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The Awful German Language (1880)

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Re: The Awful German Language (1880)

#201

Post by TomMarius »

sarabande wrote: post #48
bitL wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Despite appearance, German is very illogical language full of idioms and exceptions one has to master. Also, even natives usually don't master the full extent of language and the overbearing nature of language with its need for precise use of words/formulations specific to a given situation often leads to strong reliance on syntax/appearance of complexity. You can see it in typical German philosophy, where the langua…

I think this conflates typically verbose academic/philosophical writing with German itself. Many great old philosophers came out of Germany, in a time where writing obtusely to make a point was in vogue (in English, too, not just German), so this may add to the perception of German philosophy needing to be contorted. I've read refreshingly concise modern works in both and English and German and can assure you that st…

Could you share an example? I'd like to read something while learning German.

Re: The Awful German Language (1880)

#202

Post by coldtea »

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…

>It's an awesome language

An awesome language to learn easily or to express yourself with full capacity? Those could be different qualities...

Re: The Awful German Language (1880)

#203

Post by liftbigweights »

lolc wrote: post #182

As a native speaker I can confirm the observations of Mark Twain. What is ignored in such humorous tirades is that every human speaker will push information density to the very limit of understandability. In every language. They will use all the tools available. Sure, the German case system is getting weaker as the centuries go by. And in some situations you will wonder why it's used still. But that doesn't mean the…

> It amazes me how many people claim English is easy to learn

People think english is simple because we don't have the gender+conjugation+declension system of many languages. So initially, english appears simple. A boat is a boat is a boat. But everywhere else - from spelling to grammar to phonetics, english is irregular and has so many exceptions that it really requires effort to become native or even fluent.

One cow or many cows vs one sheep vs many sheep? One goose or many geese vs one moose vs many moose? Though goose can become gooses if you use it as a verb. Or look at envelope. You pronounce it differently depending on whether you use it as a noun, verb or adjective ( though it might be a regional thing ). And of course the nearly non-systematic accent/emphasis of syllables which you simply have to learn through listening. Whereas languages like latin have fairly consistent and systematic rules for accent/emphasis. And then there is the british insistence on adding a 'u' to words like labor or harbor.

Re: The Awful German Language (1880)

#204

Post by coldtea »

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…

>"THE table" and "A table". It's useless and clear from the context what is meant

"Bring the table", "Bring a table".

Do I ask you to bring some table we've already talked about or I can expect you to remember the reference to,

or do I ask you to bring any table because any table will do?

"Clear from the context" is a low bar. In languages, as in parsers, we should avoid it if we can.

Re: The Awful German Language (1880)

#205

Post by coldtea »

zvrba wrote: post #173
klodolph wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>Erm, memory? You remember whether something has been introduced or not.

Not a very reliable tool. At least "bring THE table" introduces some error correction in the sentence.

- "Come by the shop tomorrow. And bring THE table".

(confused by the explicit "THE", the error correction kicks in:)

- "Huh? What table?"

- "The one we talked about last week on the phone",

- "A, yes!"

Re: The Awful German Language (1880)

#206

Post by Udo_Schmitz »

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…

>That said, German pronunciation is more regular than English pronunciation.

Yup: https://www.learnenglish.de/pronunciation/pronunciationpoem....

Re: The Awful German Language (1880)

#207

Post by FabHK »

Obligatory terrible joke:

The house of a German professor is on fire. He runs in, shouting "I need to rescue my work from obliteration!" and comes out with a huge tome. He runs in again, mumbling about his magnum opus, and appears again with another volume. The fire fighters warn him that the house might collapse anytime and it's dangerous to go in, but the professor exclaims "But I need to save volume III, it contains all the verbs!"

Oh, and while we are at it: My mathematician friend claims that Latin is closed under permutation, while German is closed under concatenation.

Re: The Awful German Language (1880)

#208

Post by rytis »

coldtea wrote: post #205
zvrba wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> Erm, memory? You remember whether something has been introduced or not. Not a very reliable tool. At least "bring THE table" introduces some error correction in the sentence. - "Come by the shop tomorrow. And bring THE table". (confused by the explicit "THE", the error correction kicks in:) - "Huh? What table?" - "The one we talked about last week on the phone", - "A, yes!"

Then why not use 'THAT' and 'ANY' instead?

Also, in your example, what is the purpose of referencing particular phone with 'THE'? Why not just 'on phone'?

NB. Just like zvrba I was (still am) having troubles with As and THEs. Baltic language speaker here btw.

Re: The Awful German Language (1880)

#209

Post by FabHK »

liftbigweights wrote: post #203
lolc wrote: post #182

As a native speaker I can confirm the observations of Mark Twain. What is ignored in such humorous tirades is that every human speaker will push information density to the very limit of understandability. In every language. They will use all the tools available. Sure, the German case system is getting weaker as the centuries go by. And in some situations you will wonder why it's used still. But that doesn't mean the…

> It amazes me how many people claim English is easy to learn People think english is simple because we don't have the gender+conjugation+declension system of many languages. So initially, english appears simple. A boat is a boat is a boat. But everywhere else - from spelling to grammar to phonetics, english is irregular and has so many exceptions that it really requires effort to become native or even fluent. One co…

I've seen this quote attributed to G B Shaw: "English is one of the easiest languages to speak badly, but one of the most difficult to speak well"; however, I can't find a reliable citation.

At any rate, I think it captures something about English. As you say, languages like German and French take more effort to learn initially (conjugation and (in German) declension), but then there are only a few ways of expressing something correctly. English has so many synonyms with slightly different connotations and idiomatic nuances that it is hard to master.

Re: The Awful German Language (1880)

#210

Post by wolfgke »

rurban wrote: post #188
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.

German is more concise and can specialize the nouns much better than in english. But on the other hand that makes german much longer. Translations into german (e.g. SW or movie subtitles) are the longest in german than in any other major language. You need much more room to express the same. E.g. in SW translations this conciseness strikes back, the english original form is often preferred, as it is easier to underst…

> But on the other hand that makes german much longer. Translations into german (e.g. SW or movie subtitles) are the longest in german than in any other major language.

I can believe that if you translate texts that are written in idiomatic English into German, they get longer. On the other hand, if you have a concisely written scientific text in German, translating it into English leads to something between gibberish and something barely readable. So you often have to completely rewrite/reexpress large parts of the text so that it looks like idiomatic English.

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