Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Awful German Language (1880)

faculty.georgetown.edu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 258 posts

Re: The Awful German Language (1880)

#231

Post by etripe »

wheels wrote: post #101
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,…

Hamburger is "from Hamburg", not "made from ham", and is borrowed from German. "Frankfurter" (from Frankfurt) and "Wiener" (from Vienna, Wien, in German) have the same etymology. All languages have the sort of contradictions that are pointing out there, and English isn't especially bad (in fact, most of the examples there are directly inherited from German). Most of the difficult things in English come from it being…

> I've occasionally heard that Swedish is the closest in simplicity

Speaking English and Swedish fluently, I'd say Swedish (and Danish/Norwegian) is simpler grammatically, as it just has the one conjugation per tense regardless of the personal pronoun: I are, you are, we are (är). I were, she were, you were, we were (var). This is why you'll hear Swedes/Scandinavians make typical mistakes like "we was".

As an aside, it also seems to me like Swedish culture is more monolithic/conformist and contains a small set of really common idioms and phrases that get you a long way towards being conversational. It shares that aspect with Dutch as spoken in the Netherlands, as opposed to Dutch in Belgium.

> English became the modern lingua franca

As a second language speaker, I can't help but think poor English is the lingua franca. Not to mention lots of couleur locale in the form of accents.

Re: The Awful German Language (1880)

#232

Post by rvieira »

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…

> languages are nonsensical, illogical, and the sooner you stop trying to make sense of it all, the faster you will advance

Except Esperanto, surely ;)

Re: The Awful German Language (1880)

#233

Post by quercusa »

trompetenaccoun wrote: post #114
quercusa wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> languages are nonsensical, illogical, and the sooner you stop trying to make sense of it all,the faster you will advance. In the first day of Koine Greek class, the instructor asked who had programming experience. She made a point of stressing, as she would again, that unlike computer languages, human languages show no signs of design, and not to spend any time looking for it. It was good advice.

Well... not that the advice isn't solid, and she's a good teacher for driving this point into the programmer student's minds. But saying no sign is a bit extreme, there is some level of design in any natural language. Icelandic has a committee that decides on new words. Instead of using foreign loan words they largely make up their own new Icelandic words when needed for new concepts. In German the spelling is centra…

I may have internalized a version more extreme than her point - the comment was probably limited to the language of study.

Re: The Awful German Language (1880)

#234

Post by wink »

cycomanic wrote: post #174
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…

I find it weird that many English natives try to claim that English grammar is in fact complex (you are by far not the first). I think it might be because in general many don't speak another language and the most common second language is Spanish which has also a very "simple" grammar. Regarding your example with the gerund, yes it is subtle, but similar subtleties exist in German, e.g. The difference between perfect…

Talking of perfect and simple past you might be missing the "fact" that for parts of Germany (Upper Bavaria in my case) the simple past simply doesn't exist. At all. (With the exception of "to be" where the perfect doesn't seem to exist). I know, you can argue that away by calling it a dialect but even though I kinda lost my dialect in all the years at school and at work, this has persisted insofar that is still sounds wrong if someone says "Ich ging spazieren."

Re: The Awful German Language (1880)

#235

Post by aloe_falsa »

amagasaki wrote: post #9
xg15 wrote: post #4

> It is a bleak Day. Hear the Rain, how he pours, and the Hail, how he rattles; and see the Snow, how he drifts along, and oh the Mud, how deep he is! Ah the poor Fishwife, it is stuck fast in the Mire; it has dropped its Basket of Fishes; and its Hands have been cut by the Scales as it seized some of the falling Creatures; and one Scale has even got into its Eye. And it cannot get her out. It opens its Mouth to cry…

Perhaps “Weib” An outdated,today slightly pejorative, word for “Frau” But to me the term “das Fischerweib” doesn’t sound familiar either, so I am not sure

For a less antiquated example, imagine that the text introduces the girl (das Mädchen) Fiona, and then persists in referring to her as "es", because the word Mädchen has a neutral gender.

