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A History of German: What the Past Reveals about Today's Language
This book provides a detailed but accessible introduction to the development of the German language from the earliest reconstructable prehistory to the present day. Joe Salmons explores a range of topics in the history of the language, offering answers to questions such How did German come to have so many different dialects and close linguistic cousins like Dutch and Plattdeutsch? Why does German have 'umlaut' vowels and why do they play so many different roles in the grammar? Why are noun plurals so complicated? Are dialects dying out today? Does English, with all the words it loans to German, pose a threat to the language?
This second edition has been extensively expanded and revised to include extended coverage of syntactic and pragmatic change throughout, expanded discussion of sociolinguistic aspects, language variation, and language contact, and more on the position of German in the Germanic family. The book is supported by a companion website and is suitable for language learners and teachers and students of linguistics, from undergraduate level upwards. The new edition also includes more detailed background information to make it more accessible for beginners.
This second edition has been extensively expanded and revised to include extended coverage of syntactic and pragmatic change throughout, expanded discussion of sociolinguistic aspects, language variation, and language contact, and more on the position of German in the Germanic family. The book is supported by a companion website and is suitable for language learners and teachers and students of linguistics, from undergraduate level upwards. The new edition also includes more detailed background information to make it more accessible for beginners.
468 pages, Paperback
First published December 15, 2012
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May 29, 2016
Jules Renard said German was the language he used when he wanted to remain silent. It certainly can seem complicated – all those odd, umlauted plurals, unguessable genders, and a weirdly regimented syntax that hanging on for the verb until the very end of the sentence keeps you. Where did it all come from?
This excellent historical overview incorporates up-to-date linguistic theory, plenty of quotes from German grammarians through the ages, and a full understanding of the wide range of German dialects. It impressed me constantly. It's so good, in fact, that I wouldn't be surprised if it was the best book of its kind even for German speakers.
Be warned, though – it is thorough. Salmons opens with more than fifty pages examining the phonology and morphology of Proto-Indo-European, which is a bit like writing a recipe for a ham sandwich that starts with a long description of how to raise a pig. For comparison, Peter Rickard's A History of the French Language dispenses with the subject in a sentence and a half on page one. Here nothing is taken for granted: laryngeals, Ferdinand de Saussure, spectrograms, all in glorious detail. If you have studied any of this before, none of the material is really new, but if you haven't, the first couple of chapters almost amount to a crash course in historical linguistics.
Of course this makes a lot of sense since German, like English, traces many of its features directly back to Indo-European, like the ablaut-grades (e.g. English sing, sang, sung, song). More generally though, it means that every new feature is introduced with the largest possible historical scope for context. This is important because, as its subtitle suggests, the book is not just about how German developed but about how its history is reflected today. At every point here, when we learn about a detail of Old High German morphology or a nicety of Lutheran syntax, Salmons is always concerned that we see how they explain features of the modern language.
Like most Indo-European languages, German has lost much of the complexity of cases and inflexions that its ancestral forms had (a process that continues apace today). This had, and continues to have, important implications for syntax and grammar generally, and some of the details of this were new to me. For instance, even something as basic as the use of articles may be linked to morphological simplification. Nowadays articles are the primary way for German to mark definiteness/indefiniteness (the difference between a and the, in English), but it's been argued that in Old High German this job was done primarily by noun case:
skancta sinan fianton bitteres lides (from the Ludwigslied)
‘He poured his enemies a bitter drink’, where the original has no article and a noun in the genitive; versus for instance
Inti dir gibu sluzzila himilo riches (Tatian)
‘And to you I give the key to the kingdom of heaven’; again, no article in the original but the noun this time in the accusative case.
This correspondence of genitive=indefinite, accusative=definite even survives in certain modern phrases, such as the difference between ‘Den ganzen Tag hat sie Fußball gespielt’ (where Tag is clearly not a direct object!) and ‘Eines Tages ging sie einfach weg’.
