Auxiliary Verbs, in German

After our long detour through the French auxiliary verbal system, it’s time to tackle something a little closer to home. German is often sold to native English speakers as a “harder” language to learn than French, and this is certainly true insofar as learning German requires us to learn lots of unfamiliar vocabulary. English has absorbed so much Latinate vocabulary that even without knowing no French or German, it’s far easier to understand les langages sont compliqués than Sprachen sind schwierig. But given German’s deep familial relationship with English, I would argue that in some ways German is actually easier to learn than French, because English speakers already possess a(n admittedly incomplete) knowledge of German structure.

This structural similarity is not very visible in the case of nouns, for modern English has almost completely abandoned the complex nominal declension system that Old English had and modern German and Icelandic still possess. Its remnants can be seen in the pronouns, where English him and her are clearly related to the German dative pronouns ihm and ihr, and your is similar to euer. To identify clear structural similarities between English and German, one must turn to their verbal systems.

An Overview of the German verbal system
German verbs fall into two broad categories: “strong” and “weak”. This terminology was developed by the Grimm brothers (yes, of fairytale fame!) based on the logic that weak verbs, being regular and predictable, were too weak to break free of the system of rules, whereas strong verbs were strong enough to behave unpredictably and break the rules. English verbs can also be classified into these categories; furthermore, if a verb is strong in one of the two languages, it will likely be strong in the other as well. Thus, knowing that “to sing” and “to swim” are “irregular” in English (see “I sang” and “I have sung”, and “I swam” and “I’ve swum”), we can guess that the German cognates singen and schwimmen are also strong (in the same order, ich sang and ich habe gesungen, and ich schwamme and ich bin geschwommen). This isn’t a hard-and-fast rule, though, since English verbs have tended to weaken over time, becoming more regular. Witness that the English cognate of the German strong verb backen is the regular verb “to bake”.

But German verbs, whether strong or weak, are not so strong as to entirely eschew the use of auxiliaries. (The Germanic tribes served as a source of auxiliaries to the Roman legions, but I don’t know if that had anything to do with this!) Indeed, one of the most obvious differences between the English and German verbal systems on the one hand and the French verbal system on the other is precisely the fact that both English and German use auxiliaries much more extensively. 

In fact, given a German infinitive, only two purely synthetic verbal forms exist in the indicative mood: the present (das Präsens) and the preterite (das Präteritum or das Imperfekt). All other verbal forms are generated using auxiliaries. And like English (and unlike French), the auxiliary verbs are of two types, modal and non-modal.

• The non-modal auxiliaries, which also do double-duty as full-fledged verbs:
• haben (“to have”), used for the perfect construction
• sein (“to be”), also used for the perfect construction (like the French use of être)
• werden (“to become”), used in two roles:
• werden, for the passive voice of all TAMs
• werden, for the future aspect
• The modal auxiliaries, which (as in English) convey a whole host of modal nuance, and which are cognate with the English modal auxiliaries but often carry different meanings:
• können, cognate with “can” and meaning “to be able to”
• mögen, cognate with “may” and meaning “to like”
• dürfen, meaning “to be permitted [to do something]”
• sollen, cognate with “shall” and meaning “to be obliged / required [to do something]”
• wollen, cognate with “will” but meaning “to want”
• müssen, cognate with “must” and meaning “to have to”

Two pairs need a bit of clarification: wollen expresses a stronger desire than mögen; and müssen expresses a stronger need or compulsion than sollen (compare “I must eat” to “I should eat”). Wollen is also worth noting carefully, because its English cognate “will” has come to be used as the future aspect auxiliary in the third person. Its use in German shows how this makes sense: “he will go” must have meant at some point “he intensely desires to go”. The German usage also shows why “I will go” is seen in ‘propah’ English as less polite than “I shall go”, and why it may seem rude to some to say “he shall go” in place of “he will go”. In the first situation, the use of “will” comes across as rather insistent; in the second situation, the use of “shall” eliminates the third person’s personal agency.

More to come, as always.