German Lessons for Owlet: Special Advent Edition II

[muckefuck]

Another Sunday, another verse:

Stille Nacht! Heilige Nacht!
Hirten erst kundgemacht
Durch der Engel Halleluja.
Tönt es laut von Ferne und Nah:
Christ, der Retter ist da!
Christ, der Retter ist da!

You may have noticed that the syntax on this is a little screwy. I mean, screwier even than regular German! There are some things going on here that you can really only get away with in the poetic register.

Take the line starting with Hirten. Now, while it isn't unusual to put an object at the front like that, it is odd to have a prepositional phrase stranded after the participle--at least in writing. In speech, it's more common for so-called "afterthoughts" to pop up at the end. What's really freaky, however, is dropping out the conjugated verb, something I've only otherwise seen in early modern prose. In normal writing, you would use a form of werden since this is a passive. So, untangling it all, we get:

Hirten wird es erst durch den Engel Halleluja kundgemacht.

(I'm really at a loss to explain the use of der after durch in the original lyrics, since AFAIK durch always take the accusative case and therefore could never be followed by der, which is sometimes nominative, sometimes, genitive, and sometimes dative, but never accusative. Anyone?)

By comparison, the next sentence is easy: You simply have an inversion of the dummy subject (es) and the conjugated verb (tönt). This is SOP for interrogative sentences, so what makes it unusual is its occurrence in a declarative one. But the metre precludes starting on weakly-stressed es rather than a fully stressed component, i.e. the verb.

Comments

My contribution ^o^

[aadroma.livejournal.com]

清し この夜
星は光り
救いの御子(みこ)は
馬槽(まぶね)の中に
眠り給う
いと安く

[lil-m-moses.livejournal.com]

That's not the version I learned, nor the one in my hymnal. Phooey.

Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht,
Alles schläft, einsam wacht,
nur das traute hochheilige Paar,
holder Knaabe im lockingen Haar.
Schlaf in himmlischer Ruh,
Schlaf in himmlischer Ruh!

Possibly just a different verse, though. I usually only remember the first auf Deutsch.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Schatzi, you're a week behind!

[keyne.livejournal.com]

You've got the first verse; he's quoting another. (Just so you know, it's "lockigen", one 'n', though I learned it as "lochigen"; and "Knabe" -- Knaabe is a surname.)

[richardthinks.livejournal.com]

What I find curious is the deixis: "Christ, der Retter ist da!"
Nicht hier, which seems common in various English versions:
"Christ the Redeemer is here" or
"Jesus, our Saviour is here" or alternatively
"Christ the Savior is born" (which, by the way, is my favourite verb of motion).
http://www.silentnight.web.za/translate/eng.htm

I know da is used pretty widely in German, not unlike there in English ("there is a house"), but it's curious, anyway.
...and I'm not going to get into fort/da.

By the way, are you Da from Welsh? Sorry, you probably get asked this all the time.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Actually, I never get asked that at all! It's a fortuitous coincidence; it was only after I'd gotten the nickname that I realised what it meant in Welsh.

Yeah, German deictics don't line up well with English ones, do they? The conventional way of saying, "I'm here!" is "Ich bin da!" not "Ich bin hier!" The latter actually sounds contrastive to me, as if you're emphasising one location over another. And then there's the curious use of dies hier and dies da for "this one" and "that one", respectively, with jenes basically confined to the Schriftsprache.