The Awful German Language (1880) • Hacker News Board

Re: The Awful German Language (1880)

#261

Post by posterboy » Sat, Oct 06, 2018, 7:24 PM UTC

dyeje wrote: post #237

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…

Why don't you think removing genders will make the language easier? I studied German in college and memorizing these was my only complaint.

In some cases, the gender serves merely for contrast, sometimes historically grown, and it would be a shame to loose that.

E.g. female sun, male moon, female night, male day. Those examples might stem from codified personifications (e.g. nox).

In many cases though, I suppose it's a case of vowel harmony. If there was only one article, it would be "d'" with a semi-vowel ablaut, schwa, as in English "the". I don't know exactly why, I just recently heard of vowel harmony (ie. part of the native speaker's feeling for what sounds right) existing.

Gender has a minor advantage in some situations, I guess. I'm not sure whether the free word order is an advantage, but it helps for parsing this one: "Der Frau gibt der Briefträger einen Brief." - (to) the women gives the postman a letter.

Conversely, I find totally odd the neuter pronoun used on dogs. However, I do call all dogs "he" no matter the genitals, so that's no better, also because I don't exactly look for it. Whereas cat's are a priori female. It's not OK to neutralize (pun intended) a human person in any case.

Defaulting to "es", "they" or any alternative is still a crutch, as long as the inflection remains. And that has probably some reason to be there. Indo European had a two case gender system distinguishing animate and inanimate, female being a later innovation. In fact they had two words for fire, whence the ignition (animate) and the fire (inanimate). I do not know much about the case system, but taking Latin for example, that clearly got out of hand.

So, "die Flasche" (bottle) holds spirit. "der Wind" (wind) acts. But "das Wasser" just sits there waiting to be consumed. If it flows, it's "der Fluss". The sea is weird, "das Meer" is neuter, perhaps because as diminutive (Märchen, nightmare ...?), but "die See" is an abstractum (die Nordsee, rarely Nordmeer), whereas "der See" is any determined lake. Der Teich (pond), die Leiche (corpse), das Reich (realm), der Streich (trick) seem to resist the argument for vowel harmony, but if Streich and trick are from frankish or French, estrich, estriquer or sumsuch, then that's a different matter, same if Leiche was Lyke or so ... I don't know much about that.

Re: The Awful German Language (1880)

#262

Post by posterboy » Sat, Oct 06, 2018, 8:01 PM UTC

lolc wrote: post #255

dyeje wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why don't you think removing genders will make the language easier? I studied German in college and memorizing these was my only complaint.

Not being too much of a linguist but ever ready to expound on the concept of economy in speech: We have a strong pressure to minimize communication effort both for speakers and for listeners. I would assume that genders help disambiguate and aid the listener discern words with higher certainty without increasing the syllable count. Our mind builds hypotheses of the words to follow while listening to a sentence. Witho…

> In the midst of a German sentence, some nouns will be precluded because they would be impossible due to gendered articles and adjectives. This lessens the cognitive load (of the trained listener) or conversely allows omitting words when the gender narrows down the selection enough.

This is an example for OP's notion of hard to parse foreign speaker English. I'm not sure what you are trying to say. No offense. I also noted the ease that comes from omission of a noun after an article if the grammatical gender hinted at by the article already indicates the noun (Was there anything else you were trying to say?). It's comparable to use of the indefinite it. I've seen that exposed as "omitting a word if the article makes it (word) clear" - you'd use "the" instead, then omit the noun, getting "... makes the clear".

It's used especially in subsentences "_Der_ Hund in dem Haus, _der_ dieses und jenes tat, ist ...", so the referred noun does not have to precede the subsentence directly. However, I find this a bad use of the language and think it's unnatural for spoken speech.

I suppose relational algebra would be informative to understand the problem better. One thing I remember from a first course is the limitation of one primary key per table. I like to liken this to the definite article. Hence, I find your first sentence is missing a definite article, but I don't know where to put it (there's so many options).

Re: The Awful German Language (1880)

#263

Post by CamouflagedKiwi » Sat, Oct 06, 2018, 8:11 PM UTC

err4nt wrote: post #250

CamouflagedKiwi wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Do you speak more than one natural language? I am an anglophone but took most of my schooling in french. Though I work in english now, I can remember distinctly 'thinking in English' and 'thinking in French' and depending on the problem I was wrestling with, the constructs of the language you frame your thinking in absolutely can give you an advantage or disadvantage. I always thought it was remarkable how much human…

One other than my native tongue, but not nearly fluently.

To clarify, I don't disagree with what you're saying; I'm not a linguist but from what I know there certainly seems to be some truth in the weaker forms of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (that language affects how you think), but the strong form (that language controls how you think) seems fairly well disproven these days.

Re: The Awful German Language (1880)

#264

Post by 0ld » Sat, Oct 06, 2018, 8:19 PM UTC

mh-cx wrote: post #236

zvrba wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My native language is Croatian, but... > ten/ta/to are you sure it's not "that" (dies(e,es,er)) instead of "the"? > Not sure what is different if the nějaká is left out. I'd interpret it as "The woman asks for the way.", i.e., a particular person is contextually implied. Otherwise it doesn't make sense. EDIT: alternately, it describes an abstract event of woman asking for directions. Putting it as "paní se ptá na ces…

Makes sense - still it feels odd, coming from the “other side“. I wonder when this split happened. About dieser/diese/dieses, that would be tento/tato/toto (this/that here).

