Low German

“ The Low German, one of the most interesting of German dialects, because, historically, the most intact, and the most incapable of amalgamation with the language that has superseded it, had been left to grow rusty so far as literature was concerned, until Fritz Reuter rescued it from threatening oblivion, and made it the vehicle of a naïve and spontaneous genre of humour, to which it lent itself with singular charm and appropriateness. ”

“ To have produced two such scholars, historians, and statesmen as Niebuhr and Mommsen, would be an honor to any kingdom in Germany: how much more to the small duchy of Schleswig-Holstein, in which we have been told so often that nothing is spoken but Danish and some vulgar dialects of Low-German! ”

“ But they read their Bible in High-German; they write their newspapers in High-German, and it is in High-German that their children are taught, and their sermons preached in every town and in every village. It is but lately that Low-German has been taken up again by Schleswig-Holstein poets; and some of their poems, though intended originally for their own people only, have been read with delight, even by those who had to spell them out with the help of a dictionary and a grammar. This kind of homespun poetry is a sign of healthy national life. ”

“ It may often be remarked that one form of a great speech drives another form before it. Thus, in our own day, the High German is always encroaching on its Northern neighbour the Low German; and the Low German, in its turn, is always encroaching upon its Northern neighbour the Scandinavian. ”

“ The Low-German dialect which is the 'home-tongue' of many of the German seamen. It certainly sounds sufficiently different from ordinary German to pass muster with an untrained ear as a different language. ”

“ Well, even those vulgar dialects of Low-German, and the poems and novels that have been written in them by true Schleswig-Holsteiners, are well worth a moment's consideration. In looking at their language, an Englishman at once discovers a number of old acquaintances: words which we would look for in vain in Schiller or Goethe. We shall mention a few.
Black means black; in High-German it would be schwarz. De black is the black horse; black up wit is black on white; gif mek kil un blak, give me quill and ink. Blid is blithe, instead of the High-German mild. ”

“ Beyond this we cannot go on English soil. But we know that the Saxons, the Angles, and Jutes came from the continent, and there their descendants, along the northern coast of Germany, still speak Low-German, or Nieder-Deutsch, which in the harbors of Antwerp, Bremen, and Hamburg, has been mistaken by many an English sailor for a corrupt English dialect. The Low-German comprehends many dialects in the north or the lowlands of Germany; but in Germany proper they are hardly ever used for literary purposes. The Friesian dialects are Low-German, so are the [pg 178] Dutch and Flemish. ”

“ Although the literature of Germany is chiefly High-German, there are a few literary compositions, both ancient and modern, in the different spoken dialects of the country, sufficient to enable scholars to distinguish at least nine distinct grammatical settlements; in the Low-German branch, Gothic, Saxon, Anglo-Saxon, Frisian, and Dutch; in the High-German branch, Thuringian, Frankish, Bavarian, and Alemannish. ”

“ Nowadays Muttersprache is found everywhere in the German book-language, but Dr. Lübben, in 1881, declared that he had never heard it from the mouth of the Low German folk, with whom the word was always lantsprake, gemene sprake. ”

“ Unless the whole coast has sunk into the sea, who can explain that close behind Husum, in a flat country as monotonous as a Hungarian Pussta, without any natural frontier or division, the traveller, on entering the next inn, may indeed be understood if he speaks High or Low German, nay, may receive to either an answer in pure German, but hears the host and his servants speak in words that sound quite strange to him? Equally strange is the frontier north of the Wiede-au, where Danish takes the place of Friesian. ”

“ The dialects of the Deutsche Sprache, the German language, are the Ober Deutsche and Nieder Deutsche, Upper German and Low German: from the former dialect has, in course of time, proceeded the Hoch Deutsche Sprache, the High German language, now used exclusively as the book language by the more educated classes throughout Germany. ”

“ West Teutonic, which divides again into High German (whence modern German) , the Old High German being a language contemporary with Old Irish, and Low German, which includes Old Saxon, Anglo-Saxon, English, Dutch, and Frisian. ”

