The German Question, Part Seventeen

While remaining in safety in Saxony, Martin Luther translated the New Testament into German,* complete with his take on the meaning of some passages. Since there were many dialects of German, with northern speakers and southern speakers not easily being able to understand one another to any great degree, he mainly used a dialect literally in the middle from his own region (Saxony and Thuringia), and which was able to be understood by most German speakers. This dialect was prevalent in government and church circles in Saxony, but he also used some "high" dialect in his translation ("high" meaning from elevated areas, not "high" in the social sense), and he tried to make the flow of the translation be of common speech and not the more rigid ecclesiastical terminology. This "German Bible," coupled with the printing technology of those times, permitted wide distribution of Luther's work, and brought him a growing number of adherents to his beliefs. No question about it, this translation laid the foundation of the modern German language, as it spread throughout literary and educational circles, and gradually it  made headway against the Low German dialects (again "low" meaning from plains and low-lying areas) of the northern part of Germany. So, if you've ever studied German, and you cursed all of those grammatical rules, suffixes and changes to verbs, adjectives, and even some nouns, you can give at least some of the blame to Luther (hahaha, but remember, English once did similar, but then simplified). Of course, if you're Catholic too, you might give him all of the blame (get it? Luther founded Lutheranism, so if you're Catholic.....oh never mind). He then did a translation of the Old Testament, which was also published a bit later. This overall move toward a "standard German" language helped foster German nationalism and a desire for a truly unified nation.**

It should be noted that Luther was also known for his anti-Jewish views, and some, if not many, historians attribute Luther's views and his tremendous influence as contributing to the rise in anti-Jewish feelings in Germany in his times. His arguments against Jews were something later used by the Nazis. (A Word History is below the notes)

* I'm not a Biblical scholar, but in all my years of reading German history, it was my understanding that Luther translated the New Testament from Greek into German. When I was checking some info for this article, I read in one source that he translated these books from Latin; that is, from a previous translation from Greek into Latin, but other sources noted that he translated the Christian books from the Greek edition done by Dutch Catholic theologian Erasmus. Luther had studied Greek in his younger days. The Old Testament, also known by some as the "Jewish Bible," was originally in Hebrew.

** Many may find this hard to believe, but Germans speaking only their own dialects, and not standard German (see separate note below), persisted until well into the 20th Century. Naturally, as education became more and more widespread, more and more German speakers learned standard German, although that does not necessarily mean that they stopped using their own dialects too. Many Germans to this day take pride in their regional dialect, and they continue to use it among family and friends, using standard German for business and travel, for visitors outside of their region, or to listen to the radio or television. The post-World War Two era brought universal education to rural areas and small villages, and along with that education came the requirement to learn standard German. About 25 years ago, a postwar immigrant acquaintance of mine from Austria told me that one time he was at the train station in Stuttgart (I believe in the 1970s, if memory serves me right). An older man came up to him asking something, and he asked the man to speak German, but the man only spoke the local dialect, called "Schwäbisch," or "Swabian," in English. It is related to Alsatian (Elsässisch) and Swiss German (Schwyzerdütsch/ Schwiizertüütsch, depending upon...ah...dialect. And you thought English was tough!). Today, I'd find it hard to believe that anyone from Germany, Austria, or the German part of Switzerland (and probably Luxembourg) who doesn't speak standard German, unless perhaps they are very elderly, and even then they would have had such exposure to standard German that they would almost have to be able to understand most of it, if not speak it fluently.

Note: We don't really have anything quite like the German dialects in English, at least not in American English, and likely not in England either, although they are more pronounced there (the pun is not really intended, but what the hell). Perhaps that's because English itself is derived from some of those similar northern dialects, "Anglo-Saxon," from the Continent, which then transferred across to Britain. Many of the northern German dialects trace back to the Saxons and related Germanic tribes, just as English does, but the differences in German dialects from other areas can be stark. The German dialects should not necessarily be confused with variations in spoken German, since just as Americans or Englishmen speak the same basic English differently, so do Germans vary in their ways of speaking German, and certainly the regional dialects can have a major influence on how standard German is spoken.

WORD HISTORY:
Soul-I didn't find a solid Indo European root for this word, but that doesn't mean there isn't one. Old Germanic had "saiwalo," with the notion of "the spiritual part of a person." Some etymologists suggest that this might be further linked to the Old Germanic word for "sea," which was "saiwaz," as the ancient Germanic people believed a person's soul derived from or went to the sea after death. This is possible, as we certainly see "spirits" as "flowing" along, much like water, and there could be a connection. From Germanic "saiwalo" came Old English (Anglo-Saxon) "sawol," with the same basic meaning of "spiritual part of a person." This later became "soul," and by the 900s, it had come to mean "the spirit of a dead person." The other Germanic languages have: German has "Seele," Low German has "Seel," West Frisian "siel," Dutch has "ziel," Swedish has "själ," Danish has "sjael," Icelandic has "sál," and Norwegian has "sjel."