Roland Kaehlbrandt’s book “Deutsch. A declaration of love”

When Germans want to make fun of German, they like to quote an American: Mark Twain’s ironic remarks about “the terrible German language”, about monster sentences, tapeworm words and the grammatical eccentricities of an overly complex abundance of forms have long been part of academic pop culture. They are regarded as a witty justification of what the vernacular sums up in the simple formula: “German language, difficult language”. Roland Kaehlbrandt, linguist at the Alanus University for Art and Society, counters this in a book that is both well worth reading and easy to read: he presents “ten great advantages” of German and devotes a chapter to each of them.

As befits a declaration of love – as the book says in the subtitle – the tone is personal and characterized by affection. As the first advantage, Kaehlbrandt describes the ability of German to “sensitive and expressive” formulations. He does not justify this with the emotional vocabulary, but with the small, inconspicuous particle words (Where is she? Now wait a minute – here she is), of which German has more than other languages. They are not “lice in the fur of our language”, as the style teacher Ludwig Reiners once called them disparagingly, but tones that give the flow of speech many emotional nuances.

Kaehlbrandt names another advantage of German as the suppleness of its word formation, which allows new terms to be easily added to existing words and syllables. Although it sometimes gives birth to monsters like the famous beef labeling monitoring task transfer law, it usually gives us concise designations, from Luther’s mouth of blasphemy to the rubble woman of the post-war period to a richly shimmering color palette of words from golden brown and silver gray to pigeon blue and brick red.

Balance between persistence and innovation

The suppleness of the word formation finds its counterpart in the suppleness of the sentence structure, whose flexible word order rules allow a variety of focuses. Kaehlbrandt is also able to gain something from the sentence brackets, which Mark Twain particularly ridiculed, which stipulates as a rule that the verb in the subordinate clause appears at the end and therefore sometimes, as in this example, only after a considerable stretch of words that demands the reader’s patience and memory. It bundles the information and puts it in a condensed perspective from the end. Totally complicated? Doesn’t matter! Another chapter! There Kaehlbrandt shows: German is also short. – Really now?! – But what of!

The author also finds the grammatical integration ability of German exemplary, which automatically makes the native participle downloaded from an import such as downloaded. However, the fitting of new foreign words does not always run quite as smoothly as it seems with Kaehlbrandt. A study showed that speakers had considerable problems assigning a gender to newly borrowed Anglicisms such as applet, constraint or jam. Even bulky forms such as unlimited data volume show the limits of assimilation.