2 favorite words in german: hand = hand schuh = shoe handschuh = glove schlaft = sleep anzug = suit schlaftanzug = pajamas
I think the best thing about compound words is that you can name things you don't know the actual name for.
The Awful German Language (1880)
181–190 of 317 posts
Re: The Awful German Language (1880)
#182As a native speaker I can confirm the observations of Mark Twain. What is ignored in such humorous tirades is that every human speaker will push information density to the very limit of understandability. In every language. They will use all the tools available.
Sure, the German case system is getting weaker as the centuries go by. And in some situations you will wonder why it's used still. But that doesn't mean the language will be easier to learn once it's gone. As the cases are lost, preposition will be added in many places. The choice of prepositions will likely come from English, which means it's arbitrary from a grammatical point of view.
I claim that reaching spoken proficiency requires the same effort in all human languages. If you want to speak at the level of a native, prepare for ten years of study. As a learner you'll use strings of terms that don't follow the arbitrary conventions, and people will have a hard time understanding.
It amazes me how many people claim English is easy to learn all while using unfamiliar preposition-verb combinations in unexpected order. You can't leave hard parsing work to the recipient and say it was easy!
Re: The Awful German Language (1880)
#183English grammar is far simpler than German grammar. Eliminating noun genders, declensions, and cases (as English does) is a great simplification over German. I've never understood the need for noun genders and I scratch my head at a society that makes its members memorize such useless information. That said, German pronunciation is more regular than English pronunciation. Every letter combination is in most cases pro…
In Swedish there are two ways to say "one" - "ett" and "en". Ex. one table = "ett bord" and one cat = "en katt". There is no rule for when to use either. And yes, this makes it extremely difficult for foreigners.
I can only speak for Norway, but here we use different articles for the different genders. In Bokmål, a masculine noun uses "en", a feminine noun uses "ei or en", and non-gendered nouns use "et". I think it's slightly different in New Norwegian, but I don't really know it so I can't comment on that. Bokmål is closer to Swedish anyway.
I do agree that it's difficult to learn though as there are no rules for determining a noun's gender or lack thereof. I certainly don't miss memorising the genders of nouns in primary school, not to mention all the exceptions.
Re: The Awful German Language (1880)
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
I speak 8 languages from many separate groups (Germanic, Romance, Slavic, Sino-Tibetan, Japanese), and my impression is that languages truly put constraints on one's ability to formulate thoughts. Of course, mentalese, the unspoken one, is different, independent, but it's rare people retain it to their older age and by then prevailing cultural/linguistic currents shape their thoughts. Sapir-Whorf might be discredited…
Would you please give some examples where you've found "that languages truly put constraints on one's ability to formulate thoughts"?
I don't know what he is referring to. But one interesting things is that there is a language where you can express that someone is doing something without including the time when he is doing it. This is not possible in the languages I know of (De/En/Fr).
I can imagine that this ability makes different thoughts possible.
When looking at programming languages, it is indeed the case that your "lingua franca" limits the imagination of what software architectures are possible to solve the problem.
Re: The Awful German Language (1880)
#185Earlier quoted context omitted.
Despite appearance, German is very illogical language full of idioms and exceptions one has to master. Also, even natives usually don't master the full extent of language and the overbearing nature of language with its need for precise use of words/formulations specific to a given situation often leads to strong reliance on syntax/appearance of complexity. You can see it in typical German philosophy, where the langua…
Fascinating. If you were to pick an optimal global language - which would it be?
Korean certainly.
Very well modernized, from the already simple chinese language (not the writing, just the spoken language), transported into simple and regular syllables. Extremely easy to learn for foreigners or aliens from other planets. The shape of the letters mimic how you speak them, the three major families - | or O. horizontal, vertical or round, like in chinese earth-water paintings.
It's much more regular than separating vowels and consonants into single letters.
Re: The Awful German Language (1880)
#186English grammar is far simpler than German grammar. Eliminating noun genders, declensions, and cases (as English does) is a great simplification over German. I've never understood the need for noun genders and I scratch my head at a society that makes its members memorize such useless information. That said, German pronunciation is more regular than English pronunciation. Every letter combination is in most cases pro…
I'm a native speaker of Norwegian, a language which also has three grammatical genders. I don't experience it as having to memorise genders. I only notice them when they are wrong. They're not completely useless. "Det regner." - It's raining. "Den regner." - It's calculating. The verb "regne" is ambiguous and the gender helps disambiguate ut. Sometimes, the grammatical gender conveys information about the noun. Is it…
There are homonyms in languages with genderless nouns too, such as English, but context usually makes it clear.
It's hard to imagine a real-world situation where “it's raining” would be confused with “it's calculating” when stripped of the gender, for example.
> Sometimes, when a follow-on sentence discusses previously introduced objects, gendered articles can clue you onto which objects are being discussed.
That's the best argument I've heard so far, but it's so rare to require gender for comprehension. It seems a push to burden a whole language with gendered nouns for this purpose.
Re: The Awful German Language (1880)
#187Then the teacher lets me softly down with the remark that whenever the word "wegen" drops into a sentence, it always throws that subject into the Genitive case, regardless of consequences -- and that therefore this bird stayed in the blacksmith shop "wegen des Regens." Interestingly, this grammatical rule has changed since Mark Twain's times - minimally in spoken language where the Dative case is commonly used. But a…
Der Dativ ist dem Genitiv sein Tod.
Re: The Awful German Language (1880)
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
One thing that I have noticed about English is that it seems to be more concise. There are things that can be expressed much more elegantly and with fewer word in English, while saying the same thing in German may require a mid-sized sentence.
> One thing that I have noticed about English is that it seems to be more concise. There are things that can be expressed much more elegantly and with fewer word in English, while saying the same thing in German may require a mid-sized sentence. As a native German speaker, I disagree. German allows a really concise nominal style that is hard to express in English.
German is more concise and can specialize the nouns much better than in english.
But on the other hand that makes german much longer. Translations into german (e.g. SW or movie subtitles) are the longest in german than in any other major language. You need much more room to express the same. E.g. in SW translations this conciseness strikes back, the english original form is often preferred, as it is easier to understand and not as baroque as the german form.
In Japanese forced with the same problem of having to import many new foreign terms ("lehnworte"), they chose a better way, Katakana, which is almost as well modernized as Korean. In German it backfired, and instead of chosing modern shorter and more precise forms, they want for the longer nouns, adding to it.
Re: The Awful German Language (1880)
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
Despite appearance, German is very illogical language full of idioms and exceptions one has to master. Also, even natives usually don't master the full extent of language and the overbearing nature of language with its need for precise use of words/formulations specific to a given situation often leads to strong reliance on syntax/appearance of complexity. You can see it in typical German philosophy, where the langua…
Yet, the greatest philosophers after the Greeks were all German-speaking (Hegel, Kant, Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsche, Mach...). Also, physicists, mathematicians.
With a few minor exceptions, such as Aquinas, Descartes, Voltaire, Locke, Hume, J.S. Mill, Russel..
Re: The Awful German Language (1880)
#190German is - in a way - very similar to Forth and PostScript: you need a stack of potentially infinite depth to parse it.