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The Awful German Language (1880)

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Re: The Awful German Language (1880)

#151

Post by wirrbel »

delib wrote: post #143

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 th…

I agree. I'd add that a lot of people overlook the complexity of English idioms and vocabulary. It is easy to pick up the basics of English, it is much more difficult to get to proficient level for writing a book for example.

Imho as a native German I have the impression that with German it's the other way around. In the beginning it's hard. But once people attain a basic level there is not much to learn anymore.

Re: The Awful German Language (1880)

#152

Post by sfRattan »

wolfgke wrote: post #108
this_user wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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. As a native German speaker, I disagree. German allows a really concise nominal style that is hard to express in English.

As a native speaker of English and a speaker of German, I find that some things are more concise in one language and other things are more concise in the other. I don't know if this inconsistency is due to limits in my own knowledge or limits in each language, but I suspect it's a bit of both. Where things appear more concise to native speakers also probably has to do with both tacit knowledge of idioms and amount of time spent composing a deliberately aphoristic statement.

Re: The Awful German Language (1880)

#153

Post by poulsbohemian »

sfRattan wrote: post #152
wolfgke wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. As a native German speaker, I disagree. German allows a really concise nominal style that is hard to express in English.

As a native speaker of English and a speaker of German, I find that some things are more concise in one language and other things are more concise in the other. I don't know if this inconsistency is due to limits in my own knowledge or limits in each language, but I suspect it's a bit of both. Where things appear more concise to native speakers also probably has to do with both tacit knowledge of idioms and amount of…

>As a native speaker of English and a speaker of German, I find that some things are more concise in one language and other things are more concise in the other.

I'm reminded of my former neighbors, who would switch between English and Spanish mid-sentence. I asked them about it once and they expressed a sentiment similar to yours.

As an English and German speaker, my kids would tell you I sometimes do the same thing. Bad drivers get yelled at in German ;-D

Re: The Awful German Language (1880)

#154

Post by therein »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #142
delib wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I wonder if Khmer speakers are missing out on anything by not having these concepts in their language.

Re: The Awful German Language (1880)

#155

Post by jand »

this_user wrote: post #96
krylon wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

One example:

"Don't always make this about you!"

There is no exactly matching equivalent in German. You might say something like 'this isn't about you', but there is no term for calling someone out on it so beautifully and bluntly.

But to me it makes no sense to make absolute statements on conciseness. In my opinion societies are concise in language on topics on which a great common focus lies upon.

Re: The Awful German Language (1880)

#156

Post by saghm »

tomjakubowski wrote: post #78
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)…

der, die, das, den, dem, des, all depending on case (likewise for indefinite articles + worse for adjective endings). German grammatical case presents information quite efficiently, often replacing the need for a preposition or other helper word, but it is mostly foreign to English speakers. The "nouns have gender" stuff isn't quite as weird. It's in many other languages and eventually it isn't too hard to learn the…

> It's also worth noting that there are actually two ways to _say_ "the" in English (think "thuh" and "thee"). I would challenge any native English speaker to explain when you use each. ;-)

I'd be surprised if you could find any fluent English speaker who says that either pronunciation is wrong in any context where the other is correct. If I'm understanding the description of the German definite articles correctly, the aren't all valid in the same contexts, which is hardly the same thing. (I don't actually know German, but I know a bit of Spanish and Dutch, and in both of those languages the definite articles are not necessarily interchangeable, which is my understanding of German from the above description)

Re: The Awful German Language (1880)

#157

Post by realusername »

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 pronounciation is so irregular it looks like it's written in a wrong alphabet and would benefit greatly from some Cyrillic equivalent.

Re: The Awful German Language (1880)

#158

Post by yesenadam »

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…

Latin is a dead language, and we did not have a will to adopt it as a universal language

I'm not sure what you mean by this. I used to believe that "Latin is a dead language" - until I learnt more about the subject. It was spoken everywhere in the Roman Empire, and the local differences evolved into the Romance languages. They are what Latin is today. And it (the relatively fixed 'classical' version anyway) was a universal language for a long time....until the 19th C in maths and the sciences. Thousands of years is a long time in language-years, and nothing stays still for that long, but changes totally. Latin's dead in the sense every language must be after thousands of years of evolution. English will be dead in that same sense in another 2000 years, and so will every other language of today.

Re: The Awful German Language (1880)

#159

Post by InternetOfStuff »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #142
delib wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Khmer is sure to have its own oddities.

I learned Thai, which shares Khmer's refreshing simplicity, like not having tenses.

However, it has "classifiers", which are used when counting things. In English, you might say "Three children", in Thai you would say "Children three persons", where "person" happens to be the correct classifier for children. Makes sense in that case, but in general it's weird (and somewhat comedic): for instance airplanes and bamboo share the same classifier ("long hollow things").

There are about 80 classifiers, and part of learning the language is learning the correct classifier to go with each noun, much like learning genders in German. Same as with genders, if you get the classifier wrong, you'll still be understood, but considered uneducated (or badly in command of the language).

BTW, and programmers will love this: this situation means that when counting things of disparate types, you need to typecast!

Funny (to me, anyway) story: my wife was simultaneously telling off one of our sons, nicknamed "O", and one of our dogs, also nicknamed "O". Since they don't share the same classifier, she cast their classifier to the made-up-on-the-spot classifier "O" so it would both be factually and grammatically correct.

Languages are funny.

Re: The Awful German Language (1880)

#160

Post by yesenadam »

bitL wrote: post #56
Koshkin wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet, the greatest philosophers after the Greeks were all German-speaking (Hegel, Kant, Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsche, Mach...). Also, physicists, mathematicians.

Some people blame the tragedy of 20th century on prevailing idealistic trends in German philosophy, including the ones you mentioned.

Santayana's Egotism in German Philosophy is an admirable and very readable history and diagnosis of that story, from Leibniz to the late 19th C. He has a gorgeous style and lovely understated sense of humour. And virtually explains the Nazis, although published in 1915.
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