[Ads-l] Quote Origin: Life Is Too Short To Learn German

[Laurence Horn]

This time the attribution to Twain, though unsupported, is at least plausible and not simply the usual case of Twain acting as quote magnet. There is, for example, this, from A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court:

Whenever the literary German dives into a sentence, that is the last you are going to see of him until he emerges on the other side of his Atlantic with his verb in his mouth.

And this, which relates more closely to the quote under investigation:

Never knew before what eternity was made for. It is to give some of us a chance to learn German.
Notebook #14, November 1877 - July 1878

He had a lot of other complaints about German, especially in “The Awful German Language”:
https://www.viaggio-in-germania.de/awful-german-language.pdf

LH

> On Nov 24, 2024, at 10:23 PM, ADSGarson O'Toole <adsgarsonotoole at GMAIL.COM> wrote:
> 
> Linguists on this list might find the saying in the subject line
> entertaining. The statement has been attributed to U.S. humorist Mark
> Twain, Irish playwright Oscar Wilde, English satirist Thomas Love
> Peacock, and English classical scholar Richard Porson. A translator
> inquired about the provenance. Here is a link to the QI article:
> 
> https://quoteinvestigator.com/2024/11/24/learn-german/
> 
> The attributions to Mark Twain and Oscar Wilde are unsupported. The
> earliest known match appeared in the satirical novel "Gryll Grange" by
> Thomas Love Peacock. The work was serialized in "Fraser's Magazine" of
> London in 1860 and published as a book in 1861.
> 
> A fictional character named Algernon Falconer uttered the statement
> while he was discussing his library which centered on books in
> English, Greek, Latin, Italian, and French, but not German:
> 
> [Begin excerpt]
> It was a dictum of Porson, that "Life is too short to learn German:"
> meaning, I apprehend, not that it is too difficult to be acquired
> within the ordinary space of life, but that there is nothing in it to
> compensate for the portion of life bestowed on its acquirement,
> however little that may be.
> [End excerpt]
> 
> Richard Porson was a scholar at the University of Cambridge who was
> acclaimed for his knowledge of Greek. He was born in 1759 and died in
> 1808. I found no substantive evidence that Porson authored the
> statement, and I conjecture that Thomas Love Peacock crafted the quip
> and assigned it to Porson to accentuate its humor. Alternatively,
> Peacock was simply repeating a pre-existing joke.
> 
> Feedback welcome,
> Garson O'Toole
> 
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org


------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org