From the Wikipedia article:
> German also lacks an informal language register
Can someone provide more insight into what this refers to? There are definitely less formal or technical sounding word variants in German, and of course duzen/siezen to add another level of formality, so I'm not sure what this could refer to.
So, afaiu an ‘informal register’ would be something like brospeak or language spoken at home and among friends, contrasted to that spoken with strangers and at work. But I don't know what the situation is in German. With English and Russian, every generation and each subculture invents their own slang just to differentiate themselves―can't imagine how any country would avoid developing informal language, considering the existence of Oktoberfest.
I'd assume it's about the dialects, which are very different from the "official" language, so much that Jerome K. Jerome had a joke in one of his books, more than century ago:
"Germany being separated so many centuries into a dozen principalities, is unfortunate in possessing a variety of dialects. Germans from Posen wishful to converse with men of Wurtemburg, have to talk as often as not in French or English; and young ladies who have received an expensive education in Westphalia surprise and disappoint their parents by being unable to understand a word said to them in Mechlenberg."
"Modern times" and technologies suppress the dialects and with each generation the portion of the local-specific dialects is being lost.
Could you (low register to someone of equal or lower status) vs Could you (medium register to someone of higher status) vs Might you (highest register to someone of higher status). In English I had to change to a different verb, non grammatically. In German these are all the same verb with a different rule applied.
You know, this actually makes sense. I think that after a couple of hundred pages, this would just seem like an easy-to-read, natural alternative word ordering.
Then, if the author started substituting German words here and there, starting with the obvious ones, then ones English words are derived from, and so on... before you know it, you'd be reading German!
Also: in preparation to diving in Kafka's books I learned about a peculiar feature of his style:
> Kafka often made extensive use of a characteristic particular to the German language which permits long sentences that sometimes can span an entire page. Kafka's sentences then deliver an unexpected impact just before the full stop—this being the finalizing meaning and focus. This is due to the construction of subordinate clauses in German which require that the verb be positioned at the end of the sentence.
>> “Als Gregor Samsa eines Morgens aus unruhigen Träumen erwachte, fand er sich in seinem Bett zu einem ungeheuren Ungeziefer verwandelt.” (original)
> “As Gregor Samsa one morning from restless dreams awoke, found he himself in his bed into an enormous vermin transformed.”
There's a neat picture illustrating the difference in the order of the parse tree: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Kafka_bibliography#Eng...