As a developer working in a German company the question of translating some domain language items into English comes up here and there. Mostly we fail because the German compound words are so f*** precise that we are unable to find short matching English translations...unfortunately our non-native devs have to learn complex words they can't barely pronounce :D
Most of the time we try to use English for technical identifiers and German for business langugage, leading to lets say "interesting" code, but it works for us.
I think the issue of German compound nouns is seriously overegged. In almost all cases, it’s essentially the same as English, except with some spaces. It’s not like suddenly a short compound word expresses something that couldn’t be in English.
This is true, but some German compound words acquire a meaning that doesn't simply derive from their component words. Well-known ones include Kindergarten and Weltschmerz. This is often the case for domain-specific terms (Gestaltpsychologie, Bildungsroman).
Sure, but again those concepts typically will still have an equivalent way to express them in English. For example, Kindergarten is nursery in en-GB. I'm not entirely sure what the others actually mean, but Bildungsroman is probably "coming-of-age novel" which is a common literary genre.
The biggest challenge I've had when writing multilingual user interfaces aren't lacking a way to translate, but just practical issues like dynamic string construction or where the structure of the UI somehow doesn't work in another language, or when a given string is used in multiple parts of the app in the English version, but the non-English versions need different strings in different places[0], or just where an English single word translates into a whole sentence (or vice versa).
[0] For example some languages don't have a commonly used word that means "limb" - i.e. arm _or_ leg. A bit niche, but if you're doing something medical-related it can cause issues.
Technically it is correct, but in doing that you lose the essence of the word “roman” and of the whole influence French culture had over the whole of Europe until not that long ago, including in Germany. It is in these cases where it is quite obvious that Britain was an island at the edge of Europe, culturally and not only.
> Technically it is correct, but in doing that you lose the essence of the word “roman”
This isn't specific to concepts like "Bildungsroman." You're essentially saying "this word isn't just a word, but a word with implicit cultural context."
That's true of pretty much every word. Hell, translating "ao" from Japanese, you'd think is so simple: blue. Except it can also mean green because in Japanese there is less historical, cultural distinction between blue and green. So obviously green traffic lights are called "blue" in Japanese, not green.
You'll never get a perfect translation of anything that's longer than a couple words. The point of translation is getting close enough. Translating Bildungsroman as "coming of age novel" gets you so close, that if your conversation hinges on the actual nuance, you're almost assuredly talking to someone who will understand what Bildungsroman means, so you just use that word.
EDIT: One of my friends at uni did his thesis on the difference between Japanese "natsukashii" and English "nostalgic." I've always thought about that as the perfect example of how any simple translation is fraught with cultural complications. There are certainly things I would call "nostalgic" but I'd never call "natsukashii," because nostalgia can come with sadness, but natsukashii never does.
I don’t think the argument that English's book comes from novel as in new and in French book comes ‘of the roman vernacular’ and that this changes the meaning in some profound way. I don’t speak German, but it sounds like it the meaning has been fully lost and now it just means of the French. (unless you know all three languages and then I guess it has more meaning) At most, it is vaguely interesting to think of the etymology when hanging on a word, I guess more so if you know multiple languages
Your objection to translating "Roman" as "novel" seems to be that Roman is closer to the French word for novel than "novel" in English is? But this seems to be more an objection to English using the word "novel" instead of something closer to the modern French term, and not actually an objection related to the translation.
This seems like a slightly strange objection to me; I would have thought the actual semantic problem lies with "Bildung", in that a Bildungsroman generally involves some kind of learning/development/improvement, whereas a coming-of-age novel does not necessarily involve this.
> It is in these cases where it is quite obvious that Britain was an island at the edge of Europe, culturally and not only.
I mean this is a very weird claim, which assumes that Europe is culturally homogenous (e.g. I think you will find that Britain and France are culturally closer than France and Slovenia).
> e.g. I think you will find that Britain and France are culturally closer than France and Slovenia
Not sure about Slovenia but there's a lot more France here in Romania (from where I'm from) compared to the France that is present in Britain, that is if we ignore the 1200-1300s Norman direct influences. But that's a different discussion, related to how the insular Brits cannot really comprehend Napoleon's work to the fullest (as a reminder, what is now Slovenia was indeed, if even for a short period of time, under Napoleonic France, with Ljubljana being indeed the capital of what was then a French autonomous province [1])
Slovenia's also been occupied by the Romans, Bavaria, the Austria-Hungarian Empire, the Holy Roman Empire, Fascist Italy, and was part of Yugoslavia. I think any French influence is probably a bit diluted.
> I mean this is a very weird claim, which assumes that Europe is culturally homogenous (e.g. I think you will find that Britain and France are culturally closer than France and Slovenia).
Yeah I don't get this either. The English culture and language both have clear influences from French, courtesy of the Norman invasion (and other influence points over time of course). It's weird to point to Britain of all places as not being influenced by French culture.
It's worth noting this is normal in language. Consider the highly non-technical English "lighthouse," which has acquired a far more specific meaning than "a house made of light" or "a house that produces light" or "a house that weighs very little."
I'm not familiar with "blackboard" being a valid term for any board that is black, but specifically one used in pairing with chalk to be written on.
Weltschmerz and Bildungsroman relate very closely to their compositional meaning. Sure, they have become slightly more specialised (a novel about a teacher wouldn't be a "Bildungsroman", I guess), but it's not like you can't make an educated guess.
Also, the fact that collocations can acquire more specialised meanings than just the sum of their parts is hardly unique to German (in English, the "theory of relativity" means something very specific and isn't used, e.g., for moral or epistemic relativism).
And in any case, "this concept is untranslatable" is nonsense, usually born out of xenophobia or jingoism. "MY language is more expressive than those OTHERS."
Every language has technical words that "cannot be translated." But when we say "cannot be translated," what we mean is "it is unsafe to expect a foreign reader to know what the term means without explanation." It's not that it can't be translated; it's that there isn't necessarily a single-word equivalent. I agree with the original suggestion that these can be a challenge to translate elegantly. But, speaking as a lawyer by training, the solution is obvious: you begin your technical document by describing novel technical terms. Then you use them in your document without explanation.
