Status Updates From Exploring the German Language

"... many [insert nationality] households now receive German television programmes." Mmm... how old is this book? *checks publication dates* "1st ed. 1998, 2nd ed. 2008." Oh. Oh. That was 15 years ago. oh god

It makes sense that East Middle German became more and more the standard (what one would call standard German today). It was a compromise between the High/Upper German or the South and the Low German of the North (but also, Luther's Bible translation was written in East Middle German, which did much to standardise the language, that and the fact that the printing press had been invented).

Whenever I have language students complaining about how difficult the German language supposedly is, I point out that PIE (Proto Indo European, the supposed ancestral tongue of all Indo-European languages, including English, French, German etc. etc. was a lot more complicated, with up to eight cases, six verb tenses, four separate moods and so on).