Re: The Awful German Language (1880)

#236

Post by secondcoming »

denton-scratch wrote: post #216
secondcoming wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The BBC pronounces 'sixth' as though it was spelled 'sikth'

Native english speaker here. Hardly anyone enunciates the 'x' in a word like 'sixth'. I say 'sikth' (and I fancy myself a fairly eloquent speaker). It's got too many consonant sounds; the human tongue just isn't agile enough for a word like that. You might get it properly-enunciated by a university don, or certain kinds of very pernickety radio presenters.

Me too. I think that difficulty is restricted to UK and then maybe only England. I know pretty much everyone in Ireland pronounces the 'x', and I don't recall any Scottish people doing it the BBC way. I've no idea about the US, Aus, etc.

YMMV

Re: The Awful German Language (1880)

#237

Post by wink »

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...

But then you need people to grasp that the suffixes you present are suffixes and where to split the word

Holzscheit, Lenkdrachen, ... ;)

Re: The Awful German Language (1880)

#238

Post by brightly-salty »

Symbiote wrote: post #223
Teknoman117 wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

English grammar is heavily taught in elementary school (K-5, ~age 5 to 11) and middle school (6-8, ~age 11-14) curriculum in the US. You're pretty much expected to have the grammar down by high school, where the focus shifts to composition (essay courses, etc.) This was my experience growing up here anyways. The last time I had a test question ask me to circle the past participle was middle school (and the SAT).

Do 14 year olds in the USA know what "gerund" means? I didn't know terms like that in England in the 2000s, though I picked them up from learning other foreign languages later. I have heard university professors complain that they can say, simply, "rephrase the paper into the active voice" to a student from , but many British students don't know what that means. England now teaches more grammar, but it is not much us…

No, I don’t think most 14-year-olds in the USA would know what a gerund is, but most of them would know active versus passive voice. Maybe the kids in advanced or hobbies classes, though. (Speaking as an American high school student)

Re: The Awful German Language (1880)

#239

Post by cmrdporcupine »

herewulf wrote: post #190
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

English did not start off as "old German", that's factually incorrect. It started off as Old English aka Anglo-Saxon, that is the languages of the Saxons, Angles, and Jutes which emmigrated from the north sea and areas which are now in the Netherlands, Denmark and Schleswig Holstein. Not the same as "old German" which would be Old High Franconian, an entirely different branch of the Germanic family. German and Englis…

So what did Old English and "Old High Franconian" (Old High German?) start off in common as, if not "Old German"? Linguists would call it Proto-Germanic though. The parent poster isn't factually incorrect though. And interestingly, there's a significant body of research showing mutual intelligibility between Old English and Old Norse, which are less similar than than Old English and Old High German. Old English texts…

Sure, but the common ancestor was never called "Old German" or "German"; and not only linguists, but the speakers themselves would never have called themselves Germans. They had various ethnonyms, but not that one.

"Saxon" is probably the word that the could have settled on. But that's not really an ancestor of modern high German, more the low German speaking dialects in the north west (Niedersächsisch).

I don't think this is being pedantic, frankly. And it's horrible to say English "doesn't really exist"; English is a beautiful language with a long history as old as (in fact in some ways older than) German. (FWIW I'm a native English speaker but my father's family is German, so while I'm not fluent in German I do have education and personal exposure to both languages. I've also studied a bit of Anglo-Saxon. Enough to see just how different it was from old Frankish spoken by the early "Germans" in the same time period)

Re: The Awful German Language (1880)

#240

Post by mejutoco »

wink wrote: post #237
mejutoco wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

But then you need people to grasp that the suffixes you present are suffixes and where to split the word Holzscheit, Lenkdrachen, ... ;)

That is a fine point :) It is never 100%, agree.
Post reply on HN