Especially welcome when we reach the present is Salmons's attitude to ‘standard’ German, which is often presented in traditional language histories as being the inevitable endpoint towards which earlier forms have been inexorably marching. This ‘threadbare myth’ (as he calls it) is replaced here with a much messier but more interesting story that takes in the dazzling range of different German standards and dialects that exist today.
(This was particularly important for me since I'm living in Switzerland: it's interesting in this book to follow the sound changes through history and see where the Swiss diverged, or rather, in most cases, where everyone else did. To take one example among many, the Middle High German monophthongisation which led to modern ‘liebe gute Brüder’ (with long vowels) never happened here; the Swiss version would, I think, be liebi gueti Brüeder where all three words still have diphthongs just as they did in the 1100s.)
Anyway, the point is that a standard language is always an artificial construct, and it's rare as a non-native speaker to get an insight into the real chaos underneath. This is because learning materials are usually concerned specifically with teaching the standard, while native speakers who get into a discussion about these things with a foreigner usually want to explain their idea of ‘proper’ language and often consider language change as simply bad grammar.
As in the English-speaking world, many Germans believe that the purity of their language is under threat from email, text slang, and foreign borrowings; Salmons is refreshingly dismissive of this panic and of prescriptivism in general, and he disinterestedly presents many fascinating examples of the language changes that are currently underway in modern German (e.g. the gradual loss of the preterite tense, which is slowly but surely disappearing from spoken language, as it already has in Swiss German; the loss of dative singulars in -e and similar weakening of other cases; reassignment of genders; further weakening of strong verbs; increasing use of brauchen as a modal verb; and many other interesting examples).
Despite lamentations about how language is going to hell in a handbasket, which seem to be a cross-cultural universal, German clearly has a pretty healthy future ahead of it. If you want to understand how its idiosyncrasies evolved, then look no further: this will give you all the info you could possibly want, sheaves of useful references, and all told with admirable neutrality on the subject of ‘standards’, ‘dialects’ and prescribed grammar. You may still want to remain silent in German, but at least you'll have a much better idea of what you're not talking about.
This excellent historical overview incorporates up-to-date linguistic theory, plenty of quotes from German grammarians through the ages, and a full understanding of the wide range of German dialects. It impressed me constantly. It's so good, in fact, that I wouldn't be surprised if it was the best book of its kind even for German speakers.
Be warned, though – it is thorough. Salmons opens with more than fifty pages examining the phonology and morphology of Proto-Indo-European, which is a bit like writing a recipe for a ham sandwich that starts with a long description of how to raise a pig. For comparison, Peter Rickard's A History of the French Language dispenses with the subject in a sentence and a half on page one. Here nothing is taken for granted: laryngeals, Ferdinand de Saussure, spectrograms, all in glorious detail. If you have studied any of this before, none of the material is really new, but if you haven't, the first couple of chapters almost amount to a crash course in historical linguistics.
Of course this makes a lot of sense since German, like English, traces many of its features directly back to Indo-European, like the ablaut-grades (e.g. English sing, sang, sung, song). More generally though, it means that every new feature is introduced with the largest possible historical scope for context. This is important because, as its subtitle suggests, the book is not just about how German developed but about how its history is reflected today. At every point here, when we learn about a detail of Old High German morphology or a nicety of Lutheran syntax, Salmons is always concerned that we see how they explain features of the modern language.
Like most Indo-European languages, German has lost much of the complexity of cases and inflexions that its ancestral forms had (a process that continues apace today). This had, and continues to have, important implications for syntax and grammar generally, and some of the details of this were new to me. For instance, even something as basic as the use of articles may be linked to morphological simplification. Nowadays articles are the primary way for German to mark definiteness/indefiniteness (the difference between a and the, in English), but it's been argued that in Old High German this job was done primarily by noun case:
skancta sinan fianton bitteres lides (from the Ludwigslied)
‘He poured his enemies a bitter drink’, where the original has no article and a noun in the genitive; versus for instance
Inti dir gibu sluzzila himilo riches (Tatian)
‘And to you I give the key to the kingdom of heaven’; again, no article in the original but the noun this time in the accusative case.
