I’m reading a biography of Adolf Hitler by John(?) Toland. Several times he mentions Hitler’s grammar being corrected, either by those who type up speeches for newspaper publication, or by early party comrades endeavoring to make him more presentable.
To recap Hitler’s education, he grew up mostly in Linz, Austria, and did quite well in the primary grades, but by the time he got to secondary school he did poorly in virtually every subject, and eventually failed to to enter an art college in Vienna. The rest, as they say, is history, and in this case, very unfortunate.
I’m sure I don’t know German well enough to understand all the grammatical subtleties, but my impression is that everyone from the age of about two on up has all the declensions and conjugations down solid. In casual person-on-the-street contexts, speakers don’t leave off grammatical inflections, but are more likely to omit the root of an article, e.g. 'ne instead of eine. I also know there are a few situations that are roughly analogous to “who/whom” in English, for example using the dative masculine or neuter article dem with wegen (“on account of”) rather than the genitive des, which would be strictly correct. I understand also that this leaves out issues of usage and word choice which I imagine are common to all languages. In general I have the impression that English is alone in being so stratified in terms of social context and usage, mainly because of the Norman Conquest and the superimposition of a large Romance-origin vocabulary favored by the upper classes.
So what kind of errors would a person make who had a similar background? Or is it more a question of dialect?
As a native a part of Austria whose dialect is related to Bavarian, I suspect the standard German of young Adolf may have had the following peculiarities that I have observed in bavarians:
different genders for some words
different use of the auxiliary verbs to be and to have in the perfect tense
use of past perfect instead of simple past tense (I have done instead of I did)
different construction of participles
overall somewhat different inflection of verbs and declination of nouns.
In general, the grammar of uneducated German speech uses fewer grammatical forms than educated speech (e.g. past perfect instead of preterite tense; indicative instead of one of the subjunctive modes).
For example, an educated German would distinguish between
“A sagte, B sei ein Dieb” (A said B was a thief - I am just reporting what A said)
“A sagte, B wäre ein Dieb” (A said B was a thief - I am doubting it)
“A sagte, daß B ein Dieb ist” (B is a thief (fact), and A said that)
“A hat gesagt, B sei ein Dieb” (A just has said B was a thief - I am just reporting what A said)
“A hat gesagt, B wäre ein Dieb” (A just has said B was a thief - I am doubting it)
“A hat gesagt, daß B ein Dieb ist” (B is a thief (fact), and A just has said that)
and an uneducated German might fold the six possibilities into
I wonder how well Toland understands German, that he is sure that it was Hitler’s grammar specifically. I would think it more likely that he made a lot of spelling mistakes and generally expressed himself poorly, because that’s the mistakes that Germans of low education make today.
There were some excerpts from “Mein Kampf” in my history book that were awfully hard to read not because they were repulsive, but because they were long-winded, boring and dry. But if Tolands assertions are true, then those were the edited versions.
You’re seriously off in your estimate. At age two, kids are just starting to learn the language! They have problems distinguishing between mine/yours (Meine/deine) because of the inversion (is that your toy? - Yes, that is your toy instead of Yes, this is my toy). They have trouble with the irregular pasts of verbs, with the possibilty case (Konjuntiv - what could happen, if), the second future (if this will have happend in the future, then that can also happen), indirect speech etc.
What children of low social level suffer from when growing up and learning the language, (which to my impression applies to practically every country, though e.g. Finland does far more than Germany to counter this) is a lack of reading and interest in the world at home, so their vocabulary and inner richness stays small; a lack of events to go to broaden their horizon and become interested beyond the basic things like earning money to buy a car, and the latest TV soap. School can only do so much.
So their limited vocabulary and lack of exactness in their speech as adults reflects their atrophied understanding and thinking process. Why bother to speak exactly? Why know so many words, if you don’t know the things the words are applied for?
I don’t agree with this assesment at all. I can’t think offhand of the major countries I know where speech isn’t used as an indicator to social class. In British English, it’s the accent - whether it’s Oxbridge or Cockney tells what class you’re from, but that’s go nothing to do with where the words are derived from. (See My Fair Lady for an example).