Consider "sushi": how do you translate that? Nowadays, we don't. But before it was widely known, you could've just said "a sour rice dish" and be done with it. (For those of you thinking "no wait, sushi is raw fish," no. That's sashimi. Sushi is vinegared rice mixed with other stuff, often. (Sushi can be with egg, pickled plum, crab, beef, etc. none of which are fish.)
Makizushi = rolled sour rice
Nigirizushi = sour rice to be gripped
Chirashizushi = sour rice with stuff scattered in it
> Chirashizushi = sour rice with stuff scattered in it
And it annoys me to no end how many restaurants serve "chirashi" with completely plain, non-vinegared, non-seasoned-in-any-way rice. Just "throw some sashimi on some white rice".
You do have to draw a distinction between compounding, where joined words gain their own meaning (some English examples: breakfast, football, highlight), and agglutination, which is the habit of the language to join words together, not necessarily creating a novel word that has its own meaning and dictionary entry, which is what Mr Twain is grumbling about in the article.
None of those are actual German words. For some of them, I found references that these words could potentially be used in Pennsylvania, but most of these words are not even German, even when you split them into their components.
I find it really interesting that in Russian they clearly took the same concept but just made it out of Russian words instead. Kindergarten in russion is детский (children's) сад (garden).
There are other words that are straight from German, for instance бутерброд (sandwitch).
iirc at least 3 Russian empresses (and also Russian duchesses) started out as German princesses. The court spoke French. And Russia looked to the West as a role model and source of expertise for modernization and development. It could have been one or the other but France post revolution didn't have princesses to spare, so there is also the political aspect in terms of an absolute monarchy.
Would be interesting to know when these words entered Russian vocabulary: before or after Napoleon.
"From its inception, Russia has desperately needed foreign professionals—to teach Russians about governance, manufacturing, military, mining, and other trades. The Dutch, Swedes, Brits, and French were among the foreigners who came to Russia. But Germans certainly dominated, becoming a privileged nationality in Russia.
"The ruling Romanov dynasty, which shared a lot of the German bloodline, became a branch of the Oldenburg dynasty under the name of Holstein-Gottorp-Romanov. Many of its members were born in Germany and spoke Russian with an accent. Germans, especially the Baltic ones, rapidly advanced through the ranks of the Russian society thanks to their talents, persistence, discipline, and loyalty to the throne (as of 1913, approximately 2,400,000 Germans lived in Russia)."
> iirc at least 3 Russian empresses (and also Russian duchesses) started out as German princesses.
That would be incorrect. Ekaterina II was one, yes. Anna Ioannovna and Elizaveta Petrovna were both Russian. Ekaterina I was probably born in a mixed Baltic German/Polish family, but decidedly not a princess - her early life in general is very murky but the earliest that we know of her for sure, she was a scullery maid. Her ending up as the Russian empress is a truly fantastic story and was probably only possible because Peter I was so quirky yet so dominating, he could actually make someone like that his wife and have it stick.
However, Peter III was German through and through, so between him and Ekaterina II and their son Pavel I, Romanovs were effectively a German dynasty in all but name from there on, although culturally they were thoroughly Russian after Pavel.
Under Alexandr III, who was very stereotypically Russian in both looks and manners and promoted a nationalist domestic policy, there was a political joke that went thus. Okhranka (the secret service) gives him a report that says that after a thorough investigation, they've conclusively determined that Pavel's dad (and thus Alexander's great-great-grandfather) was actually Catherine's lover Sergei Saltykov and not Peter III - which was a very popular rumor even at the time Pavel was born, with some corroborating evidence. Alexandr calmly reads the report and crosses himself, "well, praise the Lord, we Romanovs are actually Russian!". The next day, the same department submits another report saying that the previous one was based on information that was ultimately found to be incorrect, and therefore Alexandr is in fact a descendant of Peter III. He again calmly reads the report and crosses himself again saying, "well, praise the Lord, we Romanovs are actually legitimate!".
> Would be interesting to know when these words entered Russian vocabulary: before or after Napoleon.
Before. In general, Russian words that are clearly derived from German, Swedish, or Dutch entered the language at the time when Peter initiated his Westernization campaigns, as that were his primary sources (him being interested more in things like warfare, shipbuilding, and manufacturing, rather than high culture). At the time of Napoleon, French subsumed German as the primary source of borrowings for new terms, but that process has also started much earlier, and was already underway under Ekaterina II.
Not in my experience. One might use the word огород (vegetable garden) for the kind of garden many have in an American residential backyard. But in my experience сад is used generically for many kinds of gardens.
It's true that English uses basically the same method to create compound nouns, but quantitatively it's a difference. Long compounds consisting of 3, 4 or more parts are completely common in German and cause usually no trouble in understanding, whereas English is far more likely to split them up by the introduction of words such as "of", "for", etc.
x100 this. You can sort of derive the meaning of a complex word if you grasp one or two parts of it and offer a hacked together English translation, even if it doesn’t map directly. I find that people online who haven’t actually studied German like to meme this often.
The Latin-derived cases from the article, on the other hand, are the truly maddening, and makes you appreciate the simplicity of English grammar by comparison.
They're not Latin-derived, they come originally from Proto-Indo-European (which had even more cases). Many other Indo-European languages retain cases (Slavic languages, Greek, etc.), but were lost in English and the Romance languages.
What does come from Latin is the way we name and analyse these cases traditionally.
Interestingly, several different ways of analysis are in use. I first learned German as a third language and then moved to a German-speaking country, and realized that the way German-speaking people think about their grammar is often different from how foreigners think about the German grammar. The rules end up with the same result, but the angle can often be different.
For instance, we first learned what a direct object was (something which is done with/to, e.g. in “I ate the ice cream”, “the ice cream” would be direct object). Then we learned that in German, the direct object is declined in accusative (which primarily affects the article, and adjective declination). This was consistent across multiple classes and teachers and books and schools. But my German German teachers had never heard of the concept “direct object”; for them, only the “accusative object” existed. Of course, the accusative object would be in accusative, but also, its presence would signal e.g. whether to use “haben” or “ist” for “is” in certain situations (for which I learned an entirely different set of rules that they had never heard of).
