HIM; she wreathes herself about its Heart and IT
is consumed; next about its Breast, and in a Moment SHE is a Cinder; now
she reaches its Neck--He goes; now its Chin--IT goes; now its Nose--SHE
goes. In another Moment, except Help come, the Fishwife will be no more.
Time presses--is there none to succor and save? Yes! Joy, joy,
with flying Feet the she-Englishwoman comes! But alas, the generous
she-Female is too late: where now is the fated Fishwife? It has ceased
from its Sufferings, it has gone to a better Land; all that is left of
it for its loved Ones to lament over, is this poor smoldering Ash-heap.
Ah, woeful, woeful Ash-heap! Let us take him up tenderly, reverently,
upon the lowly Shovel, and bear him to his long Rest, with the Prayer
that when he rises again it will be a Realm where he will have one good
square responsible Sex, and have it all to himself, instead of having a
mangy lot of assorted Sexes scattered all over him in Spots.
There, now, the reader can see for himself that this pronoun business is
a very awkward thing for the unaccustomed tongue. I suppose that in all
languages the similarities of look and sound between words which have