The sound of German

What does German sound like to your average speaker of English? Not great, apparently.

In Don DeLillo’s 1984 novel White Noise, which I’m currently reading on the recommendation of a friend, the main character attends a German lesson and behold: “When [the teacher] switched from English to German, it was as through a cord had been twisted in his larynx. An abrupt emotion entered his voice, a scrape and gargle that sounded like the stirring of some beast’s ambition. He gaped at me and gestured, he croaked, he verged on strangulation. Sounds came spewing from the base of his tongue, harsh noises damp with passion. He was only demonstrating certain basic pronunciation patterns but the transformation in his face and voice made me think he was making a passage between levels of being.”

Whoa, whooooa Don, calm down! It’s just another West Germanic language.

In Neither Here nor There, Bill Bryson describes German as “coarse and bestial” (offering “Lebensgröße” or “life-sized” as supporting evidence) and declares that German words for food sound like “the noises of a rutting pig.” Examples include “Portion Schlagobers,” which is a portion of whipped cream.

Is “whipped cream” really a term of such delicate beauty that it puts “Schlagobers” (or the more usual “Schlagsahne”) to shame? If your native language is English, you might think so. But that’s only because when you say “whipped cream,” you picture a delightful dessert. Say it a few times and try to forget what it means. “Whipped cream.” That’s a heck of a consonant cluster in the middle – ptcr – and we usually don’t consider those aesthetically pleasing. “Toilet brush” sounds prettier than “whipped cream.” Now consider that “Schlagobers” sounds lovely to German speakers for the same reason “whipped cream” does to English speakers: because of the light and fluffy concoction they envision when they say it.

One of the reasons I enjoyed deleting my F***b*** account was that my so-called friends kept pasting this video on my wall:

I could respond to this at length, but instead, here’s a perfect video response from “Easy Languages”:

It all depends on how you say it. Well, that and some other things. What determines whether we find another language beautiful or not?

Partly the sound patterns we’re accustomed to from our native language. English speakers seem to really dislike the voiceless velar fricative – the “ch” in “Bach.” Many languages have it but we generally regard it as a strike against them in the beauty department. It’s the reason why Bryson calls Dutch “a series of desperate hacking noises.” But to people who grow up with it, it’s just another sound in their language, which can give off friendly, elegant, tragic, cute, derisive or angry vibes according to the speaker’s mood.

In the case of German, we’re also influenced by the countless films where German soldiers goosestep into Poland barking orders at terrified civilians, or smack brave resistance fighters with their leather gloves before torturing them mercilessly. You know the drill. But if you need a reminder of that sound, here’s the late Bruno Ganz (RIP) yelling in Downfall.

Now let’s hear something totally different, sticking with Bruno Ganz for the sake of comparison.

Does this German sound as “scary” or “ugly” to you as the Downfall scene? If so, could that be based more on your feelings about history than the actual sounds coming out of his mouth? What if we could get some input here from an English speaker whose opinions were completely unaffected by WWII because it hadn’t happened yet? Here’s one that’s readily available: Mark Twain in The Awful German Language, 1880. He spends most of the essay arguing that German grammar and syntax are needlessly complex and convoluted, but here’s what he has to say about the sound of it:

“I think that a description of any loud, stirring, tumultuous episode must be tamer in German than in English. Our descriptive words of this character have such a deep, strong, resonant sound, while their German equivalents do seem so thin and mild and energyless. Boom, burst, crash, roar, storm, bellow, blow, thunder, explosion; howl, cry, shout, yell, groan; battle, hell. These are magnificent words; the have a force and magnitude of sound befitting the things which they describe. But their German equivalents would be ever so nice to sing the children to sleep with, or else my awe-inspiring ears were made for display and not for superior usefulness in analyzing sounds. Would any man want to die in a battle which was called by so tame a term as a Schlacht? Or would not a consumptive feel too much bundled up, who was about to go out, in a shirt-collar and a seal-ring, into a storm which the bird-song word Gewitter was employed to describe? And observe the strongest of the several German equivalents for explosion — Ausbruch. Our word Toothbrush is more powerful than that. It seems to me that the Germans could do worse than import it into their language to describe particularly tremendous explosions with. The German word for hell — Hölle — sounds more like helly than anything else; therefore, how necessarily chipper, frivolous, and unimpressive it is. If a man were told in German to go there, could he really rise to the dignity of feeling insulted?”

Well, well, well. So German’s not harsh enough.

These attempts to try to pin down a definite “feel” for the sound of a given word are pretty futile, by the way. If the sound of “hell” were as intrinsically dreadful as Twain implies, we wouldn’t name sweet little girls “Helen.”

I could go on for a few more pages, but I should probably stop here with some closing advice: try to appreciate each language on its own terms. They all sound different, and everyone thinks their own language sounds nice.

Also, here are a few of the words that (IMHO) sound nicer in German than in English:

dragonfly	Libelle
chocolate	Schokolade
love	Liebe
paper	Papier
pretty	schön
branch (of a tree)	Ast
branch (of a company)	Filiale
egg	Ei
microwave	Mikrowelle
instruction	Anleitung