This correspondence of genitive=indefinite, accusative=definite even survives in certain modern phrases, such as the difference between ‘Den ganzen Tag hat sie Fußball gespielt’ (where Tag is clearly not a direct object!) and ‘Eines Tages ging sie einfach weg’.
Especially welcome when we reach the present is Salmons's attitude to ‘standard’ German, which is often presented in traditional language histories as being the inevitable endpoint towards which earlier forms have been inexorably marching. This ‘threadbare myth’ (as he calls it) is replaced here with a much messier but more interesting story that takes in the dazzling range of different German standards and dialects that exist today.
(This was particularly important for me since I'm living in Switzerland: it's interesting in this book to follow the sound changes through history and see where the Swiss diverged, or rather, in most cases, where everyone else did. To take one example among many, the Middle High German monophthongisation which led to modern ‘liebe gute Brüder’ (with long vowels) never happened here; the Swiss version would, I think, be liebi gueti Brüeder where all three words still have diphthongs just as they did in the 1100s.)
Anyway, the point is that a standard language is always an artificial construct, and it's rare as a non-native speaker to get an insight into the real chaos underneath. This is because learning materials are usually concerned specifically with teaching the standard, while native speakers who get into a discussion about these things with a foreigner usually want to explain their idea of ‘proper’ language and often consider language change as simply bad grammar.
As in the English-speaking world, many Germans believe that the purity of their language is under threat from email, text slang, and foreign borrowings; Salmons is refreshingly dismissive of this panic and of prescriptivism in general, and he disinterestedly presents many fascinating examples of the language changes that are currently underway in modern German (e.g. the gradual loss of the preterite tense, which is slowly but surely disappearing from spoken language, as it already has in Swiss German; the loss of dative singulars in -e and similar weakening of other cases; reassignment of genders; further weakening of strong verbs; increasing use of brauchen as a modal verb; and many other interesting examples).
Despite lamentations about how language is going to hell in a handbasket, which seem to be a cross-cultural universal, German clearly has a pretty healthy future ahead of it. If you want to understand how its idiosyncrasies evolved, then look no further: this will give you all the info you could possibly want, sheaves of useful references, and all told with admirable neutrality on the subject of ‘standards’, ‘dialects’ and prescribed grammar. You may still want to remain silent in German, but at least you'll have a much better idea of what you're not talking about.
October 1, 2017
hiar ir findet iawiht thés thaz wirdig ist dhes lésannes… (*)
If you do not directly understand this quote (in Old High German by Otfried of Weißenburg; 9th century CE), even though you can actually speak German, this is nothing to feel bad about. After reading this book, you will know what it means, and you may also agree with it. For me as a native German speaker the book was very interesting to read. Now I finally know why I speak the way I speak. The fact that the text itself is written in English and talks about German is actually very good and circumvents the danger of mix-ups. Nevertheless, reading A History of German was not easy for me and I had to make myself more familiar with linguist lingo. In particular expressions around the phonology were quite alien to me, and I often skipped IPA expressions, something you shouldn’t do with this book. There are large parts that deal with spoken language, and knowing your IPA is unavoidable. Thankfully there’s a comprehensive guide to the IPA symbols used in the book right at the beginning. By the way, the word for language in German is “Sprache” and the noun is derived from the (still strong) verb “sprechen” = “to speak”. In some sense this exonerates Joseph Salmons from his little bias towards phonological matters.