You would think that this is because my native language (Norwegian) has different concepts, but our entire way of teaching Norwegian grammar was uprooted at some point pre-WW2 _precisely to map well to German_, to prepare students for German classes when that was a more common second language than English was. (There were tons of things I never understood why were important until I got to apply them to German later.) So you'd think they'd match better.
To be technical, "accusative" etc. are cases (i.e. forms of words) while "direct/indirect object" are grammatical roles - those are different categories. In German, for example, the Dative case can mark an indirect object (although some verbs may require the Genitive case for its indirect object), but it can also have other functions. This is even more pronounced in e.g. Latin where the different cases can have a wide range of different functions, not just direct/indirect object.
This is possibly not something that is taught very explicitly in school, but it's what the terminology means. (Or at least it's how I was taught. Linguistics being such an old discipline used to analyse so many different languages means that different people will use terminology differently.)
>the way German-speaking people think about their grammar is often different from how foreigners think about the German grammar. The rules end up with the same result, but the angle can often be different.
That's true for most languages, native speakers are almost universally terrible at explaining rules because they just intrinsically know them and never have to name or even think of the rule. To the extent that native speakers are formally taught grammar, it's usually edge cases, formal registers, and more sophisticated tools, none of which are the primary concern of language learners.
We learn direct and indirect object in school as well it’s just not what people remember because they either had to grind the Latin for a test or the number (which js stupid on many different levels).
This is so true. My favourite example is when Top Gear made fun of the German word "Doppelkupplungsgetriebe" by spelling it, when it is quite literally the translation to "dual-clutch transmission". It stil is hilariously funny, but you cannot conclude that German is weird with these words.
Use of Latin has nothing to do with Americans or whiteness. It's a holdover from the legal and medical professions, and you'll find bird-spotters and gardeners doing it too thanks to Carl Linné's / Carolus Linnæus's love of Latin.
I think what you're trying to say is that people who are pretentious and middle-class (who in your experience are affluent white Americans) like to reach for Latin words because they sound grander. Orwell had a lot to say on that in Politics and the English Language:
> Pretentious diction [is] used to dress up simple statements and give an air of scientific impartiality to biassed judgements. [...] Bad writers, and especially scientific, political and sociological writers, are nearly always haunted by the notion that Latin or Greek words are grander than Saxon ones
> Use of Latin has nothing to do with Americans or whiteness. It's a holdover from the legal and medical professions
The fact that the language has such a degree lf these holdovers has something to do with Americans (or, rather the Anglosphere more generally), which is why the GP can note that it is a difference from German, where once upon a time; Germany had the same use of scientific, clerical, and professional Latin in the past, after all.
Well, perhaps we can congratulate the German-speaking countries for throwing off the yoke of Latin!
It did not happen in the Anglosphere because England was run by the Normans for hundreds of years, during which the common law system grew enormously...
Let's also not forget ecclesiastic Latin! Significantly less common in the HRE since Martin Luther's protestations!
Orwell said it better than I could, naturally. My point isn't that the professions can be traced back to origins in other languages. Nor do I mind a lingua franca for a scientific discipline. My gripe is that jargon, colloquial use and even common parlance haven't evolved away from it.
There could have been a movement away from old inherited terms. But there wasn't. And I have no better idea as to why than classism.
(German has a word for that! Jägerlatein, "hunter's latin", as a term for blowing up terminology to keep away the working population and restrict the game to the upper classes that are better educated, and frankly have a lot of time for that BS.)
On the other hand, as a Brit, I find German abbreviations oddly cutesy and childish — although I think that's just preferring what one grew up with!
That said, I don't think you can discuss German jargon without talking about Beamtendeutsch. I'm fairly comfortable reading in German — I'm slower than I am in English, but I can, say, read a book in German. Then I'll get a letter from some Amt somewhere and it'll be utterly unintelligible. Worse, I'll pass it to my German partner, and she has no idea what it says, and we'll need to go and find someone to translate the document we've just got back into regular German. I'll take "appendicitis" any day of the week over having to learn whole new grammar constructs just to interpret an official document!
>the (very white) American latinization of jargon that signifies affluence ... Habeas Corpus. All these terms have German names that are embarrassingly straightforward.
BlueSky brainrot take. Habeas corpus predates modern Germany.
"Habeas corpus originally stems from the Assize of Clarendon of 1166, a reissuance of rights during the reign of Henry II of England in the 12th century.[12] The foundations for habeas corpus are "wrongly thought" to have originated in Magna Carta of 1215 but in fact predate it."
>American latinization of jargon that signifies affluence ... Habeas Corpus.
Habeas corpus predates the United States of America by hundreds of years. It has nothing to do with "American latinization." You should remove that from your comment.
In some way yes, but not really. Had a colleague working on a project for Deutsche Bahn (state owned train operator), he was developing an app and the domain knowledge was full of long German words, no one outside this bubble ever uses: Bremshundertstel, Bremszettel, Mindestbremshundertstel, Notbremsüberbrückung... In a way it's better to have a super long name for this, so there are no 2-3 ways to describe the same thing.
I wonder 'where' these compound words end up in an n-dim embedding space (relative to their German and say English 'parts'). In fact this brings up the interesting question of tokenization of the long German compound words, and how all this plays out in German to English (and reverse) LLM translation and text generation.
Sure, you can say three nouns in a row in English. But can you then make them into a verb? Or and adjective? What happens when some of the three words in English already are in a form that also parses as a verb or an adjective?
English is a bastard language and it shows in its grammar.
My colleague this week took this a step further with this sentence: "We can model the data in [such and such way]. But then the user can PEBCAK their way into [impossible situation]." So close to poetry.
"Rain shadow" is a common idiom in English. "Wind shadow" is not because English has multiple dedicated words for this concept, including "lee" [2] as well as slipstream.
