Compare the similar clustering of prepositions in the following highly contrived English sentence: German subordinate clauses have all verbs clustered at the end. Given that auxiliaries encode future , passive , modality , and the perfect , very long chains of verbs at the end of the sentence can occur. In these constructions, the past participle in ge- is often replaced by the infinitive. Most German vocabulary is derived from the Germanic branch of the European language family. Latin words were already imported into the predecessor of the German language during the Roman Empire and underwent all the characteristic phonetic changes in German.
Their origin is thus no longer recognizable for most speakers e. Borrowing from Latin continued after the fall of the Roman Empire during Christianization, mediated by the church and monasteries. Another important influx of Latin words can be observed during Renaissance humanism. In a scholarly context, the borrowings from Latin have continued until today, in the last few decades often indirectly through borrowings from English.
During the 15th to 17th centuries, the influence of Italian was great, leading to many Italian loanwords in the fields of architecture, finance, and music. The influence of the French language in the 17th to 19th centuries resulted in an even greater import of French words. The English influence was already present in the 19th century, but it did not become dominant until the second half of the 20th century.
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At the same time, the effectiveness of the German language in forming equivalents for foreign words from its inherited Germanic stem repertory is great. The tradition of loan translation was revitalized in the 18th century, with linguists like Joachim Heinrich Campe , who introduced close to words that are still used in modern German. Even today, there are movements that try to promote the Ersatz substitution of foreign words deemed unnecessary with German alternatives.
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As in English, there are many pairs of synonyms due to the enrichment of the Germanic vocabulary with loanwords from Latin and Latinized Greek. These words often have different connotations from their Germanic counterparts and are usually perceived as more scholarly.
The size of the vocabulary of German is difficult to estimate. The modern German scientific vocabulary is estimated at nine million words and word groups based on the analysis of 35 million sentences of a corpus in Leipzig, which as of July included million words in total. The Duden is the de facto official dictionary of the German language, first published by Konrad Duden in The Duden is updated regularly, with new editions appearing every four or five years.
As of August [update] , it is in its 27th edition and in 12 volumes, each covering different aspects such as loanwords , etymology , pronunciation , synonyms , and so forth.
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The first of these volumes, Die deutsche Rechtschreibung German Orthography , has long been the prescriptive source for the spelling of German. The Duden has become the bible of the German language, being the definitive set of rules regarding grammar, spelling and usage of German. It is the Austrian counterpart to the German Duden and contains a number of terms unique to Austrian German or more frequently used or differently pronounced there.
The most recent edition is the 42nd from The dictionary is also officially used in the Italian province of South Tyrol. This is a selection of cognates in both English and German. Instead of the usual infinitive ending -en German verbs are indicated by a hyphen "-" after their stems. Words that are written with capital letters in German are nouns. German is written in the Latin alphabet. Because legibility and convenience set certain boundaries, compounds consisting of more than three or four nouns are almost exclusively found in humorous contexts.
In contrast, although English can also string nouns together, it usually separates the nouns with spaces. For example, "toilet bowl cleaner". Some operating systems use key sequences to extend the set of possible characters to include, amongst other things, umlauts; in Microsoft Windows this is done using Alt codes. German readers understand these transcriptions although they appear unusual , but they are avoided if the regular umlauts are available because they are a makeshift, not proper spelling.
In Westphalia and Schleswig-Holstein, city and family names exist where the extra e has a vowel lengthening effect, e. There is no general agreement on where letters with umlauts occur in the sorting sequence. Telephone directories treat them by replacing them with the base vowel followed by an e. Some dictionaries sort each umlauted vowel as a separate letter after the base vowel, but more commonly words with umlauts are ordered immediately after the same word without umlauts.
These variants of the Latin alphabet are very different from the serif or sans-serif Antiqua typefaces used today, and the handwritten forms in particular are difficult for the untrained to read. The printed forms, however, were claimed by some to be more readable when used for Germanic languages. The Nazis initially promoted Fraktur and Schwabacher because they were considered Aryan , but they abolished them in , claiming that these letters were Jewish.
The Fraktur script however remains present in everyday life in pub signs, beer brands and other forms of advertisement, where it is used to convey a certain rusticality and antiquity. Many Antiqua typefaces include the long s also. A specific set of rules applies for the use of long s in German text, but nowadays it is rarely used in Antiqua typesetting. The long s only appears in lower case. The orthography reform of led to public controversy and considerable dispute.
After 10 years, without any intervention by the federal parliament, a major revision was installed in , just in time for the coming school year. In , some traditional spellings were finally invalidated, whereas in , on the other hand, many of the old comma rules were again put in force.
Traditionally, this letter was used in three situations:. In German, vowels excluding diphthongs; see below are either short or long , as follows:. In general, the short vowels are open and the long vowels are close. Whether any particular vowel letter represents the long or short phoneme is not completely predictable, although the following regularities exist:. Both of these rules have exceptions e. For an i that is neither in the combination ie making it long nor followed by a double consonant or cluster making it short , there is no general rule.
