21–30 of 258 posts
German has a difficult grammar (was a real pain when learning German as a kid) but at least when reading German you know how to pronounce it, English pronunciation like German gender must be learn by heart :)
Alas, that isn't as true as German's tell me it is, I find. "Weg" "Geh weg" (go away) "Der Weg ist da drüben!" (the path is over there)
You missed "Gehweg" (sidewalk) though. :^)
It's our revenge for the "th", my dear Englishman.
Specifically Gutenburg and his hellish press. Before movable type English had the letter “thorn” - perhaps some of the pronunciation problems arose then?
But what do I know? As a nativ spanich spikr, I rimembr bing prplexd
And yet, every German speaker seems to be able to remember this, without evidence of them being better at memorization than others?
As usual, it's easy to forget how hard things are for others when you're the expert. I'm sure Twain never thought about how ridiculously hard many English words are to spell, and how people learning English as a second language struggle quite a lot with it.
But the thing is, with practice, we do learn these things. With practice speaking German, you'll learn and remember the gender of each noun, it simply becomes part of the noun itself. And with practice writing English, you'll learn the spelling - illogical as it is, it simply becomes part of the word itself.
But looking at my language, I'm not so sure how much of this is pure memory. Swedish, like all Scandinavian languages, has four genders for nouns, but only one of them stick out and modify words and sentences. Being a native speaker, I of course know the gender for each noun, and you could argue that I have memorized this. But I can also properly gender new words. I can gender words I've never heard before. I can construct new words, and gender them correctly as well, and have other Swedish speakers independently agree with me on what the gender of this new word is. So clearly there are rules, it's not the case that someone else decided the genders, and then everyone else had to memorize what this person arbitrarily chose.
And I'm pretty sure German actually works the same way.
"A rough-coated, dough-faced, thoughtful ploughman strode through the streets of Scarborough; after falling into a slough, he coughed and hiccoughed."
shows how the "-ough" has no reasonable rule that can be used to determine word pronunciation, despite similar spelling.
By comparison, spelling and word pronunciation in Spanish and Italian (and probably many others as well) match exactly. You know how to spell a word from the way it sounds. You can easily read aloud written text and have little to no idea what it means.
One of the Twain's famous examples that language is full of exceptions and hard to learn is that the word for girl is neuter. However, that shows that he didn't understand things all that well. Or the message was more important than the facts. While in general gender does indeed not follow much logic and needs to be learned by heart it's not true for this class of words. For derived words the gender is determined by…
Of course there is reason why is it so, but that is true for all oddities in every language: they made sense originally but as the new thing became the norm the origin of it is lost.
One of the Twain's famous examples that language is full of exceptions and hard to learn is that the word for girl is neuter. However, that shows that he didn't understand things all that well. Or the message was more important than the facts. While in general gender does indeed not follow much logic and needs to be learned by heart it's not true for this class of words. For derived words the gender is determined by…
So right, if he knew more he could give better examples ('das Weib', a nowadays pejorative term for woman (related to 'wife' presumably) doesn't have that diminutive structure and is still neutral), but his point still stands? This feels like Gettier problem territory. :P > diminutives are always neuter I assume you mean to only talk about "-chen"-suffixed diminutives right? [ there are other kinds of diminutive cons…
-chen and -lein (diminutives) are always neuter, they can be formed from many nouns
-heit and -keit, and -ung are always feminine
I don't claim that the gender has logical meaning. But for derived words the rules typically hold (I would not be suprised if a few exceptions could be found)
> Every noun has a gender, and there is no sense or system in distribution; so the gender of each must be learned separately and by heart. There is no other way. To do this one has to have a memory like a memorandum-book. And yet, every German speaker seems to be able to remember this, without evidence of them being better at memorization than others? As usual, it's easy to forget how hard things are for others when…
E.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_in_Danish_and_Swedish mentions only 3 genders, and says that in modern Swedish two of those have merged so now there are only 2?
I could not get it. At all. Part of it was an extremely easy first semester professor followed by an awful, hard second semester professor. However, it just never, ever clicked with me. I went back to German to satisfy my two year college requirement.
Later, upon reflection, I realized that I am heavily reliant on knowing grammar rules, and French was just too much of a change from German/English. Sure, German's verb conjugations and genders were new to an English speaker. However, because of the similar grammar, German was a lot easier for me to pick up than anything I've seen since.