The Awful German Language (1880) • Hacker News Board

Re: The Awful German Language (1880)

#161

Post by Someone » Sat, Oct 06, 2018, 7:20 AM UTC

NeedMoreTea wrote: post #44

mishac wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Porcupine is the same thing, just using latinate roots rather than native English/Germanic ones.

English does this a lot with borrowed words too, like orangutan coming from Malay orang (man) hutan (forest), so man of the forest.

That’s a nice example where English fully compounds the word while German and Dutch, languages where compounding is more usual, use a hyphen (“Orang-oetan”, respectively “Orang-Utan”).

Looking at the various translations on Wikipedia (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orang-Utans#/languages), that could be because they took the word from different languages. For example, Bahasa Indonesia has “Orang Utan”, Bahasa Banjar “Uranghutan”

Re: The Awful German Language (1880)

#162

Post by mbeex » Sat, Oct 06, 2018, 7:25 AM UTC

pitaj wrote: post #70

zwieback wrote: post #41

I'm German but have been living in the US for 25 yrs and my verdict is that the German grammar is overly and unnecessarily complicated. The pronunciation, on the other hand, is sane, which cannot be said of English.

It's not English pronunciation that's wrong, it's the spelling.

https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~clamen/misc/humour/TheChaos.html

Re: The Awful German Language (1880)

#163

Post by et2o » Sat, Oct 06, 2018, 7:31 AM UTC

thaumasiotes wrote: post #40

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…

The absence of foreign loans in German is not due to being "resistant to frivolous changes". It's due to an explicit reform effort to root out ubiquitous Latinate loans. You can do the same in any language, limited only by how much control the government has over the way people talk.

The last time I was in Germany I noticed explicitly anti-English-language grassroot campaign signs on bus stops. They are definitely worried about losing their language and perhaps the cultural identity it confers.

I alternately love and hate German. Sometimes I have to fight through sentences with 5 clauses, and sometimes you get a beautiful and concise statement.

Re: The Awful German Language (1880)

#164

Post by CamouflagedKiwi » Sat, Oct 06, 2018, 7:35 AM UTC

err4nt wrote: post #101

KeyboardFire wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea that language limits or constrains the way people think (the stronger side of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis) is now largely discredited by the majority of linguists.

Yet we have a wide variety of programming languages, and switch between them as the need arises for a better fit to the problem domain we're working in. With the wide variety of things like number systems in different languages, wouldn't it make sense that using some languages might be better for mathematical communication, and others maybe not offer the precision required to communicate everything necessary? It woul…

That's a softer form of it which is fairly obviously true; a language with no words for weather will obviously limit discussion of the weather forecast. That's a bit different to whether it limits your ability to think about those things though.

Re: The Awful German Language (1880)

#165

Post by et2o » Sat, Oct 06, 2018, 7:39 AM UTC

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)!

And two more for plural "you" since (ihr and overloaded Sie).

I like having a second person plural. I sometimes say "you guys" (although this is becoming less acceptable) or "you all" since we don't have one.

Re: The Awful German Language (1880)

#166

Post by emsy » Sat, Oct 06, 2018, 7:43 AM UTC

v_lisivka wrote: post #45

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

Yeah, English is funny language. - plane - flat surface - lighter - a lamp - light bulb - empty bulb - eyeball - a sport (Non-native speaker).

Nice lateral thinking!

Re: The Awful German Language (1880)

#167

Post by green7ea » Sat, Oct 06, 2018, 7:54 AM UTC

wumms wrote: post #149

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

la tour = the tower

le tour = the trick

Re: The Awful German Language (1880)

#168

Post by pantalaimon » Sat, Oct 06, 2018, 8:03 AM UTC

peterlk wrote: post #147

zvrba wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 comb…

I think all this unnecessary 'clutter' serves as error correction when spoken.

Even if you don't fully understand a word, you can piece together from the context what was said.

Re: The Awful German Language (1880)

#169

Post by Grue3 » Sat, Oct 06, 2018, 8:10 AM UTC

bzbarsky wrote: post #139

man-and-laptop wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could say the same thing about Russian. Like German, it doesn't borrow very heavily from other languages; and a lot of the words are simple variations of each other with different prefixes and suffixes. It was even the Lingua Franca (or "Latin") of the Communist bloc. On the other hand, Russian might be an even harder language to learn than German, given that it's Slavic and uses a different alphabet. There's alw…

Russian doesn't borrow heavily? There's a ton of borrowing from French in Russian.... I hadn't appreciated quite how much until I started learning French.

Lots of borrowings from Turkic languages as well. For example the common word for money "dengi" has the same roots as "denge" (balance) in Turkish and national currency of Kazakhstan "tenge".

Re: The Awful German Language (1880)

#170

Post by kleiba » Sat, Oct 06, 2018, 8:10 AM UTC

Then the teacher lets me softly down with the remark that whenever the word "wegen" drops into a sentence, it always throws that subject into the Genitive case, regardless of consequences -- and that therefore this bird stayed in the blacksmith shop "wegen des Regens."

Interestingly, this grammatical rule has changed since Mark Twain's times - minimally in spoken language where the Dative case is commonly used. But also in more formal or more educated contexts, standard German allows the Dative case after "wegen" in certain cases.

In general, the Genitive case is used less and less, it seems that German will in the long run only entertain three grammatical cases instead of the current four.