GERMAN LANGUAGE 



2464 



GERMAN LITERATURE 



ing of the natives that took place in 1905 was 

 soon crushed, but it had the effect of making 

 the German authorities improve their treat- 

 ment of the natives. During the War of the 

 Nations, begun in 1914, English and French 



TYPE OP NATIVE VILLAGE 

 German East Africa. 



troops invaded the colony and fought several 

 engagements with the German forces, but with- 

 out any decisive result. In the early part of 

 1916 the English started a strong offensive and 

 easily captured the colony. O.B. 



GERMAN LANGUAGE, one of the great lan- 

 guages of the world, spoken by about 80,000,- 

 000 people. Within the German Empire over 

 ninety per cent of the inhabitants use some 

 form of German speech, while in Austria-Hun- 

 gary and in Switzerland there are millions of 

 German-speaking people. To those unac- 

 quainted with it, German is not a musical 

 language, owing to its guttural sounds, and 

 those who 'are accustomed only to English find 

 it difficult to master German because of its 

 very different sentence order, its inflections and 

 its custom of building compound words by 

 merely joining together simple ones. The very 

 characteristic tendency to place some verb 

 form at or near the close of the sentence Mark 

 Twain described in the words, "The German 

 dives into the Atlantic of his sentence and 

 comes up on the other side with a verb in his 

 mouth." As for the custom of word-building, 

 those who speak other tongues may well be 

 envious, for in German it is possible to ex- 

 press in one adjective an idea for which an- 

 other language would have to make use of 

 cumbersome, phrases and clauses. What other 

 language, for instance, could achieve such a 

 triumph as "the with-great-pleasure-a-large- 

 red-apple-eating child"? 



German is much more nearly phonetic than 

 is English; that is, it has fewer silent letters 

 and fewer variations in the sounds of letters. 

 If a learner has mastered thoroughly the sound- 

 value of every German vowel, consonant and 

 diphthong, he need not fear to pronounce any 

 word he sees, for it is almost certain to be 

 sounded just as it is written. Especially rich 

 in synonyms, German affords opportunity for 

 most exquisite effects in word-choice, and no 

 language better fulfils the demands of the 

 orator and the poet. 



Historical. The term German includes two 

 branches, the High German and the Low Ger- 

 man, but only the former is considered here, 

 the latter having special treatment under the 

 heading PLATTDEUTSCH. The growth of the 

 German language has been a gradual devel- 

 opment through three periods, the Old High 

 German (700-1100), Middle' High German 

 (1100-1500) and Modern German, from 1500 

 to the present time. In the earlier periods 

 each section of the country spoke a different 

 dialect and no attempt was made at unifying, 

 but when German became the official language 

 of the imperial court the particular dialect 

 spoken there came to be looked upon as supe- 

 rior to the others. Its use spread in official 

 circles, and by the beginning of the Modern 

 German period this one branch was so much 

 more commonly understood than any other 

 that it was the natural one for Luther to use 

 when he came to translate the Bible. Fre- 

 quently it is stated that Luther gave to the 

 German language its literary form, but this is 

 not true. It had practically crystallized before 

 his time, but he helped very decidedly to 

 widen the knowledge of it. Every German 

 who wanted to read his Bible had to know 

 the particular dialect in which it was written. 



To-day there are numerous dialects in Ger- 

 man, as there are in any language spoken by 

 a very large number of people, but the lan- 

 guage of books is the same wherever German 

 is used. A.MC c. 



GERMAN LITERATURE. As English liter- 

 ature runs back into the old Anglo-Saxon, so 

 German grew gradually out of the medieval 

 Gothic, and at approximately the same period; 

 but distinguished names do not appear in the 

 history of German literature nearly as early 

 as in the English. The three greatest writers 

 England has produced Shakespeare, Milton 

 and Chaucer all lived early in her literary 

 history, but Germany had before the begin- 

 ning of the eighteenth century only one author 



