‘You will finish this sentence’: German Longitude for Anglophone Readers

Abstract

The German language has a reputation for complex syntax and complicated grammar that make it hard for the learner to attain proficiency. Unspoken in this complaint is the adverb “unnecessarily” — the notion that all this declining, conjugating, verb-splitting and multiple subordinating does not really serve any purpose other than ostentatious difficulty, in the manner of say, Latin or ancient Greek. Perhaps the most aggrieved charge came from a very proficient speaker of German, the writer Mark Twain, in his essay “The Awful German Language” (1880):