MAN WILL TRAVEL
DIE DEUTSCHE SPRACHE / GERMAN LANGUAGE
Description of German Language: "An Outsider's View of Germanlanguage" side. late r on, the Holy lfomancmpire e all know the story oft e Eng !he name Germani is.first used by Caesar lishman visiting France whose was never specifically German in its m the second book of his De Bello W first contact with a Frenchman maket:Jp, but served non-German interests Gallico (first century AD). The origin was with a waiter with red hair. He re as well as those of the Habsburg dynasty. of the word is still unknown, although corded in his diary: "All Frenchmen are After its breakup in 1806 the geograph numerous attempts to explain it have redheads." By the same token, the same ical area of Germany was composed of been ma~e. As to the word Deutsch, for Englishman might visualize a "typical" almost 400 different sovereign states German, 1t comes from the Gothic German as a huge man a la Eric von and territories. Only in 1871 a unified thiuda by way of Old High German Stroheim, with a monocle and academic German Reich under the political leader diutisk and Middle High German diutsch. sabercuts, eating sauerkraut .and drink ship of the Prussian Hohenzollern dynas The noun diet meaning Volk or people, ing innumerable steins of beer, goose ty was established. Lt suffered a consider the German language, or Deutsch, there stepping in military parades or driving able loss of territory due to its military de fore refers to the language of the· down the Autobahn at fantastic speed. feat in WW I. The short-lived demo people, as opposed to Latin, the lan Speaking a little more seriously, any cratic Weimar Republic, from 1918 to guage of the learned. In the same fashion outsider will have certain preconceived 1933, gave way to the even more short French was drived from the Vulgar notions about German people and the lived totalitarian 1,000 year Reich of Adolf Latin, which was not a language of four German language. He will almost auto Hitler and his Nazi party which met its lett_er words, but the Latin spoken by the matically associate Bavaria with beer Gotterdammerung finale in 1945, after plam people in contrast with that of the cellars and Lederhosen, Heidelberg with having inflicted twelve years of untold educated and the Church. romantic student life, and Weimar with misery on Germany-and--the-wef-id,- Goethe and Schiller. Whether the post WW II division of Ger many into western and eastern spheres of Saved from linguistic fate of Gaul German spoken not only in Germany influence will be temporary or perma proper ment is a political question of the great The works of Caesar and Tacitus furnish est importance and unresolved up to now. the earliest written information about We could go on enumerating these asso· the various tribes of Germani who de ciatiom, almost indefinitely, when talk Deutsch, the language of the people· feated the Roman legions led by Varus ing about Germany, a country, or in the great battle of the Teutoburg countries, situated in the heart of Little is known of Germanic culture i n' Forest in the year 9 AD. By this victory urope, roughly four times the size of its earliest days. Decisive for the develop the ch_ief of the Cherusci tribe Hermann, P~sylv;;;ia, with its southern boundary ment of German culture was the en or Arminius, saved the Germans from at the same latitude as the northern counter of the Germanic tribes with the linguistic fate of Gaul, on which the tip of Maine, and containin·g about the more "advanced" civilization of the vi"torious Romans bestowed the Latin Roman world and their conversion (often 65,000,000 inhabitants. The German lan language that ~ventually was to become guage, like English, belongs to the by force) to Christianity. Much of the French. - Germanic branch of the lndo-European original, purely Germanic culture was language family. It is spoken not only obliterated by E:hristianify; but some Of great importance in the history of elements of this earlier culture sur the G_erman language is Charlemagne, in Germany proper, (East an-d West), vived, for example, in the names of the but also in Austria, Luxemburg, Liech who, m 800, was crowned Emperor of the tenstein, and the greater part of Swit days of the week. For instance, Diens Ho ly Empire. This great ruler, who zerland. As a second language it can nov. tag or Tuesday is the day of Tiu, never realized his ambition of learning be found in parts of Czechoslovakia, Hun Germanic God of war, which corresponds to write (although he did learn to read) gary, Yugoslavia, Italy, France, Poland, to mardi, the French god of war. German was a driving force behind the devel Rumania, the Ukraine, Sweden, Denmark, Donnerstag, like English Thursday, is opment of German as a written language. and Holland, also in Argentina, Brazil, the day of Donar, (or Thor Scandina The earliest written documents in the and parts of the United States, apart from vian), who is the protector of peasants German language (Old High German) the mixture of German and English known and wielder of thunderbolts in Nordic stem from the period of his reign and as Pennsylvania Dutch. The German lan mythology. Friday, or German Freitag th~ type of handwriting that predomi- do~s not refer to a free day, but desig guage also makes up about 85 percent of nateorn manu!iCripts from the ninth cen Yiddish, the "lingua franca" of Eastern na1es the day of Frija, the goddess of 10\ ~ and marriage. The name of the chief tury, until the te 12th century, the European Jews, a language underst0od Caroline miniscule bears his name. wherever German is understood. All told, Germanic deity Wotan is perpetuated in the English Wodan's day or Wednesday, more than 200,000,000 people on this While the political interest in Italy globe may be credited with the know whereas in German it has given way to Mittwoch, or midweek point. shown li>y the Hohenstaufen dynasty had ledge of German, which thus ranks both no effect on the language, it was never with the culturally most important and Allspeakers of early Ger-m'"'a"'n__,i_c~ i-alects theless under fnerlohenstaufen that most widely spoken languages. were descendants of the tribes _of German reached a high point of refine warriors and hunters that were present ment as a literary language. Whereas there has been a remarkable in these areas ever since the earliest linguistic and cultural continuity and recorded European history. Around 100 East of the Elbe river German culture uniformity in the German lands from the AD, the Roman historian Tacitus con was propagated by the efforts of th,e earliest beginnings cfown to the prese , ?iders them as a native population, since, orders of Teutonic Knights in the 13th these e lements have been completely he says, the climate and living condi century to convert the Slavs to Christi tions in Germany were so bad that nobody lacking in the area of - v citical history. anity German culture was also spread Ea~ly Germanic Jribe_s ~o~x1sted ~de _by would have moved there by choice. by the comme rcial activtties of the