Earlier quoted context omitted.
Until it doesn't. Is it das Nutella or die Nutella?
When is it ever die nutella?
When you have a stomach ache from eating too much of it.
The Awful German Language (1880)
171–180 of 317 posts
Re: The Awful German Language (1880)
#172As a speaker of Kannada, a Dravidian language, grammatically, I find Indo European languages strange in general, with all kinds of rules, and all kinds of exceptions to those rules. Eg: verb conjugation and noun genders. I have dabbled with German and Spanish - I really like these two for some reason - and a bit of Russian. Of this family, Sanskrit seems simpler; not sure if that's because it was explicitly systematized (refactored) millennia back, and hence objectively so, or its just subjective since every Indian is made to learn it at a young age. I find Semitic languages, of which I know some Arabic, quite attractive. I love how concisely are ideas encoded in these languages because Dravidian languages are somewhat concise similarly, though not to that extent.
Re: The Awful German Language (1880)
#173Earlier 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…
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.
> I'm curious how you can figure out from context whether you can figure out something from context.
Erm, memory? You remember whether something has been introduced or not.
Take a hypothetical phone conversation, an example that nobody has managed to explain to me satisfactorily: A: "Where are you?" B: "I'm in [the/a/(nothing)] shower."
People tell me that "the" is the correct thing to use. But A is none the wiser; B could be at home, in a gym, at work... A is none the wiser about _which_ shower B is in and the shower has not been introduced previously in the conversation. It's tautological "the", B is in that shower that he's currently using, so he could just as well say "I'm in shower".
Or, similarly: A: "Where's my food?" B: "I've put it in fridge." If A is at work, he'd go looking into fridge at office. If at home, he'd go look into fridge in kitchen. If there are two fridges nearby, he'd ask "Which one?"
Even though I deliberately omitted "the/a" in the previous paragraph, I don't think you got confused about _which_ office or _which_ kitchen fridge A would go looking in. And personally I cannot imagine that A, upon hearing "it's in fridge" while being in the office, would go home and look into the fridge at home. Or that he'd even have to ask "which fridge?" if there only were one at office.
So there's an attempted answer.
EDIT: one of my rules of thumb is: if I can put "some" in front of a noun without changing the meaning, then it's most probably appropriate to use "a".
Re: The Awful German Language (1880)
#174English 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…
You're attacking a straw man.
Language is dynamic and cannot be controlled.
Writing needs to be adapted to fit that.
In English, the writing has become detached from the writing to the point where it is not possible to write a word upon hearing it the first time or to pronounce it upon reading it.
This is unnecessary and could be fixed.
Re: The Awful German Language (1880)
#175Earlier 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 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.
> "Don't always make this about you!"
German: Es geht nicht immer nur um dich!
Not a 100% word for word translation, but what I would yell when I meant to say something similar to the English version. Instead of "make it (about you)" I switch to something that reverse-translated ends up more like "it is not about you" because trying to use the "make" part in a 100% word for word translation does not seem to lead to anything I as a German might say. Still, I'd say my version actually is an accurate translation, so I would dispute your claim that "there is no exactly matching equivalent in German".
Re: The Awful German Language (1880)
#176English 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…
In Swedish there are two ways to say "one" - "ett" and "en". Ex. one table = "ett bord" and one cat = "en katt". There is no rule for when to use either. And yes, this makes it extremely difficult for foreigners.
Re: The Awful German Language (1880)
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> They are definitely worried about losing their language and perhaps the cultural identity it confers.
Who is "they"? As a German who also has one friend (fluent in two other languages and living abroad most of the time and married to a non-German) who is in that camp and who even collected money to give to a local German language society, this is a small minority. The majority of people could not care less. Proof: Use of English words and phrases is ubiquitous, used for shops (even that exact word instead of the German "(der) Laden"), signs, marketing campaigns, everyday language. If it didn't work or if it caused any backlash they would not do that. We even have "fake English" words: "Handy" for mobile phones (and that is the word almost everybody actually uses) :-)
Re: The Awful German Language (1880)
#178English 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…
It's the “agency of societies” that helped English lose its gendered nouns. One theory is that Old English society found them useless because there was overlap between endings, causing noun ending inflection to “collapse” into a single neutral form, which started in the North of England and progressed to the South.[1]
Societal changes are already influencing gendered nouns in Germany[2]. Some dialects of German (Niederdeutsch) also use de instead of der/die.
I'm a British national living in Austria. I've spoken with Austrian natives about the difficulty of learning German noun genders who admit that it feels increasingly old fashioned to them. The local dialect here slurs some noun endings so it's almost ambiguous, just as Old English once did.
There's no place for reinforcement of gender stereotypes via language (it is hard to find gender-neutral phrases in German - you are either a male programmer or a female one). Two languages that gender the same noun differently also have societies that use a different class of adjective (feminine vs masculine) for the word.[1]
To me it seems entirely reasonable to call gendered nouns “useless”, and to see them as a burden on a language and a society.
[1]: Lexicon Valley's episode on how English lost its genders is worth listening to: https://overcast.fm/+Noxtqh7oc. Dave Wilton's analysis is also interesting: http://www.wordorigins.org/index.php/site/comments/loss_of_g...
[2]: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/will-new-law-for...
Re: The Awful German Language (1880)
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
The languages have changed - English used to have a more complex grammar (thee, thine, thou, etc) and I think it had genders, but that died out over time.
Re: The Awful German Language (1880)
#180Earlier 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.
A Luftschiff is not an airplane, it's a Zeppelin because it floats in the air like a ship in the water.