The Awful German Language (1880) • Hacker News Board

Re: The Awful German Language (1880)

#151

Post by msrenee » Mon, May 17, 2021, 3:17 AM UTC

bombcar wrote: post #146

msrenee wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I could see saying "she'd had to have been watched" or "they had to have been watching her". Both sound very natural to my ear. Observed to me feels more like they're looking at every minute detail with some emotional distance and maybe a feeling of something novel. A scientist observes a rare bug walking on a leaf. A psychiatrist observes his patients' behaviors. It's maybe a more scientific and heavily detail-orien…

“Had to have been kidding” is a relatively common phrase.

Very common and feels very natural to me. "You have to be kidding me" "He had to have been kidding" "He had to have been kidding me" or the rougher "he had to have been fucking with me" and "he must have been fucking with me" although "must have", of course, implies more certainty than "had to have". What a wonderfully subtle and complex language we have.

"to be ing", "was ing", and "will be *ing" if I remember correctly, are actually thought to be an early borrowing of celtic grammar. Not much celtic anything was adopted into English, but there's a possibility that this sentence structure may be one of the few contributions of the celtic languages that were displaced by germanic Anglo-Saxon languages that eventually formed English.

Re: The Awful German Language (1880)

#152

Post by hug » Mon, May 17, 2021, 3:21 AM UTC

geoffmunn wrote: post #125

joefourier wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you saying mince pies didn't traditionally contain meat? Recipes up to the late 19th century include meat, and even today I can find some that do, although very rare - usually beef suet is the only remaining animal ingredient.

Mince pies are definitely a thing in New Zealand (and Australia to some extent). They come in all sorts of varieties - plain mince, mince and cheese (yum), steak and cheese, mince and potato, and then some exotic varieties like butter chicken pie. They're typically cheap and made from bad quality ingredients, but you can get very good quality mince pies if you know where to go. If you're a hungry teenager and you nee…

I'm Australian, and no one I know (from here or from NZ) calls what you're talking about a "mince pie", they call it a "meat pie".

A mince pie is the sweet fruit tart that is essentially only stocked at Christmas time.

Meat pies are all over the place, and are popular enough that a former premier referred to them as Australia's national dish.

Re: The Awful German Language (1880)

#153

Post by wheels » Mon, May 17, 2021, 3:23 AM UTC

schoen wrote: post #142

wheels wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> But, blessedly, English does have the simplest grammar of probably any European language. The deceptive thing, though, is compound tenses and phrasal verbs; in both cases you express a meaning with multiple words that couldn't have been predicted from the meanings of the constituent words alone. These are both pervasive in English and both very tricky for learners, but they often don't feel like "grammar" because t…

Which European languages don't have compound verb tenses? All of the four I'm reasonably familiar with do. Germanic languages lean on them more than Romance languages (which have a wider breadth of non-complex tenses), but the concept isn't unfamiliar. Again, aside from the gerund, there's an almost one-to-one mapping in usage between English and German tenses. I don't speak any other Germanic languages than those two, but I'd assume that to be more broadly true in that family.

Re: The Awful German Language (1880)

#154

Post by Nition » Mon, May 17, 2021, 3:27 AM UTC

OJFord wrote: post #76

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…

Here in New Zealand, a Mince Pie is a pie containing mince meat. The type of mince pie you're talking about is called a Christmas Mince Pie or a Fruit Mince Pie.

We also have chips (the type you might have with a hamburger), and chips (the type you might eat cold from a bag). If you need to clarify which one you mean, for some reason "potato chips" exclusively means the latter (for the other type you might say "hot chips").

Re: The Awful German Language (1880)

#155

Post by phasetransition » Mon, May 17, 2021, 3:31 AM UTC

andensande wrote: post #111

scrollaway wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Love that last example. I think "to have been being watched" is a bit of a reach though? "To have been observed / under observation" feels more natural. When translating it to french i got to "elle aurait dûe être observée". Incidentally, French has an easier time with this, I think because we have more options there. I couldn't reproduce the quirky structure at all, the flow is just more natural in french.

You can gloss it with 'under observation' I think fairly well. But the problem with (1) She would have had to have been observed. is that it misses out the gerund form preceding 'observed', which alters the meaning slightly in my opinion. It's difficult to get at precisely but I feel like the original sentence has a feeling of time-boundedness around when she was observed which you don't get without that gerund. I th…

(native speaker) I agree.

The original with "been being watched" feels like something the detective says when he first discovers the fact about watching. It has an exclamative aspect to it. There's a present sense of realization, mixed with the past sense of when the watching had taken place.

"She would have had to have been observed." is something like a lawyers distillation of what happened later for the court.

Re: The Awful German Language (1880)

#156

Post by jimmux » Mon, May 17, 2021, 3:37 AM UTC

geoffmunn wrote: post #125

joefourier wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you saying mince pies didn't traditionally contain meat? Recipes up to the late 19th century include meat, and even today I can find some that do, although very rare - usually beef suet is the only remaining animal ingredient.

Mince pies are definitely a thing in New Zealand (and Australia to some extent). They come in all sorts of varieties - plain mince, mince and cheese (yum), steak and cheese, mince and potato, and then some exotic varieties like butter chicken pie. They're typically cheap and made from bad quality ingredients, but you can get very good quality mince pies if you know where to go. If you're a hungry teenager and you nee…

Minced meat pies are so ubiquitous in Australia that we usually just say "pie". "Mince" is nearly always assumed to be animal meat.

The fruity kind of pies that only appear at Christmas time are called "mince pies", but we should really find another name for them because it's a constant source of disappointment when you expect savoury goodness and are presented with a sugary lump.

Re: The Awful German Language (1880)

#157

Post by tebs1200 » Mon, May 17, 2021, 3:39 AM UTC

irrational wrote: post #138

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,…

> One index, two indices? Huh, I do use indices for 2+ index. I guess I’ve been wrong. I’m surprised nobody has ever said anything in my nearly 50 years.

You're right to use "indices".

The example is just provided to show how inconsistent plurals are in English. 90% of the time you just slap an "s" on the end of a word, but there's a crazy amount of exceptions to that rule.

Re: The Awful German Language (1880)

#158

Post by Buldak » Mon, May 17, 2021, 3:53 AM UTC

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…

I had a similar thought when I studied French in school, i.e. that I could explain a lot more about French grammar technically, explicitly, than I could about my native English. This sort of example occurs to me whenever someone insists that you don't really understand something unless you can clearly explain it.

Re: The Awful German Language (1880)

#159

Post by jtsuken » Mon, May 17, 2021, 3:55 AM UTC

meowface wrote: post #124

trompetenaccoun wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>In German the spelling is centrally planned and gets reformed every other year. Which is why German words are mostly spelled as they're pronounced, as opposed to English. As a native English speaker, this is definitely a big plus. I've had German friends who've regularly expressed frustration that there's often no real rhyme or reason or pattern to either English spelling or pronunciation; you just have to memorize…

English does not have a concept of THE right pronunciation. If you try to change the spelling of a "word", you'd first have to get a number of former British colonies to agree on how to pronounce it. Is it Woed, Worrrd, Woid, Waed? Germany, after losing both world wars only needs to deal with Switzerland and Austria to agree on updated spelling of something.

Re: The Awful German Language (1880)

#160

Post by jtsuken » Mon, May 17, 2021, 4:06 AM UTC

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…

"complex case structures" are a useful tool in most languages (German to a lesser extent). They allow you to reshuffle the words in a sentence e.g. "the boat carries the car" without disrupting its meaning.