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

[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.)