drunter und drüber

Recently a student of mine stood at the window of the apartment she recently moved into with her boyfriend, looking four floors down onto the street, and mused about the many unt words that have to do with the world down there.

Unten, runter, unter, drunter.

Then she shrugged, and then they became un-words, Unwörter, words that are impossible to use or despicable just because they exist.

Why four words for what is down and never comes up anyway? Sure, they have to do with lower things (otherwise it would be about oben) but they belong to a different category of words, and they describe something different.

The word unten is a "Lokaladverb", an adverb that tells us where things happen, of a destination or a source of something.

Of course, there is oben but also links, rechts, da, drinnen, draussen.

There is a famous book that has four "Lokaladverbien" in its title. It is written by Günter Wallraff and Bernt Engelman and entitled "Ihr da oben – wir da unten."
Published in 1973, it tells about the class system in German society.

The word runter is an adverb that describes the direction of a movement. It is the short form of herunter. There is also a hinunter. The use of these words depends on the position of the speaker. The prefix her- leads to the speaker while hin- describes a movement away from the speaker.

Ahmed sieht Karls Mutter am Fenster.
Ahmed ruft: "Kommt Karl herunter?"
Karls Mutter antwortet: "Ja, er geht in 10 Minuten hinunter."

This is an ideal dialoge in some ideal high-German speaking areas of Germany.
In Berlin and many other places the dialog would be:
"Kommt Karl runter?"
"Er geht gleich runter."

The word unter is a preposition, leading to both, an accusative and a dative which means that unter never stands alone. It comes always with a noun.

Die Katze läuft unter den Tisch.
Warum? Die Maus sitzt unter dem Tisch.

The word drunter belongs to a group of words with the name "Pronominaladverb" which sounds like a new hot pharmaceutical product against cough. It is actually a short form of darunter. It replaces a group of words that is known to the speaker and the listener.

Siehst du meinen Pullover? Ich trage einen zweiten Pullover drunter.

The phrase drunter und drüber describes chaos, lack of organization in a room, on the workplace, in someone's life.

"Hier geht alles drunter und drüber," we have been hearing in train stations and on S-Bahn plattforms all winter and these days.