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The Awful German Language (1880)

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Re: The Awful German Language (1880)

#71

Post by wirrbel »

snapetom wrote: post #30

English is my second language. I took German throughout middle school and high school. I did alright with it. When I went to college, I decided to switch it up and take French. 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 requ…

Its funny how sometimes 'antiquated' English text uses word order that is so similar to German ('When I Was One-and-Twenty'... etc). Sometimes when I read such stuff, I get the feeling that my English teacher might have marked the sentence as incorrect or 'sounding to German'.

Re: The Awful German Language (1880)

#72

Post by for1nner »

bumbada wrote: post #44

For those that learn a new language, it is a good idea to suspend criticism on the language while you learn it. Every language has its pains. German using Sein and haven for auxiliary verbs in the past makes things way more complicated to learn. Not to talk about the irregularities of the past participle of verbs(that are not used in speech) that makes reading and writing way harder. But if you focus your mind on tha…

> The phonetics of Mandarin unless you create software to repeat and repeat and repeat every day is simply impossible for any adult foreigner, because we as children have not learned the basic sounds. German phonetics by comparison is trivial in a tenth of the time.

I'm not sure what you mean by this - that is very much person-dependent. As a primary English speaker, I was near-fluent in German before attempting Mandarin, and I found the inflection and tonal side of the language relatively trivial, whereas writing/reading (and generally rote vocabulary) have always been a struggle for me (similar experience across attempts to learn Latin, German, French, and Mandarin).

Re: The Awful German Language (1880)

#73

Post by cameronh90 »

russellbeattie wrote: post #65
pmoriarty wrote: post #14

Unsurprisingly, there are many articles published about "The Awful English Language" , such as: [1], [2], [3] Some examples from [2]: Let's face it -- English is a crazy language. Besides the above, there is no egg in eggplant, nor ham in hamburger; neither apple nor pine in pineapple. English muffins weren't invented in England or French fries in France. Sweetmeats are candies while sweetbreads, which aren't sweet,…

I have to admit still being confused about sweetmeats. If a Brit uses the word, are they talking about a specific type of candy, made in a specific way, from a specific type of shop? Does it need to be baked? Or have flour? Or does a Snickers bar count as a sweetmeat? Or a gumdrop? Hard candy? Or is it more like something from a bakery? Indian sweetmeats also seems to be a thing (from an image search right now). What…

As a Brit, I've never heard of sweetmeats. Is it not an American thing?

Re: The Awful German Language (1880)

#74

Post by yrro »

pmoriarty wrote: post #14

Unsurprisingly, there are many articles published about "The Awful English Language" , such as: [1], [2], [3] Some examples from [2]: Let's face it -- English is a crazy language. Besides the above, there is no egg in eggplant, nor ham in hamburger; neither apple nor pine in pineapple. English muffins weren't invented in England or French fries in France. Sweetmeats are candies while sweetbreads, which aren't sweet,…

Quicksand is quick in that it seems to be living. See also quicksilver, another name for mercury.

Re: The Awful German Language (1880)

#75

Post by zvr »

mejutoco wrote: post #70
henrikschroder wrote: post #25

> 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…

You can very often guess the gender of a word in german using some heuristics. For instance, anything ending in -heit is feminine, and -chen neutral. I wrote an elaborate analysis os these heuristics (if someone is into this kind of thing) https://mejuto.co/statistical-grammar-guessing-a-german-noun...

Thanks for this link; it was very interesting!

But you should take into account that some rules are more general expressions of others. For example, in your penultimate "(recommended)" table, there is no point in having both "-hen" and "-chen" for neutral, as the latter is a specialization of the former. Same for "-ung" and "-rung"/"-tung" in feminine.

