Bitte, beuge mich!

There is a charming Theory in Linguistics that explains why modern English does not have feminine, masculine, neuter, ablative, dative, accusative, genitive, apellative, first, second, third, fourth, fifth and sixth declensions, third, fifth, second, first, fourth and maybe sixth conjugations, and the ablative absolute. In English, we skip all that insane drek and just say "Give me the sausage," and we don't have to know that the sausage secretly wears women's undergarments.

According to this charming Theory, after a few centuries of Vikings in the North of the island (around the Jarvik suburbs) murdering and raping and pillaging and burning Angles and Saxons in the South, things started to calm down, and everybody got down to the serious business of horse-trading and pitching woo.

Both Anglo-Saxon and Vikingish were hopelessly inflected languages. You don't even want to know the grotesque details of Old Danish and Anglo-Saxon grammar.

So when Erik Cowhorn the Viking tried to buy a horse from Ethelred of Wessex, it was a terribly frustrating business, because to one of them the horse was masculine (even if it had teats) and existed in an arcane case, and to the other the horse was always feminine (even if etc.) and also existed in a different bizarre noun case which both Erik and Ethelred could never hope to make any sense of.

Then when Erik Cowhorn brought a handful of posies on a summer's eve to pretty Ethel, Ethelred's freckled redheaded daughter, she hadn't the slightest idea what he was trying to tell her, all his flattery was lost in a horrible jumble of conflicting inflections.

Raiding and burning and pillaging had been a lot simpler.

It took a century or two, but eventually everybody, the horsetraders and the lovesick teenagers, just agreed to strip both lingos of all their crazy inflections, and the result was English, very grammatically streamlined, easy for everybody to trade horses in and pitch woo with.

Now I don't have to know the gender of a fire hydrant, and I don't get thwacked on the knuckles for misspelling the 2nd person plural passive pluperfect of throw.

Just give me the sausage, just buy my horse, just let me nibble your pretty little earlobe, Ethel.

Centuries later, another Viking named William the Conquerer would force everyone in his new Court du Londres au parler francais, and it greatly enriched the vocabulary, but he was not able to re-introduce genders of shoes and noun declensions and verb conjugations and le pluparfait. English stayed streamlined.

Inflections just seem very odd to native English-speakers, but it also seems like a very charming marvelous Talk Puzzle meant to confuse me as I wander from Gare du Nord to BerlinerZoostation to Amsterdam Centraalstation and eventually to Milano and Lisboa with my backpack.

And English still retains its own bag of quirky inflections, and they must seem very odd to people from the other side of la Manche. You can eat a dozen prawns, but no matter how many shrimp you eat, you are still eating 36 shrimp. And the torture a Deutschespracherkinde must endure to conjugate the verb "to be" and make sense of Hamlet solliliquoying "To be or not to be ..." Unglaublich!

Pat Z. may tell me otherwise, but I have heard a rumor that this little poem is one of the only examples of The Pun -- die Wortspeil -- auf deutsches. Anyway, for a little South Parkie who had to learn the torment of Latin from Miss Murphy, who also taught the Deutschesklasse, I've always loved this poem. I hope you like it too.

It is midnight in the town cemetery. The moon is full and bright ...

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Der Werwolf
von Christian Morgenstern

Ein Werwolf eines Nachts entwich

von Weib und Kind und sich begab

(left his wife and kids at home)

an eines Dorfschullehrers Grab

(the Schoolmaster's grave)

und bat ihn: Bitte, beuge mich!

(Please, decline me!)

Der Dorfschulmeister stieg hinauf
auf seines Blechschilds Messingknauf
und sprach zum Wolf, der seine Pfoten
geduldig kreuzte vor dem Toten:

»Der Werwolf« -- sprach der gute Mann,

(nominative)

»des Weswolfs«, Genitiv sodann,

(genitive)

»dem Wemwolf«, Dativ, wie man's nennt,

(dative)

»den Wenwolf«, -- »damit hat's ein End«.

(accusative / objective)

Dem Werwolf schmeichelten die Fälle,
er rollte seine Augenbälle.

(rolled his eyeballs in amazement)

Indessen, bat er, füge doch
zur Einzahl auch die Mehrzahl noch!

Der Dorfschulmeister aber mußte
gestehn, daß er von ihr nichts wußte.
Zwar Wölfe gäb's in großer Schar,
doch »Wer« gäb's nur im Singular.

(alas, "Wer" (who) is only singular.)

Der Wolf erhob sich tränenblind --
er hatte ja doch Weib und Kind!!

(but what about my wife and kids??)

Doch da er kein Gelehrter eben,
so schied er dankend und ergeben.

(he thanked the old spook and sadly went away)