The steaming necks of the horses in the Tower of Babel
The Steaming Necks of the Horses in the Tower of Babel is a language game book by the German writer Franz Fühmann , which was published in 1978 by Kinderbuchverlag Berlin and reissued in 2005 by Hinstorff Verlag in Rostock . The illustrations were made by the German painter and graphic artist Egbert Herfurth .
Framework story
The bored children Monica, Caroline, Emmanuel, Gabi and Jens discover the playground of language while on vacation with their parents . The linguistic spirit Küslübürtün appears to them to be attracted by the language games of the children, who also likes to be addressed as the “great and sublime spirit of the pleasing language sound, especially the vowel harmony ”. Together with two other ghosts with the names Arthur Schopenhauer , Arthur for short, and Christian Morgenstern - not entirely by chance the names of a philosopher who works as a writer and a poet known for his puns - he playfully leads the children into the world of linguistics and history linguistic phenomena such as anagrams , compounds , palindromes , pseudonyms , phraseologisms , rhyme schemes , homonymy and polysemy as well as linguistic economy , phonetics or onomastics . The mediation is often done through tasks or riddles that the little ghost asks the children.
construction
The book consists of twelve chapters, in which the authorial narrator and direct speech loosely alternate. The language puzzles integrated into the action are partly designed to be interactive, so that the reader is encouraged to participate. The solutions are at the end of the book.
“What makes the book a non-fiction book is the unbelievable amount of information that Fühmann provides. In addition to the plot, he also uses the so-called blue book, in which our two spirits write many things. The blue book as another trick marks precisely the point where readers (especially children) can easily turn the page to the next chapter without having any further comprehension problems. ”The name of the“ blue book ”possibly refers to Ludwig Wittgenstein's blue book , in which he collected picture and language games.
Special features of the new edition
In the book are strongly partly with everyday life in the GDR affiliated and therefore uses specific terms, as well as terms which as after today's parlance racist applicable connotations have. For this reason, the publisher added an explanatory and classifying epilogue to its reprint of the book.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Franz Fühmann: The steaming necks of the horses in the tower of Babel . Rostock 2005, p. 29.
- ↑ Experience report: The steaming necks of the horses in the tower of Babel / Franz Fühmann. ( Memento of the original from November 28, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Ciao.de, May 27, 2003.
