Why does German require extra commas that may be considered useless by speakers of other languages?

Question

Let us consider the following English sentence:

I set the table if you take out the trash.

One doesn't have to set a comma between "table" and "if" – in contrast to the German rules for comma usage: In German, one has to set a comma:

Ich decke den Tisch, wenn du den Müll wegbringst.

In my opinion this obligatory comma disturbs the reading flow. In general, I have the feeling that German requires too many commas which disturb the reading flow. One might argue that in this special case, the comma indicates an intended little pause. But look at this example:

A function is called bijective if it is both injective and surjective.

In German:

Eine Funktion heißt bijektiv, wenn sie sowohl injektiv als auch surjektiv ist.

Here, one usually doesn't make a little pause before "wenn". That's why in this example, the obligatory comma is really useless and disturbs the reading flow. My question is:

Why does the German language, in contrast to the English language, requires so many useless commas which disturb the reading flow?

Answer 1

I think your question has a presupposition that is already wrong:

It is not the language, and even less a language's grammar that makes orthography rules.

Orthography is a set of prescriptive, more or less static and sometimes seemingly arbibitrary rules that are about how to transform language into graphemes, but not an inherent part of a language itself.
This is why it doesn't even really make much sense to ask a linguist that question, because linguistics doesn't care about commas.

To still make an attempt to answer your question:
Orthography rules aren't totally useless - how would you use a dictionary or make a Google search if there was absolutely no consensus how to write a word? - and when it comes to arbitrariness and unpredictability, English can be claimed to be significantly worse than German!
The main point is probably that English word order is much more restricted, while German allows for more variance in word order especially between main clauses and subordinate clauses. In speech this can be disambiguated by intonation, while this is obivously not available in written langauge, which is why you make use of punctuation instead.
The rule is that in general, German subordinate clauses need to be separated by a comma, while this doesn't hold true for English. In German it is often more complicated to determine the word order and relationships especially in main clauses because you don't always strictly have SVO (or SOV, which would be the default word order in subordinate clauses) there, and that's one of the reasons German orthography makes more use of commas.
And if the general rule is that every subordinate clause needs to be separated by a comma, then this is in fact easier than making a large list of exceptions for those cases where it seems a little bit more "useless". Everything which is a subordinate clause is put a comma in front of, and this is why this rule totally regularly applies in your example.
In that way, the rule is not as nonsensual.

But again, orthography is not really a concern for linguistics. See this question for some more comments as to why orthography is not an inherent part of natural language itself and therefore not what linguistics traditionally deals with.

Answer 2

To complete lemontree's answer, I wanted to add a quote from Mary Norris, "Holy Writ" (The New Yorker):

The comma as we know it was invented by Aldo Manuzio, a printer working in Venice, circa 1500. It was intended to prevent confusion by separating things. In the Greek, komma means “something cut off,” a segment. (Aldo was printing Greek classics during the High Renaissance. The comma was a Renaissance invention.) As the comma proliferated, it started generating confusion. Basically, there are two schools of thought: One plays by ear, using the comma to mark a pause, like dynamics in music; if you were reading aloud, the comma would suggest when to take a breath. The other uses punctuation to clarify the meaning of a sentence by illuminating its underlying structure. Each school believes that the other gets carried away. It can be tense and kind of silly, like the argument among theologians about how many angels can fit on the head of a pin.

It seems that your question assumes that German uses commas to mark pauses, when clearly the last spelling reform seem to focus on their use as a syntactic tool. See also this answer about the differences between English and German punctuation.

Answer 3

I will compare German, English and Russian.

• English has no inflection but strict word order

• Russian has rich inflection but free word order.

• German has free word order but poor inflection.

What this means is that in English you use word order to convey some information, in Russian you use inflection, and in German you use punctuation. Russian also does not need a comma here.