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The Awful German Language (1880)

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Re: The Awful German Language (1880)

#191

Post by marcus_holmes »

InternetOfStuff wrote: post #159
marcus_holmes wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 come…

Yeah, it's weird, Thai and Khmer are very similar, and share some words, but also very different. Khmer isn't tonal, and has really simplified grammar.

They used to share an alphabet, too, but the Thai opted to simplify it (westernise it) while the Khmer opted to keep their original alphabet. Written Khmer is hard for us westerners to deal with because of this. They have lots of vowels and consonants that we don't have (I always struggle with the consonant between 'b' and 'p', because it doesn't seem like there should be any room for another consonant in there).

Re: The Awful German Language (1880)

#192

Post by marcus_holmes »

therein wrote: post #154
marcus_holmes wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It does rely a lot on context. If you don't share a context with your listener, it's easy to get confused. Given the cultural gap with the West, it can mean that you're fluent in Khmer, but still miss a lot of the meaning because you don't share the same cultural context. Essentially culture-wide in-jokes.

But then, I had to explain British rhyming slang to my German gf the other day, and she thought it was crazy. I guess there's nothing that unusual about culture-wide in-jokes.

Re: The Awful German Language (1880)

#194

Post by ur-whale »

pantalaimon wrote: post #168
peterlk wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's a common sophism that completely ignores the cost/benefit trade-off of those supposedly useful error correction mechanisms.

In German for example, they're IMO total overkill (as in cost far outweighs benefit).

But then, you have to take into account that over-engineering things is a national hobby in Germany.

The question becomes chicken-and-egg: did the language induce the cultural trait or did the cultural trait structure the language.

Re: The Awful German Language (1880)

#195

Post by ur-whale »

kleiba wrote: post #170

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 a…

"allows"

The very idea that one is "allowed" to say or not say certain things is just so deeply wrong ...

How about this criterium instead: did the person you are trying to communicate with actually understand what you wre trying to said.

Re: The Awful German Language (1880)

#196

Post by ur-whale »

hevi_jos wrote: post #12

German is not that hard, specially coming from English, which is a germanic language itself. The Michel Thomas learning audio programs are fantastic for getting a grasp of the language. If you read and read and watch and watch TV,without analyzing what you do you get naturally the feeling of the language, without the suffering. Mark Twain did what 99% of Germans,Austrians,Swiss are never going to do. Stop and overthi…

>Mark Twain did what 99% of Germans,Austrians,Swiss are never going to do. Stop and overthink it too much.

The Swiss do not speak German at all.

They speak various forms of Swiss-German dialects, which are related to German, but altogether different languages.

And very wisely, Swiss-German dialects have entirely done away with all the useless grammatical garbage German is settled with.

As a result, Swiss-German - while being far from the most aesthetically pleasing thing to hear - is way easier to learn than hochdeutsch.

Yet somehow, you can perfectly express complex thoughts in Swiss-German and still be understood, so all I've read in this thread about how grammatical complexity is a form of error-correction ... sorry I have to call BS.

Re: The Awful German Language (1880)

#197

Post by Zak »

ThJ wrote: post #111
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'm a native speaker of Norwegian, a language which also has three grammatical genders. I don't experience it as having to memorise genders. I only notice them when they are wrong. They're not completely useless. "Det regner." - It's raining. "Den regner." - It's calculating. The verb "regne" is ambiguous and the gender helps disambiguate ut. Sometimes, the grammatical gender conveys information about the noun. Is it…

Regardless of the potential use for disambiguation, every noun having a gender affecting the articles and pronouns to be used adds a significant burden when learning the language. In some languages, like Spanish, the spelling of the noun nearly always indicates its gender, but this is not the case in German.

Acquiring a language as a native speaker in childhood is a significantly different experience from trying to learn one as an adult.

Re: The Awful German Language (1880)

#198

Post by DonaldFisk »

KMag wrote: post #122
escherplex wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chinese of course has numerous dialects outside Mandarin. Do any dialects change tones when using that “tā” phoneme for a "he" or a "she" or an "it"?

I'm living in a Cantonese speaking area (Hong Kong) and my Mandarin teacher (from Taiwan) claims that the multiple written forms of the third-person singular pronoun were introduced a generation or two ago in order to be able to more faithfully translate foreign works into Chinese. She says that many people, particularly the older generation, always use the older character, the one that now means "he". As far as dial…

Gender distinctions in the Standard Chinese written forms 他 (he), 她 (she), 它 (it) are indeed a recent introduction. In Cantonese there's a single character for he, she, or it (佢, pronounced keúih). This is a different word entirely from Mandarin tā, not a different pronunciation of the same word like 雞 being pronounced jī in Mandarin or gāi in Cantonese.

Because, as you pointed out, there's no mutual intelligibility, Cantonese and Mandarin are considered by linguists to be separate languages.

Re: The Awful German Language (1880)

#199

Post by coldtea »

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 and I scratch my head at a society that makes its members memorize such useless information.

Society doesn't make anybody do anything. Languages are not built in labs, they grow evolutionary and organically (with some bureaucratic intervention here and there).

For that particular people, following the historical lineages they went through, those things evolved in their language.

Plus, instead of seeing them as "useless information" (where the main concern is crudely expressing the most basic concepts to another, e.g. utilitarian communication), one could see them as a richer way of describing the world than English, and with more expressive power (not just for raw communication, for expression of feelings, poetry, etc as well).

(In fact a common point to many European essays from the past 200 or so years is how English is a cruder language suited mainly for "commerce").

Re: The Awful German Language (1880)

#200

Post by _Microft »

louisswiss wrote: post #68
noonespecial wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here. German always follows the rules. You might not like the rules, but it always follows the rules!

Until it doesn't. Is it das Nutella or die Nutella?

The Duden [0] wrote [1]:

Kein Geheimnis dagegen ist, dass das Genus für den Marken- bzw. Produktnamen nicht festgelegt ist. Häufig wird die weibliche Form die Nutella verwendet, wohl abgeleitet von der aus dem Italienischen stammenden femininen Endung -ella. Es tritt aber auch die sächliche Form das Nutella auf. Das Neutrum wird häufig auch bei Fremdwörtern gewählt, wenn es keine starken Gründe für das Maskulinum oder das Femininum gibt. Seltener kommt der Nutella vor.

It translates to:

It's not a secret that the gender of brand and product names is not defined. Often, the female form of "die Nutella" is used, most likely derived from the italian female ending "-ella". The neuter gender ("das Nutella") also appears. The neuter gender is often chosen for borrowed words when there's no strong reason for masculine or feminine. "Der Nutella" is rarely used.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duden

[1] https://www.duden.de/aktuelle_meldungen/Alles-Gute-zum-Gebur...

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