In German, speaking High German without accent was until the 70s considered the mark of an educated person, while peasants who never left their home village would talk in broad dialect.
In Greece, when they gained their indepence, they revived classical Greek for printing their newspapers. The rules for putting the accents on the letters in writing were so complicated that only people educated at good schools knew them, leading to a sharp distinction between educated and normal people. So finally the government decided to simplify the rules to no longer hidden discriminate against the normal people.
As I said above, lack of breadth of vocabulary, includig figures of speech (and interests to talk about), lack of thinking about your opinions (Which shows in the way you state your opinions), lack of taking the care to express yourself clearly (not in casual conversation, but when it counts), not using all the possible grammar forms, are generally considered the mark of the underclass and badly educated, limited-mind people, aside from any specific language.
Pretentious people go off in the other direction, by using Fremdwörter (Greek and Latin loanwords) even when a normal German word would work, making overlong and complicated sentences and using complicated grammatical forms when uncalled for to show that they can do. To somebody with the same education, this doesn’t impress, but rather comes across as somebody with an Ego problem desperately trying to compensate, and with no substance behind the big words.
Dialect wouldn’t show up in written speech, except (as tschild pointed out) in those instances where grammatical gender differs from High German (e.g. in Bavarian, butter is male - Der, in High German it’s female - Die. Also, in many dialects a double negative is understood to be used for emphasis, but in correct speech, this is considered not approriate.
Which would generally describe the use of non-standard forms: not really false like confusing who/whom or their/they’re , but not approriate for the medium and audience.
Regarding the subjunctive, are you referring mainly to indirect discourse*, or using an auxiliary such as würden with the infinitive, rather than a subjunctive form of the main verb?
*For those who don’t know German, the language uses a subjunctive form for indirect discourse, that is when restating what someone else has said. Naturally one hears and reads this in news reporting all the time.
I’ve never been able to understand more than one or two words a sentence of his speeches, though I’m otherwise fairly good at understanding spoken German. Not that listening to Hitler is something I strive to do, but still, it would be interesting to watch old newsreels and be able to understand the speeches at specific moments in history, like the confrontation with Otto Wels in the Kroll Opera House. FTR I had the opportunity to live in Germany for a year, and got reasonably good at the language, but when visiting Austria had a hard time with the language. I usually ended up having to speak English.
But surely they had someone proofread Mein Kampf before they published it. Just because no spelling, usage or grammar mistakes showed up in published work does not mean they weren’t made.
Different dialects are not just accents, but often comprise a different vocabulary and considerable differences in grammar, which both show up in the written language. Basically, you can think of a strong dialect as almost, but not quite a different language, the boundary between dialect and separate, but related language is diffuse.
In the German Sprachraum, particularly! It’s fairly well known that some dialects from different regions may be mutually only barely intelligible. I once took a class on the Grimm tales; although I as a non-native speaker was pleasantly surprised at my ability to understand fairly well the stories in dialect–like Of The Fisherman And His Wife; that was partly due to my having also studied a little Dutch, not to mention being an English speaker. The High German dialects were considerably more difficult for me.
Still, a century ago none of that would have prevented those with a competent command of Standard German from disdaining dialect speakers, or at least joking about them.
Yes you’re right about that. I don’t know why I said this; I can barely understand most American two-year-olds. Unless they type up what they’re saying and shoot me an email.
But, suppose I said age seven. Would my statement have been fundamentally accurate? Not that children of that age have an equal command to an adult’s with regard to all the things that have been mentioned here, like Futur II and Konjunktiv, but is it fair to say that a typical year old kid would not be making most of the kind of mistakes that a first year foreign student of German would be making? That is, he or she would get the genders and case inflections right?
Certainly. Children growing up in the language rarely mix up the gender, as the learn it as part of the word. Mixing up the gender of a word is a typical error made by those who learn German as a second language, except for those words where the gender differs between different German dialects and standard “High German”.
Concerning the difference between accents and dialects: In Switzerland, where the local dialects are called “Mundart”, the spoken language, and High German is called “Schriftsprache”, the written language, we jokingly state: When we think we are talking High German to people from Germany, they think they understand Swiss German. When we switch to pure dialect, most Germans will have difficulties to understand what we are saying.
