Give me time for an explanation

Weird German word order

As far as anthropologists are concerned, language first developed some 80,000 years ago in Central Africa, give or take a few tens of thousands, among tribes of Homo sapiens who happened to develop a vocal tract in their throats capable of feats similar to the beautiful utterances of songbirds. In animal kingdom, this was a rarity. At the beginning, the use they made of their new anatomy was probably not revolutionary, despite their already fairly large brains. It would have resembled what they had always done and what their feathered relatives did: producing sounds that, each standing for itself, expressed social bonds, territorial claims or references to third parties, such as predators or prey. Amhere. Goaway. Lion. Grammar was for a later age.

We may take it for granted that this new thing evolved very, very slowly, as humans developed their tools, left the continent and spread across Europe, Asia, and then Australia, the Americas and Oceania. Language was a possibility from then on, but was it necessary? There may have been subspecies of Homo sapiens who could only grunt or squeak living along those who could speak and sing for millenia. In the long run, those who developed languages had an advantage in social organisation and competition, and those who didn’t died out. But speaking wasn’t invented quickly, nor does the biblical notion of a primal language that was dispersed in the wake of Babel make much sense to us today.

There must have been myriads of primal idioms, each confined to a small band of roaming hunter-gatherers, evolving, adapting through contact with neighbouring clans and being erased in processes of conquest and cultural assimilation as larger units of human co-existence formed, from tribes to kingdoms and states. But their origins lie in the haze of pre-history, there’s nothing comparable that could be observed today.

And how do you even start devising a system of structured communication if nobody is capable of analytical thinking, mainly because it requires language itself to develop and sharpen? Imagine an inventive songbird, a starling prodigy, using its call for ‘Go away’ to mean simply ‘No’ and combining it with a wooing song into a phrase that means ‘I don’t need a mate’. Clever, but who was going to understand it? The idea of grammar, of concatenating symbols that would normally contradict each other into something with a completely new meaning by logical rules, is so outlandish and beyond the reach of most animal brains that it must have taken a long time for it to take hold, even among reasonable stone-age humans. And unlike in a German class, there was no English to explain what you mean. But eventually, grammar became a thing.

Then again, the way it evolved was not completely arbitrary. As languages are products of our brains and have been shaped by the way we experience the world, there are some remarkable constants in how humans speak, and one of them is in what we call syntax. All languages group words into sentences. And all of them have a notion of the basic components a sentence must have. In modern words, a sentence describes what an agent (or actor) is doing (the action) to a patient (the one acted upon), and in a normal English or German statement, these are called subject, verb and object. The object is optional, but the subject and verb must be there, whatever you call them.

This basic principle is universal to human language, but it leaves room for variety in at least one important aspect: which comes first? Subject, verb or object? The order just mentioned – SVO, for short – is that of English and its closer relatives, and it may seem natural to you if your mother tongue also uses it. But it is by no means universal. It’s not even the most frequent one, but that depends on how you count.

If you go by number of speakers, SVO does predominate indeed because it includes the Chinese dialects, the Sub-Saharan Bantu languages of Africa and the Indo-European family. But according to WALS, the World Atlas of Language Structures, the most frequent word order worldwide is SOV, or subject-object-verb, which is common on the Indian subcontinent, in Papua New Guinea and in most Native American languages. That’s where the greatest linguistic diversity is, and both systems combined account for about eighty percent of the languages of the world. Arrangements with the verb at the beginning (verb-subject-object, verb-object-subject) are about one order of magnitude less frequent, and those starting with the object exist but are rare.

And then there is German, where it gets really weird. Yes, we do use SVO in general, but we have a couple of tricks up our sleeve to bewilder you. Juggling with verbs, you may call them. As a rule, the verb in a Hauptsatz is always at the second position (counting parts of speech, not words), which means that it may change place unexpectedly when new elements are inserted. The sentence Ich wasche meine H?nde has classical SVO word order, but if you add a specification, it sudddenly switches to VSO: Gleich wasche ich meine H?nde. Darn! Germans hardly ever notice what happened here, but this sleight of hand baffles learners so much that they keep getting it wrong even after they can say Wasserstra?en- und Schifffahrtsverwaltung correctly.

Then, splitting up a verb and propelling its components to opposite ends of a sentence seems an implausible thing to do at first. Look at the verb auftrennen in this sentence: Wir trennen dieses Verb auf. Not an idea everyone would have. But learners seem to have less of a problem with this than with the position two rule, perhaps because it resembles what English does with phrasal verbs, as in We can split this phrasal verb up. Just that there is no infinitive to upsplit in English.

More curious still is what we do in that special construction called Nebensatz, where we put the whole verb at the end. Yes, at the end, thereby switching to SOV word order. Or, as Mark Twain put it in 1880: “You observe how far that verb is from the reader's base of operations; well, in a German newspaper they put their verb away over on the next page; and I have heard that sometimes after stringing along the exciting preliminaries and parentheses for a column or two, they get in a hurry and have to go to press without getting to the verb at all.”

