NOW
INTO ITS third edition, this rather curious book continues to be compulsory
reading for undergraduates in German at the prestigious University of Pisa. The
authors� sole publication, it helped pave the way for them to two chairs in
German linguistics at Pisa. An examining commission consisting of five
professors (Anna Maria Carpi [Venice], Antonio Pasinato [Padua], Johann Drumbl
[Modena], Barbara Stein [Milan] and Hans Georg Gr�ning [Macerata])
expressed high praise
for the two candidates� �profound knowledge of historical linguistics� and
for their �methodological sovereignty�. They were also at pains to point out
that some �minor inaccuracies� had been eliminated in the third edition.
Glancing
through this interesting Pisan contribution to learning, however, one comes
across literally dozens of unforgivable errors. For example, Hepp believes that
the Germanic languages broke away from Indo- European as late as in the �first
centuries AD when the second sound shift began to take place around 500 AD�
(page 21) � which turns out to be double nonsense. Hepp states that Ziestag
(a variant of Dienstag meaning
�Tuesday�) derives from Zeus, by
which she implies that the old Germans borrowed a Greek word meaning �Zeus�
day� (p.43). In reality, the Germans substituted their equivalent (Ziu) for
the Roman god Mars and it is only a coincidence (or rather an Indo-European
parallel) that these two personal names had the same origin with no direct
etymological relation Zeus > Zies.
Incidentally, there had never been a �Zeus-Day� to be borrowed from Greek
and Tuesday was of course �Ares�
Day� in Greek.
Hepp
erroneously believes that umlaut is typical only of Middle
High German and not of Old High
German too (p.67). She claims that from Middle High German onwards the strong
endings in the adjectival declension disappeared gradually (p.69) but her
example testifies to the contrary: even today heiliger Geist has two
distinct strong forms in the singular
and three in the plural.
Meanwhile,
Foschi declares that the plural ending -er
is �often� (!) accompanied by sekund�rumlaut,
which she takes to be a velarumlaut,
and that the prim�rumlaut is the
only palatalumlaut (p.115). What we
learn from Foschi�s explanation is that she is blissfully unaware of the
basics of German historical grammar which, until recently, most German and
Austrian secondary school students would have been familiar with. It is
therefore hardly surprising that even in her revised edition Foschi continues to
misinterpret the word zunge as u-declension
while forming the dative plural tage
(p.115).
Worse
still, not only is the authors� knowledge of German
grammar inadequate, since they have evidently never studied either Latin or
Indo-European, but they also fail to copy simple words. Thus they write e.g.
�Seculum ecclesiae� instead of Speculum
(p.81), �Confederatio cum princibus� (p.92) and �resquiescat in pace�
for RIP (p.199); Hepp regularly misreads thorn,
the Gothic letter which she is not acquainted with, as p,
so she spells the well-known word for people
as �piuda� (in the third edition she �corrects� it to �phiuda�), and
she calmly goes on to claim that tod
has a Gothic parallel �daupus� (pp.26, 33 and 67), thus assuming that
some mysterious sound change, d > p
or viceversa, took place. The authors do not even have a command of modern
German orthography (traditional or reformed), which they spell �Ortographie�
(pp.144, 164 and 217): �bloss� (p.86) and �Schlo�e� (p.157) are wrong
even according to the new norms, and English words share the same fate, cf.
�leaderarticle� (p.163) and �chanel� (p.189).
In
contrast to the five Italian professors who happily overlooked the numerous
blunders, of which the few examples mentioned above may suffice, most German
students familiar with the classical German manuals would soon have noticed a
second characteristic of the book, one which not only casts a shadow on the
authors� philological competence and their enthusiastic examination
commission, but which, in most European countries, would not only have failed to
open the door to a professorship but would have
put an abrupt end to the authors� academic career. In fact, Foschi and
Hepp, who had never undertaken any previous research in linguistics and who had
graduated from the University of Pisa, where degree courses in German as a
foreign language did not include any
historical linguistics before Foschi�s and Hepp�s advent, simply copied /
translated or roughly summarized two standard German textbooks: Eggers� Deutsche
Sprachgeschichte and Wolff�s Deutsche
Sprachgeschichte. Of course, to a certain extent all historical grammars of
a given language do bear certain resemblances, but Foschi�s and Hepp�s Breve
storia follows its two models so closely as to verge on sheer plagiarism. For
instance, the passage �Le crescenti esigenze�� (p.94)
is a literal translation of Wolff, p. 106: �Der wachsende Geldbedarf��,
the only difference being Foschi�s addition of the emperor�s name, whereas
Wolff took for granted that his readers knew which emperor he was talking about.