I worked on a case management system for a few years that dealt with Norwegian criminal law, and we did the same. Technical terms and conventional parts of method identifiers (like getFoo, setFoo, isFoo and such) were in English while the domain terminology was left in Norwegian. It looks a bit weird when you first encounter it, but honestly it was fine. Especially for a domain with as much emphasis on nuance and as many country specific details as the legal domain anything else would be a terrible idea IMO. Not only would it be really hard to translate many cases, it would probably make the code harder to understand and in some cases even cause misunderstandings.
Yeah nothing worse than entering a translated to English portal for Dutch tax purposes. Because those English words also ended up in Business Dutch but then got another meaning. Dutchlish, or at least the original term in parenthesis) is really preferable to anything else.
Words like beamer for projector... but isn't that similar between all countries? Even within English-speaking countries? You don't know what some Australian-specific or AAVE word means until someone tells you, no matter where you're from. Every version of English is a dialect of English so long as it's still a complete language (having semantics and all that)
Same as a friend of mine who works for NAV. There's a whole lot of long-ass variable and function names because they use the Norwegian name for whatever they are calculating. It makes sense for them though, as the ones who review your code are lawyers...
I work with a lot of Germans and have noticed this. For me to provide the English translation that is the most accurate I have to dig deep. The unabridged English dictionary has plenty of words but I feel slightly guilty providing them with a word which I know is the best fit but which they will probably never encounter anywhere else, and where most English people would just not know this word. The definition is often quite contextual and nuanced, hinting at (for example) the reliability of the thing that is described by it, or the way it is used (or was used) in society (e.g. for good or ill). The "baggage" I suppose.
I've had this same discussion with a colleague at my job in the Netherlands. He will ask me to choose from a list he provides for variable names. Usually I need to ask for more context and then I end up leaning towards the more "well known/normal" option, both because it still fits and will be more likely to be understood another decade from now when we've probably both moved on and are not there to answer anymore questions.
Discussing the words is a fun way to take a little break during the workday, but I don't consider it more than that.
I don't know where the idea about the preciseness of German language comes from, especially in anything computer-related. For one, German language famously fails to distinguish between safety and security as well as between an error, a fault and a mistake. Whenever Germans discuss any software matters, they seem to be "code-switching" to English terms themselves.
Compounds have to be translated using multiple words, yes - that's just a few extra white space, it doesn't result in loss of precision.
There very much was a well defined distinction between safety and security:
Sicherheit and Schutz, as in Datensicherheit and Datenschutz.
And yeah, you can see with those two latter terms where the issue lies :)
Those two were traditionally actually used this way in the safety and security context - I think I even have the script for the "Datenschutz und Datensicherheit" lecture I had on uni in the '90s lying around somewhere in the attic.
But their meaning has changed and muddled so much over the years - probably not helped by the fact that "Sicherheit" is much closer to "security" in colloquial usage, and probably vice versa(?) - that they stopped being useful and used in this context.
Datenschutz is about legal protections for personal information (protection of the rights of the individual). Datensicherheit is about technical measures to ensure security of information (security).
These things happen in any languages. English, for example, has "number" - which could mean cardinality of something (how many of something is here?), a number in the mathematical sense (real number, complex number, etc.), a digit (0/1/2/...), or a numeric identifier (room number, telephone number).
I also work in Germany and the code-switching has nothing to do with the question of precision, but simply because English is the technical language for CS. Also, Germans apparently like everything American, so some of their own words which originally existed in German (and have exactly the same meaning as their English counterpart) have pretty much fallen out of use, cf. computer / Rechner.
It's not that German lacks precision per se but most of the jargon originated in the US or even England, and rather than coming up with German translations, it has become custom to use the original English. Which, frankly, makes everyday tasks like looking up documentation or debugging a lot easier.
Compare this to French where the Académie Française makes sure that you don't have to use these nasty English words! Yikes. And if there isn't a good French translation, they just make one up - my favorite example: the word "bug" (as in programming) has a made-up "French" alternative: "bogue". As far as I understand, no-one uses it, but it exists.
Native German here: In my experience the issue is in most cases not compounds, but the domain language.
There are terms that are specific to certain domains and used by everyone to precisely name a certain process. Belegprüfung, Indexpartizipation, Zessionär, etc.
Sometimes germans outside of your field of work don’t know these terms either, but those who do all use the same term. If you use english expressions you have to replace a domain term with one of multiple possible translations, making it confusing in many cases.
We have the same with translated documentation. Ever read the german version of Azure Docs? I have no clue what they are talking about until i switch to the english version.
The issue is not so much one of language but of habit and usage. That's why in that sense it is important for scientific and technical domains to be taught and practiced in your own language. This allows terms to evolve and be used habitually in the language.
Totally get where you’re coming from—German can feel like a surgical tool when it comes to precision, especially in law or certain engineering domains where it’s still dominant. But from my (very subjective) experience, that sharpness doesn’t always carry over to areas like machine learning or modern software architecture.
Most cutting-edge research and discussion happens in English, and honestly, I find it pretty tough to have a deep technical conversation in German—even with other Germans. The language just doesn’t seem to reflect the latest advancements in those fields.
I used to agree with the “German is super precise” sentiment—especially when it came to legal or philosophical stuff. But the more I’ve immersed myself in English, the more I’ve seen how nuanced and expressive it can be too. And ironically, German law often ends up being a case-by-case “interpretation party” anyway.
Don’t get me wrong, I still appreciate the poetic weight of words like Müßiggang—there’s real beauty there. But when it comes to actually getting things done or discussing complex, evolving ideas? I’m not sure German gives us much of a practical edge anymore.
> I find it pretty tough to have a deep technical conversation in German
...loan words?
