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The Awful German Language (1880)

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Re: The Awful German Language (1880)

#241

Post by usr1106 »

pacaro wrote: post #77
usr1106 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"

That could be true for some words, but not in your example. "sh" does not exist in any basic German word, so the boundary must be there.

Re: The Awful German Language (1880)

#242

Post by anoncake »

jacobr1 wrote: post #141
ojosilva wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The irony: despite Mark Twain's vicious rant, German is quite consistent on following the spelling, just like Spanish et al. That doesn't mean some phonemes aren't hard to pronounce for the uninitiated, nor does it exclude accents and dilects and the everyday contraptions of the language.

Was that true in his time, or has it changed as result of the frequent reforms that have occurred over the past century?

Spelling wasn't standardized until 1901.

Re: The Awful German Language (1880)

#243

Post by Teknoman117 »

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…

Yes, we were taught what a gerund _is_, but I never had a teacher who actually called it that.

Re: The Awful German Language (1880)

#244

Post by jan_Inkepa »

wirrbel wrote: post #66
xg15 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I assume you mean to only talk about "-chen"-suffixed diminutives right? [ there are other kinds of diminutive construction in German that aren't neutral - e.g. -ling , Zögling, takes masculine ] Which is even more fun as -ling is generally seen as more objectifying than -chen, even though -chen is neutral and -ling is male.

Also -ling is not so much a diminutive but more of a suffix for Nominalisation (Zögling stems from 'ziehen' [to raise],and refers to someone who was raised, Widerling from 'widerlich' [despicable], thus a despicable person, Schreiberling from 'schreiben' [to write], a Writer], Frühling from 'früh' early [spring]). Gives a somewhat pejorative connotation at times. The key misunderstanding here is of course that 'Genus…

[I'd like to acknowledge that my designation of "-ling" as functioning sometimes as a diminutive is a thing that might be debated for all the grounds given in this and in another comment, but I think it would make precisely nobody happy to pursue the matter further (while at the same time appreciating the points made, that do indeed give me pause)].

Re: The Awful German Language (1880)

#245

Post by bakuninsbart »

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…

In german, I think we would change "being watched" to a noun with the same meaning:

Sie hätte unter Beobachtung gewesen sein müssen.

Still a sentence with 4 verbs though.

E: Interestingly enough, google translate is just plain wrong in a predictable way:

Sie hätte beobachtet werden müssen.

Which implies that she should have been watched.

Re: The Awful German Language (1880)

#246

Post by cptsmrk »

Symbiote wrote: post #225
pezezin wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> too convoluted It's a sentence that would typically be spoken rather than written, but it's only a step beyond "you would have had to have been there", which has genuine occurrences in Google Search. https://www.google.com/search?q=%22You+would+have+had+to+hav...

Which is also funny, because it's apparently convoluted enough in English to have us regularly shorten it to "you had to be there" (which sounds correct, even though I'm fairly sure it's ungrammatical.

Re: The Awful German Language (1880)

#247

Post by herewulf »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #239
herewulf wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 thin…

I had to go back to the original parent's post to make sense of your reply. I found the parent's post to be an accurate, tongue-in-cheek description of the evolution of the English language. It clearly wasn't written by a native speaker and makes more sense if you substitute "German"[1] with "Germanic". I can see why an English native speaker might take offense. I am a native speaker also but I don't take offense. English serves as a pretty awful lingua franca which has cursed most of the world with struggling to make sense of its inconsistencies, but there's nothing to be done about that now.

Also keep in mind the topic of this discussion, which is a humorous diatribe against the modern German language (written in beautiful, flowing English by one of its best writers to have ever lived). A native German speaker could quite easily take offense at it. I happen to have struggled through obtaining German fluency in my college years and while I wouldn't agree with everything that Twain wrote, I find his piece hilarious.

[1]: "German" being an originally Roman Latin term for a group of related peoples speaking, what amounts to closely related dialects rather than separate languages. The definition of "language" is also really indistinct. It really comes down to mutual intelligibility than anything else, see Norwegian, Danish, Swedish (separate "languages" but mutually intelligible). You're certainly aware that the modern Germans call themselves and their language "Deutsch" -- an old word for "people" and that was the case in English in the past, see the "Pennsylvania Dutch" who most certainly don't come from the Netherlands or speak modern Dutch. Old English had liberal use of the term "þéod" (people) which is cognate to "Deutsch"/"Dutch". The country of "Germany" has only really existed since 1871.

Re: The Awful German Language (1880)

#248

Post by schoen »

wheels wrote: post #153
schoen wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 tw…

I have the impression that English compound tenses and their nuances are harder than other European languages', although other languages definitely do have them.

I eat breakfast

I am eating breakfast

I ate breakfast

I was eating breakfast

I have eaten breakfast

I have been eating breakfast

I had eaten breakfast

I had been eating breakfast

I would eat breakfast

I would be eating breakfast

I would have eaten breakfast

I would have been eating breakfast

I will eat breakfast

I am going to eat breakfast

I will be eating breakfast

I am going to be eating breakfast

I will have eaten breakfast

I am going to have eaten breakfast

I can't think of another European language that would idiomatically use (or maybe even require) quite this range of constructions.

Re: The Awful German Language (1880)

#249

Post by wizzard »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #215
wizzard wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s how I learned it too, but apparently that is “traditional” grammar. In “modern” grammar any verb with the -ing ending is a gerund now according to Wikipedia.

Gerunds are used as nouns. Nobody writing for wikipedia can change that.

It's not an invention of Wikipedia editors. If you just read the first paragraph of the article it explains the accepted meaning has evolved over time. It further explains "The distinction between gerund and present participles is not recognised in modern reference grammars, since many uses are ambiguous."

Re: The Awful German Language (1880)

#250

Post by archduck »

lemoncucumber wrote: post #121
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…

A similar example: As a reply to the question, “what’s the most expensive car on the market?” 1) “I’m guessing it’s some German supercar.” 2) “I would guess it’s some German supercar.” 3) “I guess it’s some German supercar.” As a native speaker, the first two both sound correct to me, and essentially equivalent. The third sounds a little weird, even though it’s grammatically the simplest. I can’t put my finger on exa…

In 1) and 2), it's clear the speaker is making some kind of conjecture. In 3), I think there's some bleed-over interfering from the idiomatic "I guess" which indicates that you're reporting hearsay or hedging your commitment to its accuracy. Some languages express this "evidentiary" modality more formally, e.g. via some kind of morphosyntactic change that makes it explicit. English has a ton of ways of expressing modalities, but they're wrapped up together in various kinds of constructions that express tense and aspect as well ("TAM" is an acronym for tense-aspect-mood used in lots of linguistic analysis across all kinds of languages).

Usually it's an error to add -ing to a mental process (Are you knowing the answer?, I'm believing in a deity, etc.). (We can choose to construe a mental process as a material one - it's not a lexical rule about those verbs, but a grammatical means we have access to, e.g. I'm lovin' it, I'm thinking about you contrue them as an activity rather than a mental state.) But perhaps the reason why replacing "guessing" with "guess" changes the meaning so much is because "I guess" is already taken. It should modify the meaning as "I think x" => "I'm thinking x" does, but saying "I guess" sounds like a way of hedging information from a 3rd party.

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