6.1 Greetings and Sie versus du — Epoché
What you will be able to do Open and close an exchange at any hour, and pick the greeting that fits the hour and the region: Guten Morgen! , Grüß Gott! Decide, before you say anything, whether the person in front of you is a Sie or a du , and know what it costs when you get it wrong. Ask how somebody is and answer: Wie geht es Ihnen heute? — Gut, danke. Und Ihnen? Follow a real exchange in which the formal and the informal address sit side by side, and hear the moment a speaker switches from one to the other. Prerequisites : 5.2 and 2.3 — you need the words for people and forms of address from the vocabulary volume, and the three genders with their articles, because every polite formula in this lesson carries one of them. This is the first of the eight conversation lessons in this phase, and all eight are built the same way. Every line of every exchange is a sentence somebody really wrote and somebody else really translated; nothing in the dialogues was composed for the page. The exchanges are a little more clipped than a textbook conversation, and in exchange you are learning sentences that exist. The lesson begins where every German conversation begins, and that is not with a greeting: it begins with a decision about the person you are greeting. English speakers have not had to make that decision since the seventeenth century, which is why it is the hardest habit in this volume. Who is speaking to whom The first exchange below is entirely formal. A man arrives at a language school on his first morning, speaks to the receptionist, and is introduced to the head of the school; none of the three has met either of the others, and all three use the formal address from the first word to the last. The second exchange starts informal — two colleagues who have known each other for years meet in a corridor — then walks into a bakery, where the person behind the counter is formal again and the two friends stay informal with each other inside the same scene, and finally goes back out into the street. Read the first as your model for a first meeting, the second as your model for an ordinary day, because an ordinary day is mixed. The choice English stopped making English once had the same two-way split. The singular familiar form was thou , with its own verb endings — thou hast , thou goest — and the plural form used to one person as a mark of respect was you . Over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the familiar form drained out of ordinary speech, until by about 1650 it survived mainly in prayer, in Quaker usage and in a few northern dialects. For nearly four hundred years, then, an English speaker has had exactly one word for the person being addressed, and has never once had to choose. This is a bigger problem than it looks. The difficulty is not that the forms are hard: they are two short words and two sets of verb endings. The difficulty is that you have no practice in making the decision , because in your language it does not exist. Every German sentence makes you answer a question English never asks: how close am I to this person, and who decides that? Here is the short answer, and it will carry you a long way. Use the formal address with every adult you have not been invited to treat otherwise: shop assistants, officials, doctors, waiters, landlords, the parents of your friends, colleagues at a first meeting, and anyone older than you whom you do not know well. Use the informal address with children, family, university students, close friends, animals, and anyone who has offered it. When you cannot tell, be formal: being too formal sounds stiff for ten seconds, while being too familiar sounds presumptuous, and in a shop that can end the conversation. Two further points. The formal address is spelled with a capital letter mid-sentence, and that capital is the only thing in writing separating it from the ordinary word for they . And it takes plural verb endings even when you address one person — exactly as English you are is plural in form however many people you mean. Greetings by the clock and by the map German has one all-purpose hello and a set of greetings tied to the hour. It also has regional greetings that are used by tens of millions of people. The table gives the neutral forms first and the regional ones after. The three regional entries are written out here rather than quoted from the corpus, because a bare greeting is a fixed formula rather than a sentence. German When and where Hallo! Guten Morgen! [1] Hello! Good morning! — the first word is the all-purpose hello: safe with anyone, at any hour Guten Morgen! [2] Good morning. — until roughly eleven in the morning, and in an office often until lunch Guten Tag! [3] Good afternoon. — literally good day : the standard formal hello in the north and centre Guten Abend! [4] Good evening! — from roughly six in the evening Gute Nacht! [5] Good night! — a farewell only, said when parting for the night; never on arrival Grüß Gott! [6] Good day! — the daytime greeting in Bavaria and Austria, short for (may) God greet you , and entirely secular in use Servus hello and goodbye in Bavaria and Austria, informal, from the Latin for servant (written for this lesson) Moin hello at any hour on the North Sea coast and in Hamburg, often doubled; the clock rule does not apply (written for this lesson) Grüezi the everyday greeting in German-speaking Switzerland, and the one thing a visitor to Zurich should learn first (written for this lesson) Auf Wiedersehen! [7] See you again. — the formal farewell, literally until seeing again Tschüss dann! [8] Bye then! — the informal farewell, and much the commonest in speech Schönen Tag! [9] Have a nice day. — what a shop assistant says as you leave One habit is worth taking from that table immediately. The evening greeting and the night farewell look like a matched pair and are not one: the first opens a conversation, the second only ever closes one. Saying the night one as you walk into a room is the kind of