Dutch doesn't have a word for computer other than computer, SSD is SSD, machine learning is machine learning, WiFi is WiFi (with a 50/50 split on people saying it the english or the dutch way), generative AI is generatieve AI and I don't think anyone would count loaning generative as-is as a typo either (maybe if you work for a publisher with a strict rulebook)
And from there you apply the normal grammar. To do stuff on the computer is computering (or, actually, we make verbs with -en so it's actually computeren) and machine learning applications are machinelearning-toepassingen. At least, to me it's normal to mix languages like that. It's also not like we avoid the word fingerspitzengefühl or überhaupt just because they once came from german, or like the english don't throw in a kindergarten or zwischenzug where applicable. It just gets mixed into the existing language
Maybe you could look into establishing a proper-technical-terminology-direct-literal-translation-enforcement-protocol that uses "-" and translates German words more or less literally. The effect should be very obvious for German speakers, and more obvious than German words to English speaking folks.
This leads to cringy non-idiomatic kf nit nonsensical English though. As a non-native but fluent English speaker, working in projects where people with only basic English proficiency translated the native terms into English by naive dictionary lookup, or sometimes by selecting false friends, is really painful, because the translations give all the wrong signals and connotations in English.
I was once involved in building the UI for a video game. There was some kind of labels for baseic color selection ... "czerwony" instead of "red" broke everything :F
> unfortunately our non-native devs have to learn complex words they can't barely pronounce
I simultaneously know too little about German and have seen too much horror stories on German that I cannot identify whether this is but a typographical-error or actually pursuant to DIN orthographical standards
I hope he will give us an actual example from his work. But meanwhile, here's a classic example:
The Donau is a river. On this river is a steamship (Dampfshiff): Donaudampfschiff
This ship is part of an organisation (Gesellschaft) that manages cruises (Fahrt): Donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaft
The ship has a captain (Kapitän) who has a cap (Mütze): Donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaftskapitänsmütze
On this cap is a button (Knopf): Donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaftskapitänsmützenknopf
You could extend this example: The button is colored with a special paint (Farbe), which is produced in a factory (Fabrik): Donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaftskapitänsmützenknopffarbenfabrik
And the factory has an entry gate (Eingangstor): Donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaftskapitänsmützenknopffarbenfabrikeingangstor
In English, this would be a huge sentence, all in reverse order: The entry gate of the factory that produces the color for the button on the captain's cap of the ship belonging to the cruise organization on the Donau.
The German is a lot more compact, if sometimes hard to parse :-)
And I think the use of spaces between pieces of nouns in English has more to do with the fact that -- in comparison to German -- the pronounciation is so unpredictable from the spelling that not having the visual indicator between pieces could leave you completely lost -- "what word is this?" Whereas German has very regular and consistent rules of pronounciation that map closely to spellings, so once habituated you can scan it from the page and spit it out more reliably.
Still, having grown up with English as my first language and (partially) learned German as a young man, learning German gave me more appreciation for English. Which only grew once I studied a bit of Anglo-Saxon. I love our language, there's just something about its character.
A spelling reform would be nice (though entirely impractical) though.
If you enjoy English and German but want something with a more modern twist, might I suggest Dutch? I started learning it about 3 years ago and it's very regular in terms of spelling/pronunciation. Once you learn the irregular verbs (the most common ones, like in any language it seems...), many things will just "make sense", especially if you already know English and German!
It’s not considered prescriptively correct, but often nowadays people just write them with spaces (like in English), especially on phones, because hitting spacebar makes spellcheck/autocorrect kick in.
I don't remember many events from 1996 but my German boss walking into the office excited about the spelling reform of "Schiffahrt" certainly stood out as a memorable event.
Context, maybe just for others: Schiff is ship and Fahrt is ride, so eine Schifffahrt is a cruise (and without the article, it is also the term for seafaring in general). Anyway, you can see that Schiff ends with two Fs and Fahrt starts with one, so if you put them together to form a compound word, you get three Fs in a row, Schifffahrt. In pre-reform German spelling, this was deemed excessive, so one would write Schiffahrt, instead. The German spelling reform in the mid-90s changed this, so now you do the logical thing. (Whether the old way really was confusing and which way is more aesthetic are separate questions.)
Impartial foreigner here who has no stake in the old or new spelling. If you're combining ship and port, you can't just write shiport. Of course it's shiff-fahrt / shifffahrt? By what logic does anyone argue anything else?
Once upon a time we used to write by hand. It was considered time consuming.
Once upon a time we used to set books in lead letters. There were ligatures, where two consecutive letters hat a special spacing - like "fi" or "sz". If we allowed three consecutive letters, we would need to invent new ligatures.
It is probably easier/cheaper to just forbid the spelling.
First of all, it was probably a descriptivist move. What I think happened is that people wrote 'ff' because 'fff' looked like a typo or was less convenient to write, so the linguistics codified that.
Also, there are portmanteau words where the middle letters overlap, e.g. bro+romance=bromance.
Swedish works the same (unsurprisingly), but note that programming languages also kind of do that. If you had to use a word like that in Java you would just mash all the words together in CamelCase and it would be pretty much the same as using the long German word (and almost exactly as difficult to read) even if technically it moved from being a single word to being a long list of words. It can still be a single identifier without spaces even if you translate to a language where it can not be a single word.
This is not necessary. Practiced German speakers generally do not struggle with splitting words into their components because syllables follow relatively predictable patterns. You will run into ambiguities from time to time, of course, but the same applies to tons of other features of natural languages as well. (Do you want to outlaw homophones in English?)
Anyway, there is also a perfectly acceptable and established way of making German words easier to parse if need be: hyphens. So Hyphen-Case instead of PascalCase.
When I was learning to read German, for the longest time I thought the word “letztendlich” was “letz-tendlich” (which is meaningless but at least theoretically pronounceable) rather than “letzt-endlich” (which is what it actually is).
I’m sure a native German speaker wouldn’t make the same mistake, though.
The century old tradition has set up a couple rakes for native speakers to step into.
"Selbständig" (freelancing) is obviously derived like self-standing, but "selb" is archaic and completely unused, prompting native learners to write 'selbstständig, which is wrong.
Couple more ones like this. Ask a native speaker about hinüber vs herüber, they will be perplexed, because it feels so dialectal. And nobody even knows about imperfect tense vs perfect tense, it's just stylistics to most.
This is not an accurate or precise example. You surely know you are misleading people.
