Re: High 'n' Low (was Re: 'Roman catholics')

Chris Waigl wrote: 
This is correct. There's also "Mitteldeutsch", in the middle. As far
as I know -- but I'm not a specialist by any stretch -- Luther's
bible translation has strongly contributed to the standardisation of
German: he had to pick a variety. The way I've heard it, he wrote in
a rather artificial dialect that was geared towards
comprehensibility for all literate Germans, but that none the
less was based on High German. Over time, a standardised High
German became the prestige variety, with regional dialects
holding their own, but not being used in writing. Today, the
distinction is still very visible in the local dialects.

[...]

Luther himself told us nearly 500 years ago what he had done to translate
the Bible at a time when Latin was still the language of educated men.
Before Luther, there had been translations of some parts, which Luther felt
learned gentlemen had just bashed into a kind of fake German far removed
from the way Germans actually spoke. Moreover, Luther was the first one not
to translate just the Vulgate, the official Latin translation. He translated
from the original languages, Hebrew and Greek.

Luther said as a basis for his translation he had taken the language used by
German kings and princes in their correspondence. That artificial language
was known as the Saxon or Meissen official style (sächsische
Kanzleisprache/Meißner Kanzleisprache). But Luther said its cardboard,
stilted phrases weren't adequate to translate what he considered the poetic
language of the Bible; therefore, he said, he had to coin new words and
phases, always guided by how he believed just ordinary people could be
expected to express a given idea.

Luther said he wanted Germans reading his translation to realize immediately
that he was speaking to them in their own language. To find out how they
spoke, he said, he had listened to them carefully. He had gone into the
marketplace to hear them; he had listened to children talking as they played
in the streets; and he had listened to mothers in their homes talking to
their families.

Luther explained his ideas in his own words in his "Epistle on Translating,"
which was published in 1530 and is still fascinating reading today. In it,
Luther regularly refers to his critics as "asses" (Esel) and cites examples
of how not to do a literal, stilted translation but to come up with a
natural version that does the best job of getting the meaning across.
Everything he said was controversial and picked apart, but nothing was more
controversial than his translation of "Hail, Mary, full of grace." The Roman
Catholic Church had long harped on the greeting, saying the angel who had
greeted Mary in that manner had had a purpose in telling her she was full of
it, so all of us should also strive to acquire "grace." That resulted in an
entire Catholic dogma. Wrong, said Luther, telling translators of old they
had not understood greetings in Palestine in those days. According to
Luther, the angel's greeting was just a nice way of saying, "Hello, Mary,
dear." The angel's words are recorded in Greek; therefore, we don't even
really know what he actually said, presumably in Aramaic, since Mary, a
carpenter's wife, was probably illiterate like most people of her day and
couldn't be expected to speak Greek. That particular angel was quite a guy;
he's also down on record as having spoken Hebrew, too.

Luther said he didn't care what the "asses" thought about his translation.
He said he would rely on ordinary Germans to pass judgment on whether he had
spoken to them in German or not. And pass judgment they did! Printing was
still in its infancy and books were prohibitively expensive, but the 3,000
copies of the first edition of the New Testament sold like hotcakes, and the
book quickly went through a series of reprints. Eyewitnesses have written
that the German nobility was amazed to see ordinary Germans walking around
with a copy of the New Testament under their arms, stopping to read from it
when they had time. The nobility wasn't aware that so many Germans were even
able to read!

The Luther Bible spread with Protestantism and set the stage for a literary
language, which was going to take a long time to develop and finally to
storm the strongholds of Catholicism in Germany, but once it had, Luther's
name would go down in history not only as a religious reformer but also as
the man who had unmistakably pointed the way to a common language that would
unite all Germans.

Regards, ----- WB. 

.

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