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The Awful German Language (1880)

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Re: The Awful German Language (1880)

#201

Post by pezezin »

aspaviento wrote: post #87
kergonath wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Exactly. You most often cannot guess the gender of a noun in quite a lot of languages (German, Spanish, French, etc), but most of the time you also cannot guess…

> You most often cannot guess the gender of a noun in quite a lot of languages That's far from true. In Spanish it's quite easy most of the time: Female form (-a): casa (House) taza (cup) armadura (armour) luna (moon) leona (lioness) escritora (female writer) Male form (-o/-or/-on): camión (truck) sillón (sofa) león (lion) escritor (male writer) You don't even need the article to guess which one is which one.

It's not so clear and cut. For example, "acción" and any other noun that express the result of a verb ends in -ón, but they are female words. There are also plenty of male words that end in -a, and female words that end in -o: https://www.practicaespanol.com/mas-de-40-palabras-que-acaba...

Re: The Awful German Language (1880)

#202

Post by dataflow »

lmm wrote: post #200
dataflow wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're not going to get across the notion of an organization doing the "watching" sinisterly without additional context, at which point you don't need this awkward wording in the first place. Mind you, you yourself described the meaning as "someone was continuously watching her at the time". That's the natural interpretation of this sentence. I can't speak for BrE I guess, but in AmE the wording is quite jarring, and…

> You're not going to get across the notion of an organization doing the "watching" sinisterly without additional context Of course you do. Consider "Do you ever feel like you're being watched?" versus "Do you ever feel like someone's watching you?" Both those sentences are natural English and in a certain sense they "mean the same"; nonetheless they convey a quite different feeling, and neither is a replacement for…

>> You're not going to get across the notion of an organization doing the "watching" sinisterly without additional context

> Of course you do. Consider "Do you ever feel like you're being watched?" versus "Do you ever feel like someone's watching you?"

I was talking about in that example. I was not making a claim about every arbitrary sentence containing the phrase "being watched".

Understand that if you add enough contortions and make a sentence jarring enough, you won't get anything across without additional context. (To a human I mean. I guess I have to add that caveat because other you'll post another rebuttal about how a sufficiently strong AI would parse it just fine.)

Re: The Awful German Language (1880)

#203

Post by pezezin »

irrational wrote: post #130
andensande wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difficulty of mastering the tenses is something that I think a lot of English speakers overlook. There's a lot of really precise and difficult-to-explain subtleties in English. (Of course, English isn't unique in this regard -- but I feel like certain things are taken for granted). Something that catches a lot of English as second language people out is the correct time to use the gerund form (i.e., the '-ing' fo…

> She would have had to have been being watched. Well, now I want to see how this sentence would be translated into all the other major languages! I immediately understand the meaning, but can see why it might be hard for a non native speaker to understand. Are their other languages that can say the same thing as concisely? Google Translate must absolutely butcher this sentence. I just tried Spanish. “Habría tenido q…

Google's translation is not wrong, but the original phrase is too convoluted...

I would translate it as "debería haber estado vigilada". DeepL translate it as "tendría que haber sido vigilada". Both are much easier to understand.

Re: The Awful German Language (1880)

#204

Post by denton-scratch »

sharken wrote: post #178
lmm wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's perfectly normal English yes. "She would have had to have been watched" means she would have had to have been watched at that moment (e.g. because someone was watching the area where she did whatever it was), whereas "being watched" implies that the watching was ongoing and therefore that someone was continuously watching her at the time.

Admittedly English is not my primary language, but "She would have had to have been being watched" seems to be a construct used in a class, but not something you would hear in day-to-day English.

Native english speaker here.

It's a very contorted phrase. I struggle to think of a context in which it makes sense. I honestly don't know what it's supposed to mean. It's a mixture of subjunctive mood and passive voice, both of which detract from clarity.

You can make unclear grammatical constructions in any language. If your aim is clarity, and not obfuscation, then you just eliminate tangled grammar such as this example.

I will attempt to offer a re-phrasing with added context, though:

"The only way that anyone could have known X about her, would be if she were being observed."

(Many english speakers would substitute "was" for "were", because the subjunctive mood is rarely taught to schoolchildren in the UK. That is to say, colloquial english is generally pretty sloppy.)

If a native english speaker like me struggles with an english phrase, there's something wrong with that phrase. If I find myself constructing a phrase like that, my first instinct is that my thoughts must be unclear, because my words are unclear. I'd consider thinking again, and perhaps even re-writing an entire paragraph, just to avoid a phrase like that.