German does not simply just concatenate words ad infinitum across logical classification, a concatenated, compound word is generally logically limited by classification. The concatenation generally only tends to be used in relevant (operative word being “relevant”), increasing smaller/lower logical classification. You generally will not rise and fall in that classification, let alone jump horizontally as you concatenate. It is really just a logic tree, you don’t all the sudden jump trunks or branches. It has to be a logically precise unit.
You’re essentially just saying ManBearPig. It’s not an actual thing.
So the entry gate of the factory that produces paint that happens to maybe also be used on the button of the cap of the captain of the ship on the Danube and is also part of a union, is not…
It is one word in German. It has one article, Germans talk about it as about a single word and treat it as a single word for grammar purposes. You can use it as a single noun in any sentence.
But it also odd example for this, because it is long as hell anyway already and additional spacing that English equivalent would require is just opportunity to wrap. It is just harder to read, but English equivalent would be easier to layout.
It really is one "new" word consisting of a bunch of words spelled without spaces. It is a compound, where every word adds additinal information to the last component. An easier example is sth like "Altbauwohnung" which would be an apartment (Wohnung) in an old (alt) building (Bau) where "Altbau" is also a compound.
This way of compunding enables you to build new words everyone can understand the first time they encounter them, but also to build those stupidly long words.
What if I said in English, you can "compound" words with adjectives so for example if you have a book, you can add red and say redbook, and you can keep going and do stuff like uselessoldreddirtyneverusedbook. You can even add possessives which have their own adjectives, like if the book was owned by a redbearded german army vet you'd say
The redbeardedgermanarmyvet'suselessoldreddirtyneverusedbook
What is your definition of “word”? This is not at all a simple question in linguistics. By the way, it can’t just be “written without spaces”, as languages with no writing system at all, and languages whose writing system has no spaces (like Chinese), still have various concepts of “word”.
An example from my work: in Norwegian criminal law, the prosecutor can in some cases hand out what is called a «påtaleunnlatelse», which means something like «decision to not prosecute». This is a legal punishment in the sense that it goes on your criminal record, but no punishment beyond that is handed out. Basically, the prosecutor’s office can note down «we are convinced we can prove this was done, but have decided not to prosecute».
A special kind of this is the «prosessøkonomisk (process economical) påtaleunnlatelse» where in a large and complex case with many serious offences, some less serious can be non-prosecuted in this way to not spend eternity in the courtroom.
So these are kind of fun to compare. At the high level they clearly all have the same purpose: in some cases it's socially useful to have the punishment for a crime simply be a statement of "person X did this thing". But the details vary a bit:
- It seems the Australian section 10 is handed out by the court, where the English and Norwegian options dispense with a trial entirely. It also looks like a Section 10 doesn't go in a person's criminal record, unlike the other two.
- It looks like the English caution requires an admission of guilt, while the Norwegian option is at the prosecutor's discretion within the rules of applicability of the procedure. Of course someone not demanding a trial when given this can be seen as an _implicit_ admission of guilt, but the legal nuance can probably be important.
- The English and Norwegian procedures are nominally also different in who makes the decision: the English procedure is handled by the police, while in Norway it's the prosecutor's office. But this is more a theoretical than practical difference I think, because the Norwegian prosecutor's office is organized differently than the English Crown Prosecution Service: here, the lowest levels of prosecutors are integrated into the police services they work with, so in practice I think it works out much the same.
Another example, not involving compound nouns: Norwegian criminal process distinguishes two levels of suspicion. The first level «mistenkt» (suspect) is basically the investigation noting down in their log «we think this guy might have done it», but the second level «siktet» (literally aimed at, no idea how to translate to English or even if an equivalent term exists) is a formal decision made by the prosecutor’s office. And importantly, the use of «tvangsmidler» (coercive instruments, like arrest, search, seizure and so on) requires there to be a siktelse and this status also triggers legal rights for the accused like the right to a defence attorney.
There are similar distinctions in American law, e.g. with the police's right to tarry you. A short stop by the police can be conducted for 'reasonable articulable suspicion' of committing a crime, such as seeing you make a rash judgment in driving, while a longer stop or an arrest requires 'probable cause' such as smelling marijuana in your car after the initial stop.
You mean 'Terry' which is not a verb. The name comes from a Supreme Court case I am too lazy to look up. Correct usage is, "the police conducted a Terry stop and frisked the subject for weapons for their own protection."
Hah! That's amazing. Thanks for the correction. I had only heard it, not read it; I assumed it was from the verb 'to tarry'. The meaning is similar enough that it made sense.
In my experience, problems is not with German as a language, but with Germans requiring to use their hard language, I live in neighboring country and since like 2010, nobody bothers to learn German anymore, (some small percent still learn, ok) and everyone who I know rather works in different country because of this.
Like Netherlands, still hard language (multiple) but they don't expect you to learn it when working for multi-national company.
In every country there will be some expat bubble which can get away with not learning the local language(s). Sometimes that bubble will be bigger and sometimes smaller, but it definitely exists in Germany too (mostly in Berlin).
That said, I simply don't understand the mindset of people who move somewhere for an extended period of time and don't bother to learn the language. It locks you out of a lot of opportunities and makes you dependent on other people (especially for official/administrative/legal purposes). It also simply doesn't work in many places - (younger) Germans may speak decent English, but try going to Spain, Italy, or even Japan and see how far you get if you insist on speaking only English.
I live in Zürich and I get by just fine unable to speak German. I can read it just fine because it is similar enough to Swedish, my native language. I doubt I will ever learn Swiss deutsch, it really is a language on its own - with very strong dialects.
But today there are amazing translator apps that can make it so much easier parsing official documents.
They don't expect it, but the amount of opportunities that will open up for you if you can speak the local language should not be discounted. I've found that my professional circle has been widely broadened because I can speak the local language. As an immigrant from a non EU country, the peace of mind that I get from knowing that I can leverage my own personal growth into more professional opportunities is worth the "hassle" of learning a new language.
As an added bonus, learning a new language has been one of the most enriching hobbies I've ever begun! Exercising a new part of my brain and opening myself up to new cultural experiences is something I'm very grateful for. If anyone is considering a move abroad, I strongly suggest not only weighing the financial factors, but also the cultural and self-enriching ones.