Quite
often, when Hepp/Foschi make references to a huge range of specialist articles
and monographs, it can easily be shown that their knowledge is not the fruit of
authentic reading but taken over from Eggers� and Wolff�s books. If the
references often turn out to be bogus, that is obviously because Foschi/Hepp did
not check the references they copied or
else misunderstood what they actually referred to. The classification of zunge
as u-declension, by the way, is a
misprint in Wolff which any of Wolff�s readers, with the sole exception of
Foschi/Hepp, would easily recognize as such. Foschi/Hepp base themselves mainly
though not exclusively on Wolff and Eggers, e.g. Foschi�s allegation that a
certain Stephan had Germanized the postal terminology on the pressure of Allgemeiner
Deutscher Sprachverein (p.164) is not only wrong, because the association
was founded some ten years after the Germanization, but reveals Foschi�s true
source, which she does not mention: Schildt�s Kurze
Geschichte der deutschen Sprache.
Listing
all the �parallels� between Breve
storia and Wolff/Egger would by far exceed the scope of this review. Such a
�synopsis� with a list of errors extends to more than thirty pages in small
print with narrow line-spacing. It should be mentioned, however, that Foschi
adhered to her well-tried �method� in the third edition when she added a
chapter on so-called �Austrian German�, also highly praised by the
enthusiastic five-member board. This time she translated and summarized
Ammon�s standard monograph, Die
deutsche Sprache in Deutschland, �sterreich und der Schweiz, and again she
made several mistakes, misunderstanding
the German original and displaying poor critical methodology. E.g., she wrongly
claims (p.177) that a certain Verein
Schweizerdeutsch propagated �Alemannic� as national written language
(against standard German) and here, exceptionally, she actually gives a
reference to her source. But she misunderstood Ammon�s complex argumentation
and a pronoun which referred to a Sproch-Biwegig and not to the Verein.
Her impressive list of 11 alleged lexical Austrianisms is distilled, without any
critical evaluation, from a completely artificial text excogitated by Ammon and
completely misrepresents the linguistic situation. For instance, Foschi did not
realize that later in his book Ammon himself explicitly doubts the status of
almost half of those words by admitting that a Viennese professor denied that
they could be accepted in what some call �Austrian German�. Had Foschi read
more than just the few pages of Ammon�s summary, which she used for her new
chapter on �Austrian German�, she could have easily argued against Ammon�s
�Austrianisms� because in a normal context, i.e. without ideological
background, Ammon himself does not always use those words he declares as
�German German� but prefers an alleged �Austrianism�.
Where
the Breve storia is more than just a
translation and a summary of the books by Eggers, Wolff and Ammon, it not only
betrays a lack of philological knowledge but also an insufficient command of
German. Thus almost all translations Foschi and Hepp added to the sentence
examples, which for the most part are copied from the three German study books,
too, are wrong: e.g. Auspr�gungsst�rke
is rendered as �capacit� di coniatura (imprinting)� (p.189) and the simple
word Schiff in Grass� Die
R�ttin is misunderstood as �la navata�, which would be a Kirchenschiff
(p.193). It goes without saying that the translations of older German are much
worse. For instance Foschi�s modern German version of the Middle High German
text Die Pachtung der M�nze (p.101)
not only shows a complete lack of syntactic comprehension, it is also
grammatically wrong and more or less incomprehensible. Even for well-known texts
she failed to check her translations into modern German with the help of modern
editions. Thus, in the sentence �da� der Wolf nit kom und Schada dau� from Simplicissimus,
Foschi interprets the verb dau as
pronoun dir and invents another verb
in square brackets (p.135) and she renders both awer
and aa as �aber� although
everyone familiar with colloquial German knows that the latter means auch.
Hepp in her turn quotes the famous Muspilli
(p.56); in four short lines she manages to produce three spelling mistakes (plus
inconsistent length marks) which render the text unreadable and the translation
is, of course, wrong: the nonsensical phrase �das Wasser trocknet aus�
revealingly resembles Bosco-Coletso�s nonsense translation �le acque si
prosciugheranno�.
What
is most alarming, however, and what so strikingly unmasks the academic practice,
is the fact that five Italian professors working as far apart as Macerata and
Venice, should so readily have
concurred in a totally erroneous unanimous assessment. It would appear to
follow that either
none of the members of the commission noticed the numerous grave inaccuracies in
the Breve storia because none of them
had a sufficient knowledge of German linguistics, or else that they all agreed
in their praise of the book in order to promote the authors at any cost and
against all competitors.
Martin
Putz, an Austrian academic from Innsbruck, read Classics & Italian at the
University of Innsbruck and Philosophy & Scandinavian studies at the
University of Vienna. He spent three years teaching German at the University of
Pisa. His Finnish Grammar was published by Edition Praesens, Vienna, in February
2002.
Note:
This review was first published on July 18 2002 by JUST Book Reviews.