The subjunctive in German is routine and explicit. Indeed, the word "were" in my re-phrasing is pronounced in parts of northeast of england to rhyme with "bear", because it comes from the germanic subjunctive "wäre". But in general, subjunctives in English are concealed - we don't use subjunctive forms of verbs much, the listener is supposed to infer subjunctive mood from the presence of words like "if" and "would".

Twain is winding us up; after all, he was a satirist. The German language is pretty regular, compared with English. It's quite easy to learn. English must be a nightmare to learn, as a foreigner.

Re: The Awful German Language (1880)

#205

Post by HelloNurse »

cycomanic wrote: post #193
andensande wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difficulty of mastering the tenses is something that I think a lot of English speakers overlook. There's a lot of really precise and difficult-to-explain subtleties in English. (Of course, English isn't unique in this regard -- but I feel like certain things are taken for granted). Something that catches a lot of English as second language people out is the correct time to use the gerund form (i.e., the '-ing' fo…

Actually, if I'm not wrong your example 2a and 2b is about simple present vs present continuous not gerund. Isn't gerund something like "I like swimming" or "I like to swim" (where both works) or while "I enjoy swimming" only works with gerund? Admittedly both are subtle and somewhat confusing to non-native speakers.

Present continuous is built from gerund, like other continuous tenses. The important difference is therefore between the "simple" verb and gerund. What you refer to is a different use case of gerund.

Re: The Awful German Language (1880)

#206

Post by tilolebo »

locallost wrote: post #84

As someone who's had to (or maybe wanted to) learn both english and german, I'd say german has a steeper initial learning curve, but it becomes easier later, whereas english can be easy to get going, but it's difficult to master (obviously the spelling, but also the more advanced use of tenses etc). Regarding Twain's complaints, the biggest lesson I learned from learning german at an older age was: languages are nons…

That has been my experience too.

I was always an average foreign language student, until I started to learn German living in Berlin and to speak English at work.

Now I'm fluent in both languages. I forgot most of the German rules I learned during my first months in Berlin taking crash courses. I just know sentence structures because I heard them and used them so often. Like a child, really.

Re: The Awful German Language (1880)

#207

Post by sfblah »

shawxe wrote: post #176
sfblah wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m a native English speaker here and it’s clear to me. I also think it’s somewhat tricky to express it more succinctly without changing the sentence a fair bit. Essentially it means “it must have been the case that, at the moment we’re speaking of, someone was watching her.” Your sentence is slightly different, in that it implies that, in general, someone was watching her during the timeframe we’re talking about, bu…

> Essentially it means “it must have been the case that, at the moment we’re speaking of, someone was watching her.” Another native English speaker here. This would be how I would parse "She had to have been being watched," but I think it's not quite the full picture in this sentence's case. It's important to note that the "would" adds the implication that this conclusion is being drawn based upon some other (possibl…

You’re right. I was doing it on my phone and forgot that word was even there.

Re: The Awful German Language (1880)

#208

Post by benhurmarcel »

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…

> 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

It's generally the case in French too, but there are cases for which people don't agree. A recent example is a nation-wide disagreement on whether to say "le" or "la" Covid.

Re: The Awful German Language (1880)

#209

Post by lmm »

dataflow wrote: post #202
lmm wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You're not going to get across the notion of an organization doing the "watching" sinisterly without additional context Of course you do. Consider "Do you ever feel like you're being watched?" versus "Do you ever feel like someone's watching you?" Both those sentences are natural English and in a certain sense they "mean the same"; nonetheless they convey a quite different feeling, and neither is a replacement for…

>> You're not going to get across the notion of an organization doing the "watching" sinisterly without additional context > Of course you do. Consider "Do you ever feel like you're being watched?" versus "Do you ever feel like someone's watching you?" I was talking about in that example . I was not making a claim about every arbitrary sentence containing the phrase "being watched". Understand that if you add enough…

There's nothing jarring about the sentence though. It's just normal English. The difference between "she's being watched" and "someone's watching her" conveys the same meaning that it would in any other sentence.

Re: The Awful German Language (1880)

#210

Post by haecceity »

locallost wrote: post #84

As someone who's had to (or maybe wanted to) learn both english and german, I'd say german has a steeper initial learning curve, but it becomes easier later, whereas english can be easy to get going, but it's difficult to master (obviously the spelling, but also the more advanced use of tenses etc). Regarding Twain's complaints, the biggest lesson I learned from learning german at an older age was: languages are nons…

Children learn language by learning phrases and the correspondence of those phrases to things around them or things that happen around them. Rules are learnt later. Learning language is harder when you don't have parents to play the language game with you. Maybe something like aidungeon could be a language learning tool??
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