I suspect it's largely a generational/regional thing. My wife has lots of family from various rural parts of Eastern Germany, and half of the people over 50 speak effectively no English.
Do they know Russian? They had no reason to learn English if they’re over 50 and lived in East Germany, for obvious reasons. Someone that is 50 now would’ve graduated high school in 1993, only a few years after German reunification.
"problems is [..] with Germans requiring to use their hard language [..] nobody bothers to learn German anymore, (some small percent still learn, ok) everyone who I know rather works in different country because of this"
I assure you, as a matter of fact, (A) the size of your social circle is very limited, and (B) such an attitude as yours could safely be labeled as cultural ignorance bordering on cultural arrogance.
Can't confirm this.
I'm a native German working for a company in Munich and as soon anybody joins to the meeting that is not German we switch to English.
90% of meetings are in English.
When my Russian colleague asks me to speak German because he wants to practice then I speak some German with him. Otherwise all our conversations are in English.
The experience might be different in "older" companies.
My experience couldn't be further from this. As an English-speaker natively, French was the alien language which took yonks to get, German was 1. oh, these 5 things are pronounced like that, now you can read anything with confidence and people know what word you mean when you talk, and 2. oh, here's maybe 15h worth of grammar to learn and now you can make sentences up to upper intermediate level, and they feel pretty intuitiive as soon as you start flipping verbs to the end sometimes. French was ten times the struggle!
i spent like 10y studying German in school, and was pretty good at it. Then life happened, and we moved to France. I could speak good enough French after 1 year, and speak/understand basically everything after 2 years.
German was PITA, French was pretty easy but obviously I had a personal French teacher, and old lady who was amazing
How old were you when you first "learned" French? I've observed that kids/teenagers who aren't actually interested in learning the language retain just enough to pass their classes and then it all just drifts away. I was the same "learning" Spanish in high school in Texas.
Until I moved to a new country and _wanted_ to learn the language, I could barely remember how to ask where the toilet was. Now that I'm invested and interested, things are much more sticky.
I believe this is why much of the world has latched on to learning English. There is so much content available that people _want_ to consume, that it becomes a hobby they are actually interested in, rather than a chore. As more and more people learn English, it becomes a positive feedback loop of content creation that nearly the entire planet can participate in.
I've been studying German in my spare time for about a year now, and it seems very similar to Old English. Lots of subject-object-verb, lots of suffixes, noun gender.
I can certainly confirm that learning German grammar as an adult is...challenging. Even though I am now fluent, learning as an adult means that you will always make mistakes on the gender of nouns. There are effectively four genders (male/neuter/female/plural), plus four cases (nominative/accusative/dative/genetive), so you have a 4x4 table giving you a choice of 16 articles that can appear in from of a noun. Only, the 16 articles are not unique: the table contains lots of duplicates in unexpected places.
Of course, most Western languages have gendered nouns - English is pretty unique in that respect. That likely comes from English being born as a pidgin of French and German.
Verbs in German are valuable things. You collect them, hold on to them as long as you can, and then - at the end of the sentence - they all come tumbling out. The order of the nouns at the end of the sentence differs by region. In purest German, they come out in reverse order, giving you a nice, context-free grammar. In Swiss dialects, they come out in the order they were conceived, meaning that the grammar is technically context sensitive. In Austrian dialects, the order can be a mix.
Of course, every language has its quirks. French, for example, puts extra letters on the ends of words that you are not supposed to pronounce. Well, unless the right two words are next to each other, in which case, you pronounce the letters after all.
English, meanwhile, gives learners fits, because the pronunciation has nothing whatsoever to do with spelling. Consider the letters "gh" in this sentence (thanks ChatGPT): "Though the tough man gave a sigh and a laugh at the ghost, he had a hiccough and coughed through the night by the slough, hoping to get enough rest."
>You collect them, hold on to them as long as you can, and then - at the end of the sentence - they all come tumbling out.
as a German native I felt oddly at home with Japanese because funnily enough building seemingly endless verbs at the end of sentences felt very natural. Despite the fact that German, most of the time, is an ordinary SVO language. It's one of the mistakes English natives who just learn German make, that only made sense for me after I thought how odd that structure is.
I've also heard live TV translators really hate this about German because it's annoying, depending on the context, to have to wait to the end of a sentence to translate the whole thing.
Or the tale about a speaker, being translated into German. He tells a joke, the English speakers laugh. He says "ok, and seriously now...", the German speakers finally hear the verb and start to laugh.
Also, English has the 5 vowels of the Latin script representing some 25 vowels sounds, to the point that consonants can turn into vowels with no rhyme or reason. The best way to learn that English is nonsense is to live in Britain and learn local city and village names. They all have made up pronunciation rules, evolved over the centuries, sure, but they forgot to update the bloody name on the map to match the sounds.
As a descendant of the Romans, I can only shake my head at such barbarism.
In these cases it's all Scottish Gaelic, which has a complex but very consistent phonics system. Complaining about it would be like complaining that Russian vodka brands are hard to pronounce because you can't read Cyrillic
Because the components are Leice-ster, not Lei-cester. Same for Glouce-ster, Worce-ster etc. A very refined pronunciation might emit both "s" sounds, but colloquially they get smooshed together into one.
That depends on how one defines «properly». Finnish, with its nearly 20 noun cases and vowel harmony, has made a spellchecker a computationally unsolvable problem.
If you're counting sounds (i.e. phones), then most languages with those same 5 vowel letters have quite a lot because of numerous allophones.
English is criminal in that it has many vowel phonemes - British more so than American - and then on top of that its mapping of them to vowel letters is completely out of whack with both traditional Latin values of them, and how they're used in most other languages out there. I mean, cmon, <ea> for /i:/?
Still, with a sensible orthography, General American would only need something like 9-10 distinct vowel characters (for monophthongs; but diphthongs are best spelled as the obvious corresponding vowel-vowel or vowel-semivowel sequences anyway).
