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The Awful German Language (1880)

cs.utah.edu

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Re: The Awful German Language (1880)

#141

Post by ThinkingGuy »

geowwy wrote: post #86
rolleiflex wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

English still has he / she, so it’s not fully gender neutral, it still has gendered constructs in its ‘runtime’. There are a few fully gender neutral languages, Turkish is one.

Chinese is interesting because the spoken form has no gender but the written form does (he/she/it are written 他/她/它 but all pronounced “tā”)

I recall reading somewhere that these separate written forms were devised fairly recently (like the 18th or 19th century), in order to accomodate translations of Western novels. Same with Japanese (彼/彼女). Sorry, I don't have a source for this at the moment.

Re: The Awful German Language (1880)

#142

Post by marcus_holmes »

delib wrote: post #140
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…

> I scratch my head at a society that makes its members memorize such useless information. Such a weird perspective on language and on the agency of societies. There are tons of "useless" things in any language. For instance, why not get rid of all the tenses in English? Do we really need the past progressive? To make English spelling more "logical" (so people need to remember less useless information!), we should ag…

I recently started learning Khmer (Cambodian). It's an awesome language. No tenses (all assumed from context... if something happened in the past, you say it happened "already", and there's a single modifier to all verbs to indicate they will happen). No genders, at all (there's no "he/she/they" problem). The numbering system is simple adn consistent, and it's applied to months and hours ("one month" is a measure of duration, "month one" is January). I reminds me of reading good code; simple, elegant, with no unnecessary cruft.

It's given me a new perspective on (as you say) all the useless crap we have in English.

Oh, and I started learning German, too. TFA made me laugh.

Re: The Awful German Language (1880)

#143

Post by delib »

I think an overlooked aspect of the German-English comparison is the system of tenses. In German, you can get by with basically just two tenses: the present and the perfect. The past tense can almost always be replaced by the perfect when speaking. When you want to express something that lies in the future, you can just use the present and it will in most cases be clear from context.

Compare that to English, where the mastery of the tenses (i.e. when to use which tense) is essential. Distinguishing the use of the simple forms from the progressive forms can be tough for non-native speakers. And then there are all the different past tenses: simple past, present perfect, past progressive... in many cases it sounds really strange when these get mixed up. Think of something like: I have gone to the store last night. Or: He never was in New York. (When the speaker means that he has never been.)

Re: The Awful German Language (1880)

#144

Post by kayoone »

hv42 wrote: post #131
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…

What's really killing me is that the genders don't matter when you have a plural form. It's all the same (ie. using "die" and the plural cases) In Spanish or French for eg. you still have gender marks (los/Las for eg.) with the plural form but in German, it's all the same. That makes me wonder why it's so necessary to have genders in the first place since the German plural doesn't have marks of it and it doesn't hurt…

It's not necessary and as a native german it is something i can totally live with if foreigners get it wrong in conversations. Even people with years of being fluent in germany still ocassionally screw them up. In a similar way i always struggle pronouncing words like "caffeine, beard, deteriorate" etc after years of speaking english at work.

Re: The Awful German Language (1880)

#145

Post by zvrba »

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…

> I've never understood the need for noun genders

As a native speaker of Slavic language, I've never understood the need for differentiating between "THE table" and "A table". It's useless and clear from the context what is meant (note that both are different from "THIS/THAT table", which I do NOT deem useless.)

For English and Norwegian, I've learned grammatical rules that cover ca 80% of use-cases, the rest is guessing and I still get it wrong sometimes.

Re: The Awful German Language (1880)

#146

Post by kingofpandora »

bobogei81123 wrote: post #128
kingofpandora wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've never understood the need for noun genders What a peculiar comment. It's like saying, what's the use of termites? No, seriously, why _do_ we have termites? Do we really need termites?

If someone is creating a new language now, that is a concept that would definitely not be included.

> If someone is creating a new language now, that is a concept that would definitely not be included.

Natural languages aren't designed, which is why the comment above is so odd.

Re: The Awful German Language (1880)

#147

Post by peterlk »

zvrba wrote: post #145
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…

> I've never understood the need for noun genders As a native speaker of Slavic language, I've never understood the need for differentiating between "THE table" and "A table". It's useless and clear from the context what is meant (note that both are different from "THIS/THAT table", which I do NOT deem useless.) For English and Norwegian, I've learned grammatical rules that cover ca 80% of use-cases, the rest is gues…

I am fascinated by how little syntax is required to actually communicate with each other. You can remove gender from language entirely and still understand what people mean. We can even get rid of time-based tenses and instead say something like "I go to the store yesterday". This is incorrect English, but the point is still communicated. As you say "the" and "a" could be condensed. You could go even further and combine these words with "one". Having traveled to a lot of places where I had to speak languages that I don't speak or understand, the amount of language built on top of the tiny "required" subset is marvelous and interesting.

Other questions that make language fun. Any ideas where eenie meanie miney moe comes from? Why does flat (low) German exist, and how far is it from Dutch (or English)? How many dialects of various languages are spoken in the Alps? Why do we call different Chinese dialects "dialects" and not "languages"? Which language has the most diverse set of conjugation rules? But I digress.

Re: The Awful German Language (1880)

#148

Post by klodolph »

zvrba wrote: post #145
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…

> I've never understood the need for noun genders As a native speaker of Slavic language, I've never understood the need for differentiating between "THE table" and "A table". It's useless and clear from the context what is meant (note that both are different from "THIS/THAT table", which I do NOT deem useless.) For English and Norwegian, I've learned grammatical rules that cover ca 80% of use-cases, the rest is gues…

For me, "the" and "a" are critical for understanding whether you are introducing something new or assuming that I know what you are talking about from context. If I use "the" then it's something clear from context, if I use "a" it's something new. The languages I know make a big fuss about this so I'm curious how you can figure out from context whether you can figure out something from context.

Re: The Awful German Language (1880)

#149

Post by wumms »

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…

> Likewise, the combination "ei" will always be pronounced "eye."

That's not true for German, e.g. in some loanwords:

"Atheist" and "Koffein" (= caffeine) use "eh-i"

> I've never understood the need for noun genders

Sometimes they show different meanings of a word:

German:

Die Leiter = the ladder

Der Leiter = the director

French:

la tour = the tour

le tour = the tower

Re: The Awful German Language (1880)

#150

Post by Too »

k__ wrote: post #7
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…

To me, as a Germany, it felt rather strange that in English it isn't the same. Like, why would you add a space between two words that are meant to be read together?

Especially when programming it's quite natural to put words together as variables can't have spaces in their names. No need for any underscores (under_scores?) as some styleguides propose, as long as it's a single noun just treat it as a single word.
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