AHC/WI: Real Grammar Nazis

Status
Not open for further replies.
Your challenge should you choose to accept it is to make the real life Nazis become openly obsessed about grammar. What would the effects be in real life:p

Bonus points if you include a meme relevant to the topic while posting.
i84eq.jpg
 
From what I've read, a lot of what we think of as being "Nazi obsessions" were really the idiosyncratic interests of individual high-ranking Nazis, not neccessarily shared by the movement as a whole, eg. Hitler himself had a hard-on for Wagner, but the Nazi regime did little to promote his music once in power(and in fact, performances of his music declined). Similarly, Himmler and Rosenberg were into Nordic mythology and occultic esoterica, but other Nazis(including Hitler) found these pursuits laughable.

So, probably the best way to get actual "grammar Nazis" into power would be to have grammar be the obsession of one particular high-level Nazi. I'm not sure who that could be. But there were, famously, a number of artists and writers in the upper echelons of Nazism, and they did generally tend to oppose experimentation in the arts. So it probably wouldn't be too tall an order to have one of them become obsessed with "degenerate grammar" or some such.

That said, from a pragmatic perspective, having to police grammatical minutiae in the workforce and bureucracy might get in the way of the Nazis' broader mobilization goals. So, they might just end up making a few big announcements about it, but then just let the campaign fall by the wayside.
 
So you mean books getting burned not due to their political content or the ideologies or ethnicity of the authors, but because of their truly atrocious grammar?

...That does not sound all that bad, actually.

Maybe make someone who was a teacher by profession the leader of Nazi Germany. You could call the TL, say

Streicher's Germany: The Thesaurian Totalitarian


BTW, I wonder how Mein Kampf would fare when scrutinied by Grammar Nazi censors.

the-first-grammar-nazi.png

9k=
 
Last edited:
Well, the Aryan myth originated from linguistics, before it was taken into racial theory. There were some pretty prominent Nazi philologists, and in general theories about evolution of language played a very important role in the background of the development of Nazi narrative, so some potential is there, although the Nazis never actually harped much on that theme, choosing to focus almost exclusively on the "racial" angle.
I can see a campaign for a "pure" language being promoted, like cleansing the "decadent" German in use from words and expressions deemed to be "un-Aryan" for being borrowed form Latin, Slavic or Semitic languages (for example). I suppose that some degree of that happened IOTL as well (Fascism tried that, and Turkey went pretty big on it under Kemal Ataturk, so there is a lot ofn potential ispiration around). Some emphasis on "correct" German might be in order, probably with the addition of some oddities of linguistic engineering.
However, if the Nazis are perceived as being interested in nitpicking about other people's grammar, that would contribute making them laughable.
 
I could maybe see something like this being put in place in the event Germany wins/survives some alternate version of WW2. So ITTL they institute stuff like this and other campaigns to reach that ultimately "perfect race" thing they were obsessed with (as well as to thin the herd by a few hundred thousand).

I really don't think such a thing would be a focus of theirs in war time. but then again, logic and sense were not in their vocabulary
 
Well, the Aryan myth originated from linguistics, before it was taken into racial theory. There were some pretty prominent Nazi philologists, and in general theories about evolution of language played a very important role in the background of the development of Nazi narrative, so some potential is there, although the Nazis never actually harped much on that theme, choosing to focus almost exclusively on the "racial" angle.
I can see a campaign for a "pure" language being promoted, like cleansing the "decadent" German in use from words and expressions deemed to be "un-Aryan" for being borrowed form Latin, Slavic or Semitic languages (for example). I suppose that some degree of that happened IOTL as well (Fascism tried that, and Turkey went pretty big on it under Kemal Ataturk, so there is a lot ofn potential ispiration around). Some emphasis on "correct" German might be in order, probably with the addition of some oddities of linguistic engineering.
However, if the Nazis are perceived as being interested in nitpicking about other people's grammar, that would contribute making them laughable.

Why would they purge Latin words though? The nazis admired and sought to emulate Romance aesthetics; you can see that in their architecture, though obviously with a more brutalist bent.
 
Mussolini attempted to remove French influence in Italian and consolidate the various versions of common words such as "you", so Hitler could easily copy a page out of that book.
 
Not if they send people guilty of "degenerate and debased language" to extermination camps. :(

I suppose that this would be a step too far even for them in most realistic scenario (although I can see some pretty nasty policies of linguistic purism). But I was referring to the early stages of the movement.
 
Why would they purge Latin words though? The nazis admired and sought to emulate Romance aesthetics; you can see that in their architecture, though obviously with a more brutalist bent.

True. On the other hand, the Nazis weren't famous for their consistency. The point is that targeting Latin and French loanwords in German which has a significant number of both, is pretty logical step if you are taking the "pure ancestral language" path. Of course, hey could pick only "impure" word of Slavic and Semitic origin, but that would be rather unimpressive, since the number of those in German is relatively limited.

In general, I don't see Nazism as particularly conducive to an obsession for grammatical correctness in itself. I can see them focusing on linguistic purism, or, if they are more radical, on trying to remould German into something closer to some ideal linguistic concept they put together.
 
Top
Status
Not open for further replies.
Top