When the author speaks of the history of German, he truly means history. The book is largely chronological. We learn about German essentially von der Pike auf (from the ground up), that is to say, we start with Indo-European (IE), a language that most likely existed once, but no one knows exactly how it looked like. Words in IE were re-constructed, based on some clues and (highly educated) guesswork. It is estimated to be spoken at about 4,000 BC. From IE, we follow the path starting with proto-Germanic and pre-German, then Old High German (OHG), Middle High German (MHG) to Early New High German (ENHG) and end with New High German and Contemporary High German. A long journey. Naturally the older the individual kind of German is the less knowledge we have about it.
There are only relatively few written documents available from OHG (ca. 750–1050), and those were usually written by an elite (poets, clerics), and do not necessarily reflect the language of the common people. Many texts were written in Latin, or from a mixture of OHG and Latin. And then there are the different dialects to consider, which further complicates matters. Still, reading some snippets of OHG and been given the needed translation and explanation was fascinating. For example, why don’t you consider writing your next insult to someone in OHG?
undes ars in tine naso (**)
MHG (ca. 1150–1350) is already more accessible:
uns ist in alten mæren wunders vil geseit / von helden lobebæren, von grôzer arebeit / von freuden, hôchgezîten, von weinen und von klagen / von küener recken strîten muget ir nu wunder hœren sagen
These are the first few lines of the Nibelungenlied in the original, and I knew these lines before, even though I have never read the text. My mother belongs to the last generation who learned MHG in school (at least in parts), and when I asked her she could still memorize these lines. The most interesting word here, by the way, is arebeit, which obviously became the modern noun “Arbeit” (=work). At that time, however, it had the meaning of “difficulty” or “hardship”. So in deciphering old texts, different spellings, morphology and so on, one also has to consider changes in semantics (which in this case is only a small one after all).
With ENHG (ca. 1350–1650) we are already on relatively firm ground. This is where we encounter e.g. Martin Luther and his famous German translation of the Bible. Although the texts from that period are relatively easy for me to read, there are still quite a few differences to today’s German to notice. Conveniently book printing was also invented during this phase by Johannes Gutenberg. Linguists have a huge corpus of texts to study. Furthermore we know a great deal more about social and historical developments and that’s what ultimately forge a language.
The second to last chapter (before the conclusion) deals with New and contemporary High German, that is “my” language. Some of the things discussed in this chapter I personally notice in my everyday life, for example the steady decline of my beloved genitive (sigh). On the other hand there’s a continuous rise of the verb “sein” together with “am” to indicate progressive action. So instead of saying “Ich lese” (I read) more and more often people use the form “Ich bin am Lesen” (I am reading). Strong verbs (those that are able to change their vowels when conjugated) are more and more struck out of the field by weak ones. So for instance most people (including me) say “Ich backte das Brot”, instead of “buk”. “Ich melkte die Kuh” vs “molk” holds some balance and “I las das Buch” (instead of “leste”) will probably remain intact for a few more years. One notices that language is continually in motion and nothing is written in stone. In this chapter, the so-called Kietzdeutsch, a sociolect which may prove to be only transitional, is also addressed. This kind of German has now developed further into some kind of short German (Kurzdeutsch), which is increasingly used by German native speakers in colloquial language: “Er kann nicht Präsident” instead of “Er kann das Präsidentenamt nicht ausfüllen”; “Ich hab Rücken” instead of “Ich habe Rückenschmerzen”; “Ich laufe Bahnhof” instead of “Ich laufe zum Bahnhof” etc. I wouldn’t be surprised if, in some generations, this kind of language will become the standard one.
In all chapters there are numerous examples on all possible topics. Unfortunately, these examples are not particularly unified. For some examples the German translation (the modern words) is given, in others there’s is an English translation, or none at all. Some contain phonetic spellings, others don’t. The whole thing seemed to me to be a bit cobbled together, as if the author had not had enough time to rework it. Nevertheless, the examples are interesting and revealing and essential for the understanding of the surrounding text. A further point of criticism are the maps (there are 28 of them on a whole range of different subjects) and some tables too, all of which are rendered as gray scale versions of originally colored illustrations, and are hardly legible. For the same reason, most of the photos are not particularly appealing to look at. I suppose the publisher wanted to save printing costs here which is a pity. As some kind of compensation though, there is an accompanying website with some more maps (this time in color!), a list of errata, as well as a wealth of PDF files with exercises and additional information (which I have not read) and of course numerous links to the topics of the individual chapters.
