Grammar Rock

Did you know that the Schoolhouse Rock song, Unpack Your Adjectives, was sung by Blossom Dearie? She's a marvelous dame — I had the pleasure of meeting her once, several years ago. When I admired her unabashedly gaudy gold jacket she exclaimed, in her little-girl voice, "Really? I bought it right off the rack!"

Peel Me A Grape is her song, not Diana Krall's.

But I digress.

In an earlier post you were cautioned not to get me started on apostrophes. That is because I tend to rant about grammar, often to the dismay of my friends who would rather rant about the tragi-comic U.S. election, or the war in Iraq, or the ludicrocity of Gilles Duceppe giving a speech to Bay Street bankers. So I must warn you again:

DANGER, WILL ROBINSON! SHE'S GOING TO RANT ABOUT GRAMMAR!

Feel free to step away from the blog. I won't be at all offended.

OK, everybody gone but the game grammarians? To continue:

It's all well and good to rant when no one's listening, but ever since Tim Bray mentioned me, much to my overwhelming surprise, it seems I've acquired some readers. And some of them are as grammar-obsessed as I. Suddenly, I'm minding my Ps and Qs even more than I normally do.

Tim Trautmann wrote:

While I like your blog of course I was wondering if the spelling error in your blog's title was on purpose or by accident? If I remember my German correctly, it is: Postmoderne Sprachspiele (without the 'n' at the end) but "sprachspielen" could be a verb as in - to play with language.

I was so excited that someone was (a) reading my blog and (2) liking it (Did he say he liked it of course?) that I was unable to fully appreciate that he was nitpicking my grammar. In German, no less. You gotta love that in a man. At least I do.

Later that same day, Ingo Lütkebohle wrote from Germany to say:

It might be intentional, but I thought I'd mention it anyway: the German plural in your blog title is slightly off. The 'n' at the end makes it a verb instead of a noun. "Sprachspielen" means "playing with language" whereas (I guess!) you meant to say "postmodern language games" which would be without the 'n': "postmoderne sprachspiele".

When two people point out the same error, especially in the same day, the chances are good that they're right. So I wrote back to both Tim and Ingo asking if they had any suggestions. I didn't want to change my blog title or URL.

Ingo replied:

You could change the title to "postmodernes sprachspielen" (note 's' at the end) and while the abbreviation as used in the URL is the same, the expanded form is grammatically correct german. How does that sound? I have to admit that it would be slightly more unusual for germans to use that in a title, but it is done and the slight oddness goes well with the meaning, I think. Ich hoffe das hilft Dir weiter und liebe Grüsse aus Deutschland :-)

Not only is it a deliciously elegant solution to my problem, but it allows me to keep the URL and make only a minor change to the title.

I wrote back to thank him:

...I really want to understand the grammar/usage here. Why is Postmodernes Sprachspielen grammatically correct German, but Postmoderne Sprachspielen is not? I realize that English readers don't know that I made an error, and probably wouldn't care, but I also know, being of German heritage on both sides of my family, that Germans (1) will notice, and (b) will care.

And explain Ingo did:

Glad you like it ;-) The suggestion was mainly by intuition, to be honest. However, it was fun trying to figure out why exactly I would say it that way, after the fact, and even though the explanation is a bit involved, and I got carried away a bit, I hope you like it. Some of the details are from the standard book on german grammar the "Duden", part 4.

Basically, adjective and noun have to agree on certain properties in German and the noun 'rules' the adjective, so if the noun changes, the adjective has to change accordingly.

I must interject quickly here, to tell you (if you're still with me, and god bless you if you are!) that I do understand about cases in German, it's just that I don't always know how to use them correctly. But I recognized immediately that my error was one of grammar, not of spelling. It's not that I just forgot the "s", it's that I thought it didn't belong there. Back to Ingo's brilliant explanation:

The two relevant attributes here are number and gender. So, looking at "sprachspiele", its a composite of "sprache" and "spiele", and because it is a special kind of game (as opposed to a special kind of language), the gender of "spiel" applies and that is neutral. There are a lot of exceptions to this gender rule (e.g., quite often when words are imported from other languages), but here it applies.

Now, what comes into play with your blog title is the number. The standard neutral-plural ending for adjectives is 'e'. The corresponding neutral-singular ending is 'es'. For nouns, the plural ending differs a lot but "sprachspielen" is singular. You will have noticed that "postmodern" is neither -- it is a form used only with verbs (more on that later).

As "sprachspielen" was fixed in your URL and the adjective wasn't, it occured to me that it would be possible to change the adjective to match the noun and thereby make it grammatically correct again.

Actually, there are two possibilities. You can treat "sprachspielen" as either a verb or a noun (thus my comment to that effect in the first mail). This might seem odd, but is quite a common occurence, in English as well. The type of the word is strictly determined only by its place in the sentence and since your title is just a fragment, ambiguity arises.

Now, if you treat it as a noun, the standard adjective suffix applies, which is 'es' and thus my suggestion.

If you treat is a verb, the matching suffix is "n", so it would become "postmodern sprachspielen".

Actually, now that I think about it in detail, my original translation is more appropriate for the verb case. A really literal translation for the noun case that I suggested in my last mail could be "a game of postmodernistically playing with language". Quite a mouthful, isn't it? ;-)

Now, what to chose? Both possibilities are equally valid and there is not really a clear rule to decide. I used intuition here. Two guesses at an explanation for my choice: One is that I, personally, tend to use nouns more than verbs. At least my German teacher used to complain about that! The other guess is that, in everyday usage on signs and such, when people use just a fragment, it usually contains a noun, not necessarily a verb.

I suppose this is a case where literal translation isn't suitable. In English, I would have used a verb, in German I would have preferred the noun form. I guess even though English and German are pretty close, there are slight differences in usage.

P.S. Ja, ich mag meine Muttersprache sehr :)

Ingo, ich mag dich sehr!

In the next story, Postmodern Sass avoids her friend Magda.