Bickering Authors, Renaissance Edition

[selenak]

Yesterday I was in Nuremberg. Passing not just Nuremberg's but Germany's oldest bookstore, I saw this poster featuring some of its back-in-the-day authors:

Comments

[redfiona10]

I like it :)

[selenak]

:) I'm glad.

[sonetka]

Nice! I'll bet they were secretly grateful Henry dropped out, though -- imagine the bloodbath that could have resulted if he took offense to a question from the audience :).

I now have a very strong urge to visit Nuremberg, go to this bookshop, and ask in a whisper if they have some Bibles hidden under the counter which are in the vernacular.

(How would you put that? Scraping up memories of my college German, I'd probably say "Haben Sie eine deutsche Bibel" but that just doesn't carry the same aura of contraband).

[selenak]

If you want a contraband-evoking phrase, go with "Haben Sie Bibeln in der Volkssprache?" :) Though no one would ask this today. Also back then they'd probably gone with either "Du" or "Ihr", just to make life for German-learning foreigners even more difficult ("Sie" as a mode of address didn't get into fashion until ca. two centuries later, around Luther's time the formal mode of address, especially relevant in hierarchical positions, was "Ihr", but depending on your social status you could also have called the bookseller the informal Du.)

Luther, btw, contributed a lot, not just via the bible translation but via his pamphlets, to making written German popular, and specifically informal, casual every day German. When Hilary Mantel in her letters to the characters wrote in More's how his anti-Luther pamphlets with their scatological swearing revealed his capacity to hate, I thought, well, sure, but did you read the pamphlets of our boy Martin? Mudslinging king second to none and proud of it, against just about anyone who raised his

[sonetka]

Interesting! I had no idea about the changing Sie/Ihr -- in German lit class, Goethe was about as far back as we went (though I honestly cannot remember what forms of "you" he used either, I just remember getting very, very annoyed with Werther and being heartlessly relieved when he finally shot himself and STOPPED COMPLAINING). Do you know how/why the new word was added? English, of course, went through the opposite process, where thou/thee was gradually dropped and "you" had to serve for both the singular and plural, leading to centuries of unnecessary confusion and a number of historical novels where writers assume that "Thou" was a fancy, formal version of "You" when it fact it was the opposite -- "You" was formal/respectul, and "thou" was not

[selenak]

Oh, in Goethe's life time the use of "Sie" was in full swing already, and since "Werther" is a contemporary (debut) novel, the characters use "Sie" when appropriate. However, in historical drama at the time, you get the use of "Ihr", and, just to make things even MORE confusing for foreigners, a peculiar Prussian-origin variant that spread across the other German language realms but died at at this very point (late 18th century), which is talking indirectly about someone while talking to them. So, for example, in Faust, which is set (in as much as it's set in any particular time) in the middle ages, you get both. Faust and his adlatus Wagner address each other as "Ihr", as in "Wenn Ihr's nicht fühlt, Ihr werdet's nicht erlernen" (Faust to Wagner). Faust, meeting Gretchen for the first time, says "Schönes Fräulein, darf ich's wagen, Arm und Geleit Ihr anzutragen." This is third person, not second person Ihr. If Faust was using the same mode of address as he did with Wagner, he'd be saying "Arm und Geleit EUCH anzutragen". Instead