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Katherine Johnson’s mathematical calculations helped guide some of America’s most important early space missions while she confronted the racial and gender barriers faced by Black women in twentieth-century America.
MORE →Reflects the personal views, recollections, and perspective of the author, Mike Davis.
This is a personal recollection on the Move fire on May 13, 1985
"The Awful German Language" is an 1880 essay by Mark Twain published as Appendix D in A Tramp Abroad.[1] The essay is a humorous exploration of the frustrations a native speaker of English has with learning German as a second language.
Twain made his first unsuccessful attempt to learn German in 1850 at age fifteen. He resumed his study 28 years later in preparation for a trip to Europe. Upon his arrival in Germany, the fruit of his recent scholarship was attested to in the advice of a friend: "Speak in German, Mark. Some of these people may understand English."[2] During this 1878 stay in Germany, Twain had a dream in which, according to his notebook, "all bad foreigners went to German Heaven—couldn't talk and wished they had gone to the other place."[3]
"The Awful German Language" was published in the second volume of Twain's A Tramp Abroad, 1880, as appendix D. Gunnar Magnusson describes the work as "Twain's most famous philological essay".[4]
On October 31, 1897, Twain delivered a German-language lecture titled "Die Schrecken der deutschen Sprache" ("The Horrors of the German Language" in English) to the Concordia Festkneipe in Vienna (the Vienna Press Club).[1] Twain continued to give lectures into the 20th century regarding the language.[1]
Twain describes his exasperation with German grammar in a series of eight humorous examples that include separable verbs, adjective declension, and compound words.[1] He is, as the subject suggests, focusing on German as a language, but Twain is also dealing with English to compare the two languages. This allows for an analysis in linguistic weight assigned to various typological and stylistic aspects of language which revolve around the difference between an analytic language like English with a language like German that is a synthetic language with some analytic characteristics. Twain emphasizes these changes through interlinear translation, a manner of translation which tries to preserve the original language without context and in a literal manner, and this method emphasizes the mechanics of the language translated.[5]
The German language contains a complex system of inflection that is capable of frustrating learners in a manner similar to Twain's argument:[6]
Surely there is not another language that is so slipshod and systemless, and so slippery and elusive to the grasp. One is washed about in it, hither and thither, in the most helpless way; and when at last he thinks he has captured a rule which offers firm ground to take a rest on amid the general rage and turmoil of the ten parts of speech, he turns over the page and reads, "Let the pupil make careful note of the following exceptions." He runs his eye down and finds that there are more exceptions to the rule than instances of it.
The inflections within the language are used to represent both syntax and semantics, and function is assigned in hard-to-grasp ways, which combine with Twain's claim about exceptions being rather common in the German language. Part of this stems from the language's word order, along with gender, number, and other linguistic aspects, being connected to the morphology of individual words.[6]
One of the key emphases within the work is on German linguistic gender. Twain plays with the differences in natural or sexual gender and linguistic or grammatical gender by pointing out that the German for "girl" is grammatically neuter, unlike many sexless items such as turnips:[7]
Every noun has a gender, and there is no sense or system in distribution; so the gender of each must be learned separately and by heart. There is no other way. To do this one has to have a memory like a memorandum-book. In German, a young lady has no sex, while a turnip has. Think what overwrought reverence that shows for the turnip, and what callous disrespect for the girl.
The problem with the linguistic gender is that it appears to make sense in theory, but it operates in an illogical manner.[8] The actual relationship between gender and noun is unclear, and it is difficult for a learner of German to psychologically connect their understanding of the words with the gender rules.[9] To Twain, there was no reason for concepts such as a fish's scale having a feminine gender but a fishwife, an actual female, lacking any. When Twain translates the "Tale of the Fishwife and its Sad Fate", he expresses feelings of anger that result from his attempt to learn the language:[10]
It is a bleak Day. Hear the Rain, how he pours, and the Hail, how he rattles; and see the Snow, how he drifts along, and oh the Mud, how deep he is! Ah the poor Fishwife, it is stuck fast in the Mire; it has dropped its Basket of Fishes; and its Hands have been cut by the Scales as it seized some of the falling Creatures; and one Scale has even got into its Eye. And it cannot get her out. It opens its Mouth to cry for Help; but if any Sound comes out of him, alas he is drowned by the raging of the Storm.
German is not special in this manner, but, as the linguist Guy Deutscher observes, it was simply the language that Twain was learning at the time of the work. Many other languages contain some or all of the idiosyncrasies that Twain mocks, including French, Russian, and Latin.[11]
The Awful German Language public domain audiobook at LibriVoxSource: Wikipedia. Article content is retrieved live through the MediaWiki API.
"The Awful German Language" is an 1880 essay by Mark Twain published as Appendix D in A Tramp Abroad. The essay is a humorous exploration of the frustrations a native speaker of English has with learning German as a second language.
