German : Biography of a Language
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Review
German provides an apt starting point for anybody seeking an accessible book on the history of German (Kerstin Hodge, Times Literary Supplement )
Like a good biography, it provides a tantalising taste of its subject. (Kerstin Hoge, Times Higher Education Supplement )
For any scholar of linguistics, this book offers rich material. (Organiser, New Delhi )
an ingenious telling of just how German emerged from the primordial Germanic soup...this is an enjoyable yet still-scholarly read for the historian, linguist and Germanophile alike. It would be a fine thing to have more such brief histories, made easily readable to the non-specialist, of the major world languages. (The Economist )
Like a good biography, it provides a tantalising taste of its subject. (Kerstin Hoge, Times Higher Education Supplement )
For any scholar of linguistics, this book offers rich material. (Organiser, New Delhi )
an ingenious telling of just how German emerged from the primordial Germanic soup...this is an enjoyable yet still-scholarly read for the historian, linguist and Germanophile alike. It would be a fine thing to have more such brief histories, made easily readable to the non-specialist, of the major world languages. (The Economist )
Product Description
Nearly six thousand years ago, seafront clans in Denmark likely began speaking the earliest form of Germanic language--the first of six "signal events" that Ruth Sanders highlights in this marvelous tour of the German language. Blending linguistic, anthropological, and historical research, Sanders presents a brilliant biography of the language as it evolved across the millennia. She sheds light on the influence of such events as the Battle of Kalkriese, which permanently halted the incursion of both the Romans and the Latin language into northern Europe, and the publication of Martin Luther's German Bible translation, which in effect forged from many regional dialects a single German language. The narrative ranges through the turbulent Middle Ages, the spread of the printing press, the formation of the nineteenth-century German Empire, and Germany's twentieth-century military and cultural horrors. The book includes fascinating sidebars on topics such as the Gothic language (now extinct), the branching off of Yiddish, and the revolution of 1848. The first book on this topic for general readers, this engaging volume will appeal to everyone interested in German language, culture, or history.
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8 reviews
56 of 60 people found the following review helpful
Badly needed an editor
5 Aug 2010
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
This book reads like a stream-of-consciousness first draft.
The giveaway is the endless repetition. Why do we need to be told THREE TIMES that Martin Luther posted his 95 theses on the church door at Wittenberg in 1517 and that this was a seminal event in the beginning of the Reformation? Why do we need to be told TWICE that in Wittenberg alone, 100,000 copies of Luther's translation of the Bible were printed during Luther's lifetime? Why do we need to be told THREE TIMES that the 30 Years War devastated the German countryside and made life miserable for the peasant population? And those examples are just from one chapter; they are representative of an endemic problem.
Then there are the issues of the content itself, which the previous two reviewers have discussed. It seems to me that in a book purporting to be the biography of a language, it would have been useful to include more examples of that language as it evolved than this book has. It certainly would have been more relevant than the mini-biography of Luther's wife or the details of exactly when the major Lutheran church bodies in the United States got around to disassociating themselves from Luther's excoriation of the Jews. The author tells us, several times, that High German is so called because it developed in mountainous southern Germany and Low German because it prevailed in the lowlands of the north - yet gives just a single, one-word example of the sound shift that distinguishes the two languages. The author talks about how Luther in his Bible translation combined his local dialect with chancellery German, but gives not a single example that illustrates this.
A good editor would have caught these things. This book clearly did not have one, or perhaps it had one but the author was not willing to accept the editor's advice.
I give it three stars because amid all the chaff, there is some wheat, especially for someone like myself who is trying to relearn German a half century after studying it in school and who is curious about the history of the language. But the book could have been, and should have been, so much better.
The giveaway is the endless repetition. Why do we need to be told THREE TIMES that Martin Luther posted his 95 theses on the church door at Wittenberg in 1517 and that this was a seminal event in the beginning of the Reformation? Why do we need to be told TWICE that in Wittenberg alone, 100,000 copies of Luther's translation of the Bible were printed during Luther's lifetime? Why do we need to be told THREE TIMES that the 30 Years War devastated the German countryside and made life miserable for the peasant population? And those examples are just from one chapter; they are representative of an endemic problem.
Then there are the issues of the content itself, which the previous two reviewers have discussed. It seems to me that in a book purporting to be the biography of a language, it would have been useful to include more examples of that language as it evolved than this book has. It certainly would have been more relevant than the mini-biography of Luther's wife or the details of exactly when the major Lutheran church bodies in the United States got around to disassociating themselves from Luther's excoriation of the Jews. The author tells us, several times, that High German is so called because it developed in mountainous southern Germany and Low German because it prevailed in the lowlands of the north - yet gives just a single, one-word example of the sound shift that distinguishes the two languages. The author talks about how Luther in his Bible translation combined his local dialect with chancellery German, but gives not a single example that illustrates this.