Re: The Awful German Language (1880)

#76

Post by OJFord »

pmoriarty wrote: post #14

Unsurprisingly, there are many articles published about "The Awful English Language" , such as: [1], [2], [3] Some examples from [2]: Let's face it -- English is a crazy language. Besides the above, there is no egg in eggplant, nor ham in hamburger; neither apple nor pine in pineapple. English muffins weren't invented in England or French fries in France. Sweetmeats are candies while sweetbreads, which aren't sweet,…

> Sweetmeats are candies while sweetbreads, which aren't sweet, are meat.

My favourite one, which I had the er pleasure of trying to explain to a vegetarian unfamiliar with mince pies; which might also be British English-specific is:

- mince is meat

  * but mince *pies* contain no meat
- mincemeat is not meat

  * and is the key ingredient in mince pies
- minced meat is meat

  * and =mince

  * and could be used in the making of a pie

  * which would be extremely different from a mince pie

Re: The Awful German Language (1880)

#77

Post by pacaro »

usr1106 wrote: post #45
TomAnthony wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

There are some exceptions, sure. But German pronunciation is 80% simple and regular at least whereas English is more like 80% complicated and irregular.

Compound words do have the potential to throw this for a loop. The pronunciation is regular if you can decompose the word, but if you miss where the word boundaries are all bets are off. For example "linkshändig"

Re: The Awful German Language (1880)

#78

Post by LatteLazy »

pmoriarty wrote: post #14

Unsurprisingly, there are many articles published about "The Awful English Language" , such as: [1], [2], [3] Some examples from [2]: Let's face it -- English is a crazy language. Besides the above, there is no egg in eggplant, nor ham in hamburger; neither apple nor pine in pineapple. English muffins weren't invented in England or French fries in France. Sweetmeats are candies while sweetbreads, which aren't sweet,…

English is this way because it doesn't really exist.

English started as old German. Then vowels shifted. Then the Normans arrived and added a lot of French words on top. When German grammar proved too hard for them that was simplified too.

On top of all that is a bunch of Latin and Greek added when England lead the scientific and industrial revolutions (in part because English couldn't logically supply words for new things). These kept their own rules grammatically. Or they didn't, pretty much randomly.

None of these jobs were ever "finished", so nouns in English don't have genders (like they would in German) but actually some do still (mainly pronouns) and some words right next to each other come from different languages (Cow is German, Beef is French hence they sound nothing alike).

Since England has not been conqoured or undergone unification since before all this started (except for the Norman conquests which were part of this) nothing has every been standardised. This is why spelling English words is all but impossible (German words are spelt almost exactly as they sound, English words almost never as they sound, you just have to memorise them, ALL of them).

Compare this to German or French with logical spelling, strict, consistency in grammar and single root languages.

English really is awful and quite an unusual language.

Re: The Awful German Language (1880)

#79

Post by yongjik »

henrikschroder wrote: post #25

> 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…

In fact, English does something very similar. There's a bookshelf, but never a furniture - you can say a piece of furniture if you want to be fancy. There's a cow, and cows, but never a cattle, or even cattles. (What do you mean they are uncountable. They are freaking cows.) Then there are crazy stuff like a pair of scissors. (I mean, has anyone seen a scissor?) Somehow native English speakers memorize all of this.

At least genders are conceptually easy: given a word, you have one gender. (Though I'm sure there are complications.)

Re: The Awful German Language (1880)

#80

Post by blahedo »

forinti wrote: post #17
pmoriarty wrote: post #14

Unsurprisingly, there are many articles published about "The Awful English Language" , such as: [1], [2], [3] Some examples from [2]: Let's face it -- English is a crazy language. Besides the above, there is no egg in eggplant, nor ham in hamburger; neither apple nor pine in pineapple. English muffins weren't invented in England or French fries in France. Sweetmeats are candies while sweetbreads, which aren't sweet,…

If you look at an eggplant in its early stages, you will understand the name.

More importantly, they were historically egg-shaped and (off-)white; the large and phallic purple variant that now dominates is the result of selective breeding over centuries.
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