German (Deutsch, pronounced [dɔɪ̯tʃ] ) is a West Germanic language in the Indo-European language family, mainly spoken in Western and Central Europe. It is the majority and official (or co-official) language in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and Liechtenstein. It is also an official language of Luxembourg, Belgium and the Italian autonomous province of South Tyrol, French autonomous region of Alsace and as well as a recognised national language in Namibia. There are also notable German-speaking communities in other parts of Europe, including: Poland (Upper Silesia), the Czech Republic (North Bohemia), Denmark (North Schleswig), Slovakia (Krahule), Romania and Hungary (Sopron). Overseas, sizeable communities of German-speakers are found in the Americas. German is one of the major languages of the world, with nearly 100 million native speakers and over 130 million total speakers as of 2024. It is the most spoken native language within the European Union. German is the second-most widely spoken Germanic language, after English, both as a first and as a second language. German is also widely taught as a foreign language, especially in continental Europe (where it is the third most taught foreign language after English and French) and in the United States (where it is the third most commonly learned second language in K-12 education and among the most studied foreign languages in higher education after Spanish and French). Overall, German is the fourth most commonly learned second language globally. The language has been influential in the fields of philosophy, theology, science, and technology. It is the second most commonly used language in science and the third most widely used language on websites. The German-speaking countries are ranked fifth in terms of annual publication of new books, with one-tenth of all books (including e-books) in the world being published in German. German is most closely related to other West Germanic languages, namely Afrikaans, Dutch, English, the Frisian languages, and Scots. It also contains close similarities in vocabulary to some languages in the North Germanic group, such as Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish. Modern German gradually developed from Old High German, which in turn developed from Proto-Germanic during the Early Middle Ages. German is an inflected language, with four cases for nouns, pronouns, and adjectives (nominative, accusative, genitive, dative); three genders (masculine, feminine, neuter) and two numbers (singular, plural). It has strong and weak verbs. The majority of its vocabulary is derived from the ancient Germanic branch of the Indo-European language family, while a smaller share is partly derived from Latin and Greek, along with fewer words borrowed from French and Modern English. English, however, is the main source of more recent loanwords. German is a pluricentric language; the three standardised variants are German, Austrian, and Swiss Standard German. Standard German is sometimes called High German, which refers to its regional origin. German is also notable for its broad spectrum of dialects, with many varieties existing in Europe and other parts of the world. Some of these non-standard varieties have become recognised and protected by regional or national governments. Since 2004, heads of state of the German-speaking countries have met every year, and the Council for German Orthography has been the main international body regulating German orthography.
The nouns of the German language have several properties, some unique. As in many related Indo-European languages, German nouns possess a grammatical gender; the three genders are masculine, feminine, and neuter. Words for objects without obvious masculine or feminine characteristics like 'bridge' or 'rock' can be masculine, feminine, or neuter. German nouns are declined (change form) depending on their grammatical case (their function in a sentence) and whether they are singular or plural. German has four cases: nominative, accusative, dative and genitive. German is unusual among languages using the Latin alphabet in that all nouns are always capitalized (for example, "the book" is always written as "das Buch"). Other High German languages, such as Luxembourgish, also capitalize both proper and common nouns. Only a handful of other languages capitalize their nouns, mainly regional languages with orthographic conventions inspired by German, such as Low German and Saterland Frisian. Under the influence of German, the Scandinavian languages formerly capitalized their nouns; Danish retained the practice until 1948. Noun compounds are written together with no spacing (for example, the German word for "spy satellite" is "Spionagesatellit"). Plurals are normally formed by adding -e, -en, -er (or nothing) to the noun, and sometimes a vowel is also changed (the umlaut). Moreover, recent loanwords from French and English often keep the -s plural ending.
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a picaresque novel by American author Mark Twain that was first published in the United Kingdom in December 1884 and in the United States in February 1885. It is commonly named among the Great American Novels, and it is among the first in major American literature to be written throughout in vernacular English, characterized by local color regionalism. Being the direct sequel to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, it is told in the first person by Huckleberry "Huck" Finn, the narrator of two other later Twain novels (Tom Sawyer Abroad and Tom Sawyer, Detective) and a friend of Tom Sawyer. The book is noted for "changing the course of children's literature" in the United States for the "deeply felt portrayal of boyhood". It is also known for its colorful description of people and places along the Mississippi River. Set in a Southern antebellum society that had ceased to exist over 20 years before the work was published, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is an often scathing satire on entrenched attitudes, particularly racism. Perennially popular with readers, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has also been the continued object of study by literary critics since its publication. The book was widely criticized upon release because of its extensive use of coarse language and racial epithets. Throughout the 20th century, and despite arguments that the protagonist and the tenor of the book are anti-racist, criticism of the book continued due to both its perceived use of racial stereotypes and its frequent use of the racial slur "nigger".
Before the 1921 destruction of Tulsa’s Greenwood District, Black residents had created a remarkable center of business and community life. The district included stores, professional offices, entertainment venues and homes owned by Black citizens. Understanding Greenwood means learning what was built—not only what was burned.
MORE →Joe Louis.