“ In respect to its stages, we have the Old Frisian of the Asega-bog, the Middle Frisian of Gysbert Japicx, [31] and the Modern Frisian of the present Frieslanders, Westphalians, and Heligolanders.
§ 39. The Low German and Platt-Deutsch.—The words Low-German are not only lax in their application, but they are equivocal; since the term has two meanings, a general meaning when it signifies a division of the Germanic languages, comprising English, Dutch, Anglo-Saxon, Old Saxon, and Frisian, and a limited one when it means the particular dialects of the Ems, the Weser, and the Elbe. ”

“ In Hanover, Brunswick, Mecklenburg, Oldenburg, the Free Towns, and in Schleswig-Holstein, the lower orders speak their own German, generally called Platt-Deutsch, and in many parts of Mecklenburg, Oldenburg, Ostfriesland, and Holstein, the higher ranks too cling in their every-day conversation to this more homely dialect.28 Children frequently [pg 124] speak two languages: High-German at school, Low-German at their games. The clergyman speaks High-German when he stands in the pulpit; but when he visits the poor, he must address them in their own peculiar Platt. ”

“ The Germans of Schleswig-Holstein are Saxons, and all true Saxons speak Low-German, and Low-German is more different from High-German than English is from Lowland Scotch. Low-German, however, is not to be mistaken for vulgar German. It is the German which from time immemorial was spoken in the low countries and along the northern sea-coast of Germany, as opposed to the German of the high country, of Swabia, Thuringia, Bavaria, and Austria. These two dialects differ from each other like Doric and Ionic; neither can be considered as a corruption of the other ”

“ Attempts were also made in Low German districts, though at a later stage of this period, to unify the dialects and raise them to the level of an accepted literary language. It will be shown later why these attempts were unsuccessful. Unfortunately, however, the efforts of the High German poets to form a uniform language were also shortlived; by the end of the 13th century the Dichtersprache had disappeared, and the dialects again reigned supreme. ”

“ The Low German dialects, as we have seen, stand nearest to the English and Frisian languages, owing to the total absence of the consonantal shifting which characterizes High German, as well as to other peculiarities of sounds and inflections, e.g. ”

“ So I am never ashamed of the low German in our country; it is the true mother-tongue of our land and people; my heart always swells when I hear low German spoken. This entire Saxon nation was divided into three tribes. One tribe, which dwelt for the most part towards the west, that is, in the Osnabrück region and further west as far as the Rhine, was called the Westphalians. The second tribe, which dwelt mostly at the east, as far as the Elbe and further, was called the Eastphalians. ”

“ The language spoken at their court being High-German, the ascendency of that dialect may be said to date from their days, though it was not secured till the time of the Reformation, when the translation of the Bible by Luther put a firm and lasting stamp on what has since become the literary speech of Germany.
But language, even though deprived of literary cultivation, does not easily die. Though at present people write the same language all over Germany, the towns and villages teem everywhere with dialects, both High and Low. ”

“ TEUTONS.—The English language was introduced into this country by bands of warlike colonists from Northwestern Germany, who drove the old inhabitants to the mountainous regions in the west of the island. Those colonists were variously called Angles, Saxons, and Jutes; but they all belonged to the Teutonic race, and their speech was a branch of the Teutonic group of languages. The Teutonic group of languages contains three main sections, from which all the others spring. These three main sections{9} are: High-German, Low-German, and Scandinavian. ”

“ The countries speaking Low German dialects 189are almost purely Nordic but the populations of High German speech are very largely Teutonized Alpines and occupy lands once Celtic-speaking. The main distinction between the two dialects is the presence of a large number of Celtic elements in High German.
In northern Italy there is a large amount of Nordic blood. In Lombardy, Venice and elsewhere throughout the country the aristocracy is blonder and taller than the peasantry, but the Nordic element in Italy has declined noticeably since the Middle Ages. ”