This book certainly does not serve to learn German – this is not its intention. One should already have a more or less strong grasp of the language, a solid vocabulary, and an understanding of the most important grammatical principles. With these prerequisites you’ll get a really fascinating, albeit demanding, book, which in the end delivers exactly what it promises in the title.
(*)
(**)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
didn-t-finish
May 31, 2022This was very heavy in the linguistic jargon that I am unfamiliar with. I wish I'd taken a linguistics course before picking up this book. I hope to come back to it someday, but this just wasn't what I was expecting and too dense for me to keep trying.
April 10, 2014
Very interesting but SUPER intense. The loss of 1 star in the rating probably highlights my ignorance more than anything else.
March 27, 2025
JS's History bridges the space between specialist and non-specialist, often going off into discussion of current research, especially that of the author. It is a demanding read: I found the material overwhelming and was able to cover no more than about a dozen pages at one sitting for the early and mid sections. The History is also worth it - JS covers a lot of material in depth. But I also have some complaints:
* The History includes many references to internet pages giving more detailed information. It is a promisingly innovative approach, but the first dozen or so links turn out to be dead, and after than I gave up. Not good. I understand that academic publishing works on a budget. But, if you are going something like this there has to be someone responsible - the publisher, a junior editor, the author - who is responsible for maintaining the links. As things stand, neglect here undermines the professionality of what is otherwise a serious effort.
* I would have enjoyed more discussion contrasting the development of German with Dutch and Danish. (A personal wish, since I have background in those languages). I do understand that the author has to be selective. But why do we have to wait till page 345 before seeing the first mention of Swiss German? Admittedly, many people regard this as a separate language, with little mutual comprehensibility. Just the same, I would have expected Swiss German to be taken up at the same level as English, which receives quite a lot of scrutiny.
* The History includes many references to internet pages giving more detailed information. It is a promisingly innovative approach, but the first dozen or so links turn out to be dead, and after than I gave up. Not good. I understand that academic publishing works on a budget. But, if you are going something like this there has to be someone responsible - the publisher, a junior editor, the author - who is responsible for maintaining the links. As things stand, neglect here undermines the professionality of what is otherwise a serious effort.
* I would have enjoyed more discussion contrasting the development of German with Dutch and Danish. (A personal wish, since I have background in those languages). I do understand that the author has to be selective. But why do we have to wait till page 345 before seeing the first mention of Swiss German? Admittedly, many people regard this as a separate language, with little mutual comprehensibility. Just the same, I would have expected Swiss German to be taken up at the same level as English, which receives quite a lot of scrutiny.
March 18, 2024
I am having trouble with the overwhelmingly positive reviews for this book unless only linguistic specialists have been rating it. For such people, it might very well be a great book.
I love books on language and I have read many on the English language as well as other books on the French, Italian, Spanish, Latin and Greek language. Some of the books have gotten further into linguistic specialist observations in places but even those books had very accessible portions for the general reader that made me appreciate the book. I found that this whole book was heavy-duty linguistics and I was only able to understand the smallest portions. It is the first book describing a language that I abandoned without completing it. With my comprehension of the content being so low, I wasn't getting anything out of reading it.
I love books on language and I have read many on the English language as well as other books on the French, Italian, Spanish, Latin and Greek language. Some of the books have gotten further into linguistic specialist observations in places but even those books had very accessible portions for the general reader that made me appreciate the book. I found that this whole book was heavy-duty linguistics and I was only able to understand the smallest portions. It is the first book describing a language that I abandoned without completing it. With my comprehension of the content being so low, I wasn't getting anything out of reading it.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews