I started learning German. I realized it is a difficult language to learn. No, I am not talking about pronouncing the German R. That sounds like an angry beast inside the body trying to roar. Not that…
I am talking about German sentences structures. Let me explain what I am trying to say with this example. Consider the following statement in English which makes good sense.
A woman sang a baby a lullaby.
Now the following doesn’t make logical sense but is grammatically correct.
A baby sang a woman a lullaby.
Finally, this permutation isn’t even right.
A lullaby sang a woman a baby.
What is astounding is that in German all 3 would make perfect sense and would mean the first statement!
Beauty
The beauty is how the above feat is accomplished. Languages like English or Hindi follow a strict sentence structure like : Subject Verb Object or Subject Verb Object1 Object2.
On the other hand, German handles it using cases. The idea is to first recognize that each noun plays different roles. In the above example Woman is the subject, lullaby is the direct object (result of the act of singing) and baby is the indirect object (recipient of the action).
Thereafter, the article “a” is replaced with different variations to specify the above information.
Let’s look at the same sentence in German
Eine Frau sang einem Baby ein Wiegenlied.
Here Eine, einem and ein are all equivalent to “a” in English. Frau means Woman and Wiegenlied is lullaby.
Now, making the same shuffling as the English sentence won’t create any confusion. Trick is to remember that the noun following the article is of a specific type.
Hence, the following two are the same. Notice the articles remain the same before the noun.
Einem Baby sang eine Frau ein Wiegenlied.
Ein Wiegenlied sang eine Frau einem Baby.
Benefits
There are a couple of benefits that German language enjoys compared to other languages with strict noun order like English.
Firstly, by rearranging the noun order, one can emphasize on various parts of the sentences. In the above example by moving the lullaby to the first place the information that “a lullaby” was being sung is emphasized.
A somewhat similar effect can be had in English by the use of active and passive voice. But it is not as flexible as in German.
Secondly, this flexibility allows for greater poetic or artistic wordplay.
Finally, the language is capable of conveying much denser information in fewer words. The language has many more rules along with one that is hinted in the example here. All these rules help pack in a lot of information.
Beast
There is a price to pay for all the benefits the language provides. The concept that we discussed above about the role a noun plays in a sentence is called the case system.
German has 4 cases. It also has 3 genders – masculine, feminine and neutral. So, to keep track of the gender and the case there are 4 x 3 = 12 articles. The article has to be properly selected otherwise the subject will become the object!
This is just the tip of the iceberg. The cases extend beyond just the articles. They also vary for pronouns, adjectives, prepositions etc. It surely is a Beast of a language to learn.
Other complex languages
German is not the only language which has such flexibility in sentence structure. Some notable once are: Sanskrit, Russian, Latin, Finnish, Hungarian, Turkish etc.
Sanskrit has 8 cases called vibhakti. This is already double of 4 in German. It also has 3 plurality – singular, dual and plural against 2 in German. 3 voices and 10 Moods (lakar) in Sanskrit compared to 2 voices and 3 Moods in German.
Let us see the same sentence in Sanskrit. The example sentences are written in the same order as the previous German and English. The first sentence emphasizes the woman, followed by baby and lullaby. Notice how the nouns can be moved freely.
स्त्री शिशुम् शय्यागीतं अगायत्।(Strī śiśum śayyāgītam agāyat.)
शिशुम् स्त्री शय्यागीतं अगायत्।
शय्यागीतं स्त्री शिशुम् अगायत्।
Conclusion
Languages are such a complex human invention. We grow up with a few languages and the language starts to feel natural. But when we are introduced with a new language which follows a completely different theory, it breaks our mind.
We explored in this article how some languages like English and Hindi or other Indian languages have a rigid sentence structure. These constrains also makes it simpler to learn. Whereas, other languages like German, Sanskrit, Hungarian etc. are flexible. But this comes at the cost of increase need for memorization.
I wonder if the language in which one thinks also has an impact on how efficiently one can think? After all, thoughts are self talk. If the language is more efficient one would need lesser words to convey more.
What do you think?