“ The south-eastern part of the latter has the verbal ending -en and further shows the peculiarity that the personal pronoun has the same form in the dative and accusative (mik, dick) , whereas the remainder, as well as the Westphalian, has mi, di in the dative, and mi, di or mik, dik in the accusative. To these Low German dialects must also be added those spoken east of the Elbe on what was originally Slavonic territory; they have the ending -en in the first and third person plural of verbs. ”

“ Naturalness on the German side, arbitrariness and artificiality on the foreign side, are the fundamental differences. If we keep to the former we are just like all our fellow-Germans, who understand us and accept us as their equals ”

“ A wise foreign policy will extricate England from continental struggles, and keep her outside German, Russian, French, or Austrian disputes. I have for some time observed a tendency in the government attitude to pursue a different line of action, which I have not been able to modify or check. This tendency is certain to be accentuated if large estimates are presented to and voted by parliament. The possession of a very sharp sword offers a temptation which becomes irresistible to demonstrate the efficiency of the weapon in a practical manner. ”

“ He attended the Berlin Conference, in which he gave his services to the American delegation as an expert adviser on geographical and technical questions. He lectured in Germany on the commercial possibilities of the newly discovered region, and did much to rouse German interest in Central African trade and exploitation. In England, by lectures and by personal communication with influential groups of financiers and merchants, he endeavoured to promote enterprise in the equatorial regions, and he tried hard to get his scheme for a Congo railway carried out by Engfish capitalists. ”

“ It cannot be known when the great Teutonic race was split up into High Germans, Low Germans, and Scandinavians. Hard is it to explain why each of them stuck to peculiar old forms; why the High Germans should have kept the Present Plural of their Verb (a point in which Old English fails woefully) , almost as it is in Sanscrit and Latin; why the Low Germans (this term includes the Goths and English) should in general have clung closer to the old inflec­tions than their brethren did, and have refused to corrupt the letter t into s ”

“ As a people made up of the most extraordinary mixing and mingling of races, perhaps even with a preponderance of the pre-Aryan element as the "people of the centre" in every sense of the term, the Germans are more intangible, more ample, more contradictory, more unknown, more incalculable, more surprising, and even more terrifying than other peoples are to themselves:--they escape DEFINITION, and are thereby alone the despair of the French. It IS characteristic of the Germans that the question: "What is German?" never dies out among them. ”

“ There are words of Goethe in which he condemns with impatient severity, as from a foreign land, that which Germans take a pride in, he once defined the famous German turn of mind as "Indulgence towards its own and others' weaknesses." Was he wrong? it is characteristic of Germans that one is seldom entirely wrong about them. The German soul has passages and galleries in it, there are caves, hiding- places, and dungeons therein, its disorder has much of the charm of the mysterious, the German is well acquainted with the bypaths to chaos. ”

“ For I know that even where you sit walled about by your flatterers, ramparted against the intrusion of any fresh breath of criticism, and protected by entanglements of barbed wire against any hint of doubt as to your god-like attributes—even there I know that my voice shall in time reach you, and you shall become aware that there is a German who dares to say of you what millions of Germans think and soon will dare to say. ”

“ The loneliness and the climate seem to grip a German as they never do an Englishman, and he becomes irritable and ugly and unreasonably annoyed by trifles, so that when a native fails to get out of his way quickly enough, or to salute him with the punctiliousness which he considers his due, he flies into a rage and orders the man to be flogged. ”

“ I am only speaking, directly, about the Germans of the present day, who have had to suffer more than other people from the feebleness of personality and the opposition of substance and form. “Form” generally implies for us some convention, disguise or hypocrisy, and if not hated, is at any rate not loved. We have an extraordinary fear of both the word convention and the thing. This fear drove the German from the French school ”

“ Whoever believes in stagnation, retrogression, and the round dance of which we spoke, or who sets a dead nature at the helm of the world’s government, wherever he may have been born and whatever language he speaks, is non-German and a stranger to us ”