A good editor would have caught these things. This book clearly did not have one, or perhaps it had one but the author was not willing to accept the editor's advice.
I give it three stars because amid all the chaff, there is some wheat, especially for someone like myself who is trying to relearn German a half century after studying it in school and who is curious about the history of the language. But the book could have been, and should have been, so much better.
29 of 30 people found the following review helpful
Another Book Filled With Factual Errors
11 Nov 2010
Format:Hardcover
Although as a historian, I did learn things about the history of the German language from this book, I agree with most of the other reviewers' criticisms. But my central concerns are the book's egregious errors of historical fact. Here are only some that I noticed. There may be others as well.
Page 42: The Septuagint is the Greek Old Testament, not the Greek New Testament. Page 155: It is certainly NOT true that 14,000 Germans migrated to North America in 1709. About that many did come down the Rhine and were taken across to Britain, but fewer than 3000 were sent on to New York and fewer than 1000 to North Carolina. The remainder stayed in England or were transported to Ireland. (A. B. Faust, The German Element in the United States, p. 80.)Page 158: Napoleon did NOT die in 1815. He was taken into exile in 1815 and died in 1821. Page 212: 92 per cent of the Germans most certainly did NOT vote for the Nazis in 1933. According to Hajo Holborn's A History of Modern Germany (vol. 3, pages 701 & 725) in the last fully free German election in November, 1932 the Nazis got 33.1% of the popular vote. Even with the Nazis attempting to suppress the campaigning of other parties before the election of March 5, 1933, the last even partially free election in pre-war Germany, the Nazis received only 43.9% of the popular vote. Page 161: It is unlikely that the Forty-Eighter immigration to America had much to do with today's "red state-blue state" divide despite the concentration of people of German heritage in the American Midwest. The political immigration from Germany in the years after the Revolution of 1848 was numerically overwhelmed by as much as 20 to 1 by the concurrent influx of apolitical or quite conservative Lutheran and Catholic German peasants.
This book is another appalling example of a major and respected publisher of non-fiction failing to do any simple fact-checking before publishing a supposedly non-fiction book. (for another example, see mine and the other reviews of John Keegan's The American Civil War: A Military History.) How are we now to trust what we read in new books unless we ourselves already know well the subject matter of the book so that we can spot the obvious errors?
Page 42: The Septuagint is the Greek Old Testament, not the Greek New Testament. Page 155: It is certainly NOT true that 14,000 Germans migrated to North America in 1709. About that many did come down the Rhine and were taken across to Britain, but fewer than 3000 were sent on to New York and fewer than 1000 to North Carolina. The remainder stayed in England or were transported to Ireland. (A. B. Faust, The German Element in the United States, p. 80.)Page 158: Napoleon did NOT die in 1815. He was taken into exile in 1815 and died in 1821. Page 212: 92 per cent of the Germans most certainly did NOT vote for the Nazis in 1933. According to Hajo Holborn's A History of Modern Germany (vol. 3, pages 701 & 725) in the last fully free German election in November, 1932 the Nazis got 33.1% of the popular vote. Even with the Nazis attempting to suppress the campaigning of other parties before the election of March 5, 1933, the last even partially free election in pre-war Germany, the Nazis received only 43.9% of the popular vote. Page 161: It is unlikely that the Forty-Eighter immigration to America had much to do with today's "red state-blue state" divide despite the concentration of people of German heritage in the American Midwest. The political immigration from Germany in the years after the Revolution of 1848 was numerically overwhelmed by as much as 20 to 1 by the concurrent influx of apolitical or quite conservative Lutheran and Catholic German peasants.
This book is another appalling example of a major and respected publisher of non-fiction failing to do any simple fact-checking before publishing a supposedly non-fiction book. (for another example, see mine and the other reviews of John Keegan's The American Civil War: A Military History.) How are we now to trust what we read in new books unless we ourselves already know well the subject matter of the book so that we can spot the obvious errors?
34 of 39 people found the following review helpful
enttaeuscht
29 July 2010
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
I was very disappointed by this book. But perhaps I brought more to it than the average reader, since I have academic work in European history and linguistics. I thought the author's linguistic information was rather elementary. But my primary complaint is, that in woefully short book (215pp of text, some of which is taken up by timelines that could have been omitted), the author devotes too much space to Germanic languages other than German and too much space to nonlinguistic matters. For example, 20 of the books 215 pages are devoted to an historical overview of the invention of printing, the Reformation and the 30 Years War. I don't dispute the importance of this background, but anyone who buys a history of the German language will probably know it already
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