That’s a bit overstated because such long sentences are rare and generally considered bad style. When they occur, they may pose a challenge to interpreters who have to simultaneously translate from German to English, say, at a conference. If the speaker starts a Nebensatz, you have to wait for it to be finished until you get at the verb, which is the prerequisite for even starting your English translation. Unless you can figure it out before and make an informed guess.

But that’s a very theoretical issue. I’ve done simultaneous interpreting, and the biggest problem are not phrases with the verb at the end but speakers who, lacking a manuscript, have no idea what they’re going to say, don’t finish their sentences, start all over again in the middle and generally make a mess of grammar and reason. They are quite frequent.

I can’t say why we use three different systems of word order in German, but we are not alone. Citing WALS again, about fourteen percent of all languages have changing or flexible word order, and surely no native speaker has ever felt that this is odd or particularly difficult or has any impact on the things they can express. Most Germans are not even aware of what they do with the verb in a Nebensatz.

Is there any advantage in putting the verb at the end of a sentence? Well, if you think long enough, you may find one. That’s what we’re going to do. Don’t take it too seriously, though. When the human brain reflects on its own products, such as language, it’s likely to fall for self-deception and circular reasoning. But thinking is fun, and that’s why I do it and write about it.

So imagine you were out last night, and it was a long night, as far as you can tell. You must have been drinking. You wake up on the sofa in the living room. Standing beside the sofa is your significant other. Let’s assume it’s a she, and from what she says, you gather that she expected you to be home earlier. Fair enough. She sounds angry, she might be suspicious or jealous. Then comes the obvious question: “Warum bist du so sp?t gekommen?”

The question is of the causal variety, and the word warum triggers the obvious reply:

Weil ich...

That’s a good start, and the only possible one at that. But you need time. What did you do? You don’t remember. It was five o’clock when you came home, that much you do know because the clock in the living room said so. So let’s start with that.

Weil ich bis früh um fünf…

You started in the pub, there were a lot of people, and then you met your old pal Carsten and went with him. That’s worth mentioning because it will make it clear that there’s no reason for jealousy.

Weil ich bis früh um fünf mit Carsten…

Yes, you first went to a discotheque, but that was just an intermezzo. Let’s not mention it. You ended up at his place.

Weil ich bis früh um fünf mit Carsten zu Hause…

More precisely, in the kitchen.

Weil ich bis früh um fünf mit Carsten zu Hause in der Küche…

Now the details start flooding in. There was that wooden table with drinks on it.

Weil ich bis früh um fünf mit Carsten in der Küche am Tisch…

What were you doing at the table? Sitting, of course, that’s a no-brainer.

Weil ich bis früh um fünf mit Carsten in der Küche am Tisch gesessen…

What else did you do? More drinking, but let’s not go into that. Chatting, then. You don’t remember the details of your conversation, and it surely was erratic. Lots of things about old times and old friends.

Weil ich bis früh um fünf mit Carsten in der Küche am Tisch gesessen und über früher und die alten Freunde…

We're almost there. The only thing that’s missing to complete your excuse is a verb, and now it’s easy to find:

Weil ich bis früh um fünf mit Carsten in der Küche am Tisch gesessen und über früher und die alten Freunde gequatscht… habe.

How kind of German grammar to let you fill in the details in the order in which you remember them and spare you the verb until the very end. It gives you time to think.

If you look closely, German does this even in normal statements whenever we use the Perfekt:

Ich habe bis früh um fünf mit Carsten über die alten Zeiten gequatscht.

The conjugated verb, habe, is in position two, but it doesn’t tell you what happened, just that it was in the past. The real information, gequatscht, comes at the end. Compare this with the English translation:

I chatted about the old times with Carsten until five in the morning.

The order of information is almost reversed here, from the important to the less important, like in a press release, while German starts with the background information and fills in the crucial details later.

This goes beyond the subject-verb-object question, and I’d love to state boldly that it’s a general principle of German syntax, but there are lots of counter-examples. When we make compound nouns, we put the most specific part first, like in English – but then again, we reverse the order if they are written as separate words: Leipzig University becomes die Universit?t Leipzig, and a phrase like at five o’clock today would sound impossible in German. It’s always heute um fünf Uhr.

So, the idea of starting with the background picture and getting more specific as you speak is not ubiquitous in German, but we seem to have some preference for it. The German Nebensatz relies on it, we often use it when talking about the past, and it can be handy in certain situations – like when you don’t remember things clearly at first. But I have no doubt that speakers of English or any other language with strict SVO word order would be able to make up a justification for coming home late just as well.

Lest you think that German culture is all about drinking, my next post will deal with the grammatical implications of eating potatoes with green salad, but it may take a while because it’s holiday time. Also, it will be written in German. So, if you’re not a native speaker, you may prefer to take an intensive course in the meantime instead of sitting at kitchen tables and chatting about the old times when language was invented at the dawn of human civilisation.