In some cases, there are regional differences: In central Germany Hessen , the o in the proper name "Hoffmann" is pronounced long, whereas most other Germans would pronounce it short; the same applies to the e in the geographical name " Mecklenburg " for people in that region. With approximately 25 phonemes, the German consonant system exhibits an average number of consonants in comparison with other languages.
German language
The consonant inventory of the standard language is shown below. German does not have any dental fricatives as English th. The th sounds, which the English language still has, disappeared on the continent in German with the consonant shifts between the 8th and the 10th centuries. Likewise, the gh in Germanic English words, pronounced in several different ways in modern English as an f , or not at all , can often be linked to German ch: The German language is used in German literature and can be traced back to the Middle Ages , with the most notable authors of the period being Walther von der Vogelweide and Wolfram von Eschenbach.
The Nibelungenlied , whose author remains unknown, is also an important work of the epoch. The fairy tales collections collected and published by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm in the 19th century became famous throughout the world. Reformer and theologian Martin Luther , who was the first to translate the Bible into German, is widely credited for having set the basis for the modern "High German" language. Thirteen German-speaking people have won the Nobel Prize in literature: English has taken many loanwords from German, often without any change of spelling aside from, often, the elimination of umlauts and not capitalizing nouns:.
The government-backed Goethe-Institut [84] named after the famous German author Johann Wolfgang von Goethe aims to enhance the knowledge of German culture and language within Europe and the rest of the world. This is done by holding exhibitions and conferences with German-related themes, and providing training and guidance in the learning and use of the German language.
Publications
The Dortmund-based Verein Deutsche Sprache VDS , which was founded in , supports the German language and is the largest language association of citizens in the world. The VDS has more than thirty-five thousand members in over seventy countries. Its founder, statistics professor Dr. The German state broadcaster Deutsche Welle is the equivalent of the British BBC World Service and provides radio and television broadcasts in German and 30 other languages across the globe.
Deutsche Welle also provides an e-learning website to learn German. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. For other uses, see Deutsch disambiguation and German disambiguation. Not to be confused with Germanic languages. Co- Official and majority language. Co-official, but not majority language.
Early New High German. Geographical distribution of German speakers. Italy South Tyrol 0. German is official language de jure or de facto and first language of the majority of the population. German is a co-official language, but not the first language of the majority of the population.
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Retrieved 24 July Europeans and their languages" PDF report. Archived from the original PDF on 6 January Retrieved 11 October Retrieved 3 May Retrieved 7 July Retrieved 28 September Retrieved August 6, Old English and its closest relatives: An Anthology of German Literature. Zur Geschichte der Deutschen Sprache. A history of the German language: University of Washington Press. A history of German: Geschichte der deutschen Sprache. The Encyclopedia of Christianity. Eerdmans; Brill, —, 1: A history of the German language. University of California Libraries.
The German Nation and Martin Luther. The "Duden" and its History". Die Rolle der II. Orthographischen Konferenz in der Geschichte der deutschen Rechtschreibung. Journal of the Simplified Spelling Society. Archived from the original on 23 September Retrieved 18 July Statista, The Statistics Portal. Retrieved 11 July Archived from the original on 4 March Retrieved 20 June Supplement of the Allgemeine Zeitung. Archived from the original PDF on 24 June Retrieved 23 June Markedness and salience in language contact and second-language acquisition: Founding Provisions South African Government".
Retrieved 15 March German Dialects map ". Volume 2, Reference Survey" 1st ed. Retrieved 12 June Archived from the original on 10 May Retrieved 10 May Retrieved 17 October Retrieved 21 August Walter de Gruyter, Berlin Archived from the original on 15 May The "Duden" and Its History". The Publisher as Teacher: Retrieved 5 December It is wrong to regard or to describe the so-called Gothic script as a German script.
In reality, the so-called Gothic script consists of Schwabach Jew letters. Just as they later took control of the newspapers, upon the introduction of printing the Jews residing in Germany took control of the printing presses and thus in Germany the Schwabach Jew letters were forcefully introduced.
All printed materials are to be gradually converted to this normal script. As soon as is feasible in terms of textbooks, only the normal script will be taught in village and state schools. The use of the Schwabach Jew letters by officials will in future cease; appointment certifications for functionaries, street signs, and so forth will in future be produced only in normal script.
Form und Geschichte der gebrochenen Schriften. Retrieved 24 January Retrieved 14 June The Consonants of German: The German Language in a Changing Europe. Retrieved 6 February Lay summary 6 February The Structure of German. Retrieved 26 February Routledge Language Family Descriptions. Lay summary 26 February The survey of the Germanic branch languages includes chapters by Winfred P. The Advanced Learner's Guide. Biography of a Language. Combines linguistic, anthropological, and historical perspectives in a "biography" of German in terms of six "signal events" over millennia, including the Battle of Kalkriese, which blocked the spread of Latin-based language north.
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Primarily German-speaking Europe , also in the worldwide German-speaking diaspora. Latin German alphabet German Braille. No official regulation German orthography regulated by the Council for German Orthography [4]. This article contains IPA phonetic symbols. Without proper rendering support , you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of Unicode characters. For a guide to IPA symbols, see Help: German alphabet Listen to a German speaker recite the alphabet in German.
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