Notes on Der Dativ ist dem Genitiv sein Tod by Bastian Sick
Published by marco on
In an effort to continue improving my German, I read the book mentioned in the title, which is a rollicking guide to the finicky nuance of the German language. A few years back, I read Eat, Shoots and Leaves by Lynne Truss, which effects a similar service for the English language. Another absolutely wonderful essay on the issue of usage and grammar is Tense Present: Democracy, English, and the wars over usage by David Foster Wallace (a few citations of which are documented on earthli News), which not only provides solid usage advice for what he (DFW) calls SWE (Standard Written English) but also a scintillating philosophical underpinning to a theory of dialect.
The German book above does something similar, with excursions into the nether regions of German grammar, in which certain parts of the country completely disdain the Accusative case whereas others ignore the Dative and pretty much the whole colloquial mass has decided to leave the Genetive well enough alone. Sick—as Wallace before him—acknowledges that people can’t be expected to get everything right when German—with its three genders, gender-specific declensions, multiple cases, verbs that have a single declension, verbs that can be in one of two declensions and verbs that decline differently depending on object type (human or object?) and time of day (that’s an exaggeration, but students of German know what I mean). Throw into the mix the fact that German actually has at least two official versions—old and new grammar, though only new grammar should really be used at this point, having been issued initially in 1996—and there is definitely a tendency for native German speakers and writers to feel like they can do what they please—because it’s got to be correct somewhere.
But, just because it’s difficult doesn’t mean that getting it wrong is somehow acceptable. It may be colloquially accepted and common practice even in news organs that should know better, but it’s still wrong. Wrong in this case being not grammatically correct by the official definition, which is all that is really salient when discussing a written language[1]. And, though some grammatical rules seem designed just to separate native speakers from those less fortunate, many rules are there to not only impart clarity, but to impart a lyrical quality that defines the language, that makes the language what it is, that makes the language “sound” right to a native speaker.
Reading Finickily[2]
Once you get to this level of language finickiness, though, you start to read everything through the lens of an editor. A recent example for this author was the home page of the JediChurch – Jedi Religion and Jedi Faith. The few small paragraphs describing the Jedi religion are fraught with poor phrasing and grammatical errors, enough so that they act as nigh-insurmountable speed bumps to a snoot (to borrow a term from DFW)[3].
For example, the initial paragraph:
“The Jedi Church believes that there is one all powerful force that binds all things in the universe together. The Jedi religion is something innate inside everyone of us, the Jedi Church believes that our sense of morality is innate. So quiet your mind and listen to the force within you!”
First off, “all-powerful” is missing a hyphen. Secondly—and more egregiously—”binding” things “together” is redundant: it’s sufficient to say that they are bound. Also, if you’re addressing “all things”, you don’t have to specify “in the universe” because that’s redundant too. It would be far more succinct to write “one all-powerful force that binds all things.”
Furthermore, when something is “innate”, it’s already clear that it’s “inside”: that’s what innate means. Also, “everyone” is an object, the sought-for construction in this case is “every one”. The “something” can be omitted because it’s substituting a subject from which the sentence has not yet switched (“Jedi religion”, which immediately precedes it). The phrase “of us” is, sadly, also redundant, having already been sufficiently included in “every one”. But, instead of switching back to “everyone”, let’s retain “all of us”, which is warmer and more apropos to a religion. So, let’s rewrite the second sentence as “The Jedi religion is innate to all of us.”
Notice how we ended the sentence right there instead of retaining the purely nonsensical comma, placed in the original in what seems to have been a mad effort to continue the sentence despite its having so clearly been completed. It is here that a semicolon would (possibly) have been appropriate. I imagine that this was a Jedi trick played in order to keep us from noticing that the word “Jedi” and “innate” were used twice in rapid succession.
After reading that far, I decided that the Jedi religion was not for me. Writing isn’t easy, and writing without an editor is even harder[4]. The Jedi home page smacks of a person who has too little practice succintly and clearly expressing himself[5] in written form. Many people in this situation tend to use a manner of expression that they consider above their station in order to sound more sophisticated. And that insecurity is often the source of the slightly skewed use and redundant phrasing evident in passages like the one cited above.
And perhaps also in this essay[6].