Articles usually appear in the languages which (are starting to) lose inflection. Say, there is a Slavic language which had lost its cases and does have the articles now - Bulgarian

It's all a kind of ouroboros of languages - if something gets simplified, something else appears there

Re: The Awful German Language (1880)

#265

Post by posterboy » Sat, Oct 06, 2018, 8:26 PM UTC

FabHK wrote: post #209

liftbigweights wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> English has so many synonyms with slightly different connotations and idiomatic nuances that it is hard to master.

You imply the goal was to be precise. The crux is, what you call slightly different connotation is often enough ambiguity and the goal is to be as ambiguous as possible to be understood by as many people as possible without loosing precision, that is without mistakenly falling in the trap of a nuanced connotation.

Point in case for you, my spelling correction does not know "connotated", so that may be a nuance of the English language I was not aware of. Point in case for me, connotated nuanced synonyms (or synonymous nuanced connotations) is a redundant bag of words with something for everyone, yet unspecific enough to leave me guessing, finding no difference between those my two expressions above. ...

Re: The Awful German Language (1880)

#266

Post by BrandoElFollito » Sat, Oct 06, 2018, 8:27 PM UTC

projektfu wrote: post #233

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…

Don't know German, but I've learned Spanish. I feel that English is easy because it's relatively hard for a learner to accidentally completely change the meaning of a sentence and make themselves misunderstood or, worse, say something offensive. In Spanish, a single letter changes the subject from him to me, the mood from indicative to subjunctive, etc. The use of pronouns in Spanish is especially difficult for Engli…

This is very similar to French. I always said that French language and our love for philosophy means it that when someone makes a mistake, we will try to make sense of that when other countries would have guessed that this obviously was a mistake.

Re: The Awful German Language (1880)

#267

Post by yesenadam » Sat, Oct 06, 2018, 9:18 PM UTC

Koshkin wrote: post #241

yesenadam wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 uni…

> Romance languages. They are what Latin is today That’s the same as looking at a tree and saying, “This is what I will be in a hundred years.”

How is it 'the same'? I can't see it. If somehow the tree was made from your molecules, sure, there's a sense that it would be true, but how that's 'the same' or anything similar to the continuous evolution of Latin into the Romance languages, I don't know.

It's more like, say, there was jazz in the 1920s, there are many types of jazz today, evolved from that early jazz but all very different from it, and different from each other.

Re: The Awful German Language (1880)

#268

Post by posterboy » Sat, Oct 06, 2018, 9:26 PM UTC

scrollaway wrote: post #231

willyt wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

English is not easy: Dearest creature in creation, Study English pronunciation. I will teach you in my verse Sounds like corpse, corps, horse, and worse. I will keep you, Suzy, busy, Make your head with heat grow dizzy. Tear in eye, your dress will tear. So shall I! Oh hear my prayer. Just compare heart, beard, and heard, Dies and diet, lord and word, Sword and sward, retain and Britain. (Mind the latter, how it’s wr…

> Hiccough has the sound of cup Ok, I had to google that, having never seen it spelled this way. Merriam-Webster agrees that the etymology of hiccup/hickup is imitative of the sound. Wiktionary says "hiccough" is a later spelling, folk-etymology. Fun, but this one's not to blame on the English language :)

I can confer that German has Schluckauf (swallow-up). But if your hiccup sound like hiccup, not just hick, then you have a real problem. Schluckauf is only attested for the 18th ct. so it might well come from English. Anything labeled onomatopoetic is doubtful. It's almost always a cop out.

Re: The Awful German Language (1880)

#269

Post by azernik » Sat, Oct 06, 2018, 9:42 PM UTC

anoncake wrote: post #260

howeman wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interestingly, "chief" is the same word as "chef" just imported from the Normans. French had a consonant shift, while English did not, and then imported the word again with the new pronunciation and spelling.

A consonant shift from "ie" to "e"?

That vowel shift is not from French, but rather part of the English Great Vowel Shift [1]. The original loanword from Medieval Norman French to Middle English was /tʃeːf/ (spelled "chef"), compared to the re-borrowed /ʃɛf/.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift

Re: The Awful German Language (1880)

#270

Post by klodolph » Sat, Oct 06, 2018, 9:54 PM UTC

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.

This doesn't work in English, because both speakers are not assumed to have the same knowledge of context. The "the"/"a" distinguishes between something that describes and something that also determines.

Alice: Did you see any of those movies?

Bob: I saw the good one.

In this sentence, Bob is saying that "good one" can be figured out from context. In other words, Bob is saying that there is only one good movie in "those movies". Alice may or may not be aware of this from context, but she has learned that Bob thinks that there is only one good movie in "those movies".

Bob: I saw a good one.

In this sentence, Bob is saying that "good one" describes the movie he saw, but he is not saying that this determines which one he saw. He is not making claims about context.