Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Awful German Language (1880)

cs.utah.edu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 317 posts

Re: The Awful German Language (1880)

#91

Post by kaybe »

louisswiss wrote: post #66
mitchty wrote: post #3

Heh, its honestly not that bad of a language, and has undergone two reforms (maybe 3? I forget) since this document was created. The "awful" parts of German are in some ways its saving grace. Example: surfing is Wellenreiten, literally wave-riding or riding waves. This whole thing is all over German with compound words. Its really no different conceptually from "the old blue car" in English, its just mashed together…

Those aren't the awful parts though, really. I would do away with the 'formal' form of addressing people (Germans have two ways of saying 'you') which serves no real purpose. I'd also get rid of gendered articles and finally simplify word endings (adjective endings can go for a start)!

Many people feel that having a formal way to address people is useful. It allows you to express very quickly how close you want to have them to you. A stranger you don't like? Formal. A stranger who seems to be your own age and from similar circumstances? Try using non-formal and see how they react. The most beautiful form of this is 'Sie Arschloch', I think. At the same time kind of polite and a rude insult.

Re: The Awful German Language (1880)

#93

Post by kaybe »

tomjakubowski wrote: post #37
emsy wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then there are also slightly funny ones -plane / Flugzeug / flight stuff -lighter / Feuerzeug / fire stuff -light bulb / Glühbirne / Glow pear -eyeball / Augapfel / Eye apple

Texas German has a less funny word for airplane: Luftschiff.

I think that would be an airship - zeppelin.

Re: The Awful German Language (1880)

#94

Post by escherplex »

Koshkin wrote: post #87
escherplex wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If referring to phonetics then thee would be for emphasis to a construed subordinate with thuh used generally. Really idiosyncratic. If referring to written words then use thee if you find yourself in Pennsylvania Dutch country trying to hail a horse drawn taxi or thuh if trying to play dumb while text messaging.

Well, IIRC the "official" rule is that 'thee' is to be used before a vowel and 'thuh' before a consonant.

True. The above was just for fun. But colloquial English these days behaves as if rules are to be made up as you go along. EG, locally I hear 'I'm going to thee Applebees Bar & Grill' as often as 'I'm going to thuh', but then again there isn't an abundance of Rhodes scholars in this neck of the woods.

Re: The Awful German Language (1880)

#96

Post by this_user »

krylon wrote: post #61
Koshkin wrote: post #34

German is an amazing, beautiful language. With not much of the vocabulary borrowed from other languages, words actually make sense. From that perspective, German can be seen as the modern equivalent of Latin, and if I were to choose only one language to remain on the entire planet, it would be German (sorry English, Chinese and Spanish). Its sounds are easier for non-native speakers to pronounce - especially compared…

As a German, allow me to respectfully disagree. I think English is far easier to learn. I often find it easier to express my thoughts in English than in German. I do agree that German is a beautiful language, though, and highly recommend reading Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra to anyone who does or does not agree with me on this one.

One thing that I have noticed about English is that it seems to be more concise. There are things that can be expressed much more elegantly and with fewer word in English, while saying the same thing in German may require a mid-sized sentence.

Re: The Awful German Language (1880)

#97

Post by ummonk »

tomjakubowski wrote: post #39
Tehnix wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, it's not anything like it. German is very different from English, especially in the way you position the verbs. It's a rather silly example, with one word. Following that logic, French would be a lot easier for anything English speaking person, with all their words that are 90% equivalent to their English counterparts

The hardest part of reading (not-simplified) German for me, as a sadly monolingual English speaker, is the word order. At times you have to sort of keep a mental stack of all the dative / accusative case nouns as you read, and then as you encounter the verbs at end of the sentence you kinda pop the nouns off that stack and piece together what's happening. Reading Spanish has no such difficulty for me. The word order…

Yup. SOV word order is natural conceptually and generally has less ambiguity in parsing, but the working memory requirements are really high. This is why simplified modern languages tend to shift to SVO word order. It is similar to how math operators are written in infix which makes equations easier to read than if we had written then as postfix.

Re: The Awful German Language (1880)

#98

Post by maw »

apo wrote: post #73

English grammar is far simpler than German grammar. Eliminating noun genders, declensions, and cases (as English does) is a great simplification over German. I've never understood the need for noun genders and I scratch my head at a society that makes its members memorize such useless information. That said, German pronunciation is more regular than English pronunciation. Every letter combination is in most cases pro…

> English grammar is far simpler than German grammar.

How do you negate in English? How does one eloquently and idiomatically combine English modal verbs? What are the rules governing when and how English deviates from SVO? Whom is still a word in English; how do its corner cases work? I could go on.

In other words, maybe English's grammar is simpler than German's and maybe it isn't, but it definitely isn't as clear-cut as you make it out to be.

Re: The Awful German Language (1880)

#99

Post by escherplex »

amelius wrote: post #52
tannhaeuser wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't know about your example, but Germans tend to pack more information into a sentence, particularly in the written form (as Mark Twain rightfully noticed). Actually, I find English somewhat clumsy to write technical documentation in. Using short sentences, I frequently end up in restating things and having to find alternative words and idioms to avoid repetition. Moreover, using relative clause in English isn't qu…

What I like about English is that it naturally supports gender neutrality. For example: "the user should upload their photo, and then they should press enter", instead of "the user should upload his/her photo and then he/she should press enter".

Gender references generally disappear in the English plurals. So the above should read "Users should upload their photos". Then you can just restrict gender pronouns for reference to specifics.

Re: The Awful German Language (1880)

#100

Post by tom_ »

cageface wrote: post #80
codazoda wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I took 4 years of German in high school, so I'm no expert, but I do disagree about it making sense any more than any other language. There are at least 3 ways to say "the". Der, die, and das. Which one you use depends on if the object you're talking about is femanine or not. To top that off some geographic areas use "das" for everything. It also has words that are similar to English; toilette (toilet) and hast (have)…

I've been learning Vietnamese for a few years and it seems to just fine without all the complicated tenses and cases etc in the grammar of European languages. I'm not sure if all those baroque rules really buy much.

They don't buy anything, but they don't cause any problems either. If they did, the language would have changed to accommodate it, or died out already. But since you're putting the effort in to learn it as it is, clearly neither applies...
Post reply on HN