Book 57 History of the German Language** by John T. Waterman

My fascination with German is really a fascination with Low German or Plattdeutsch and its history.   The book made me even more determined to really learn German to be able to understand the passages in German and all the variations thereof

What I didn't like:
- cover, font, and layout are old fashioned and offputting.
- I needed a primer on linguistics to understand a lot of the book.

What I liked:
- Waterman is very informative and there were numerous fascinating facts and discussions.

German has the ability to express the inexpressible, to deal with abstractions, which marks the genious of the language.

The development of compound complex sentences in the 15th century is fascinating, with comparisons of texts.

Lubeck was the centre of development of legal codes and statutes and copied by many other cities.

Yiddish dialect spoken in the US is from Central and Eastern Europe.

German syntax regarding verbs was imitated from Latin.

Financial and banking words were adopted from Italian.

Luther used a dialect that was more like Low German.  His writing and translations are unsurpassed, as shown by comparisons of Bible versions.

In the 15th C. there was a custom of name calling among factions of opposing religionists, e.g. Hurenjaeger.

It was common from 1600 on, for North Germans to speak Plattdeutsch, but read High German (like the Mennonites) and thus they often spoke High German very well and Northern Germany has the reputation for purer pronunciation.