"Verbs in German are valuable things. You collect them, hold on to them as long as you can, and then - at the end of the sentence - they all come tumbling out."
Franz Kafka put this property to good use and sometimes keeps the reader in suspense for half a page or more until the sentence falls in place.
Swedish had some of this until the second world war, since then we've made it into an english-like pidgin.
> Of course, every language has its quirks. French, for example, puts extra letters on the ends of words that you are not supposed to pronounce. Well, unless the right two words are next to each other, in which case, you pronounce the letters after all.
A lot of this is to due with latin, which pronounciation evolved over time to give modern French but which origin is still kept in spelling. So it's not that the language "puts extra letters" it's that it kept old spelling when the pronunciation change.
An example: 'est' (to be, third person singular) is very obviously verbatim latin spelling but pronunciation has shifted so that the 't' is not pronounced (and arguably the 's' could go, too).
Sometimes there are useful "rules" about how spelling and pronunciations evolved, which can be useful for English speakers writing in French, too, to remember your accents:
There have been some minor French spelling reforms over the years but French people are affectionately proud of their language with all its quirks, and changing the spelling of basic vocabulary like “est” would be a bridge too far for them.
Well, the last big German spelling reform in 1996 also had been quite a culture war, where big newspapers resisted for a while, rejecting "Delfin" over "Delphin" or reducing usage of "ß" and using more "ss" depending on the previous vowel etc.
But over time most of the change have proven to be successful ...
And yes, the French "est" will remain for the time being, but for me as a student of French there would have been a lot of low hanging fruit.
But today the interesting thing to me is how modern communication changes this. Text messaging leads to a massive increase in "dialect writing" while at the same time auto correction (and more recently AI) counters that. Back in the days™ writing was mostly done by the elites (authors, news papers, authorities) and the private letter was well thought. But test messaging, online forums, ... lead to more text being generated by "average" public, which over time certainly impacts "professional" writing.
The thing is that reforms are not needed. Usually they are pushed under the argument of "simplification" by people who have arguably too much tome onbtheir hands but why is it needed and how far should you go?
It is not just spelling. There are periodic calls to simplify grammar for no other reason than apparently people get dumber and dumber over time and can't learn the language anymore so it should be simplified.
One example in France is reform to reduce the use of the subjunctive tense. For example, now when I read the news I see horrible stuff like "Après qu'ils ont" (instead of "Après qu'ils aient" [and btw "est" and "aient" are pronounced the same ;)]), which would have sent my primary school teacher into a rage. Why do that? Cynically just because the members of the Académie Française need to find something to do...
I think the fact that that reform was successful at all, even with resistance, is evidence that Germans have less of a nationalistic attachment to their language than French people do. Even the extremely common grammatical particle “daß” was changed (to “dass”) — it’s just impossible for me to imagine anything similar ever being accepted in France.
True, but for what it’s worth the rulings of the French Academy are usually widely ignored. You would be hard-pressed to find a French person who says “courriel” for e-mail.
Some of the French neologisms instead of English words are more popular in Quebec (but on the other hand, Quebecers also use a huge amount of English loanwords that French people don’t).
There is still no such thing as an "international version" of words... at most there are some loanwords that appear in several to many languages, which is what this Wikipedia article is about.
I know what you’re getting at when you say that English is a pidgin of German and French, but that’s kind of a distorted version of the truth.
First of all, it is not German, but Old English, which is not particularly more similar to German than it is to any other Germanic language e.g. Icelandic.
Second, the idea that middle/modern English began as a pidgin is a very fringe view in linguistics; the vast majority of people who have studied the question would instead say that it indeed has a huge amount of French (or more precisely, Norman) influence, but not to the extent that we can say it went through a pidgin/creolization process.
IIRC (not sure about this) English is thought to have lost its case system mainly due to influence from Old Norse (which had a similar case system but with different and not mutually intelligible endings), not French.
> First of all, it is not German, but Old English, which is not particularly more similar to German than it is to any other Germanic language e.g. Icelandic.
While English is changing relatively quickly, German isn't. Children today read original texts from the Gutenberg era in school without any trouble.
Where I grew up, we actually read some old english texts in school. It was hard, but certainly doable, using just our knowledge of modern German and English and the local dialects (north frisian and low german).
> we actually read some old english texts in school
How old? “Old English” is a term of art meaning the language exemplified e.g. by Beowulf or the writings of Aelfric, which I would be very impressed if you could read without special study, so perhaps you meant Middle English or Early Modern English.
As an example, the beginning of Beowulf reads: “Hwæt! We Gardena in geardagum, þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon, hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon.”
Middle English is the language of Chaucer and Early Modern English that of Shakespeare.
As a native English speaker (who can also read German at an intermediate level), I can read Shakespeare with some difficulty (relying on the copious footnotes that modern editions are peppered with), Chaucer with extreme difficulty, and Beowulf not at all.
Well that's a good question I don't know the exact answer to. So I looked at the examples you provided.
Early Modern English:
Shakespeare's early modern English is something I can read fluently (and I know we read & acted his plays in original in school). To me that's basically the same as current English, just with slightly different vocabulary.
Middle English:
Original: "Whan that Aprill, with his shoures soote" / Platt: "Wenn dat April, mit sien schuren sööte" / English: "When that April, with his showers sweet"
Original: "Inspired hath in every holt and heeth" / Platt: "Inspireert hett in elk Holt un Heid" / "Inspired has in every wood and heath"
That's probably the one we read in school. If you read it, it sounds like a grandparent combining mispronounced english and their dialect.
Old English:
Original: Cnut cyning gret his arcebiscopas and his leod-biscopas and Þurcyl eorl and ealle his eorlas and ealne his þeodscype, tƿelfhynde and tƿyhynde, gehadode and læƿede, on Englalande freondlice
Platt: Knut König greet sien Arzbischopes un sien Lüüd-Bischopes un Thorkell, jarl, un all sien jarls un all sin löödschaft, twalfhunnerte un tweehunnerte, widmete un laien, Engellande fründliche
English: Cnut, king, greets his archbishops and his people-bishops and Thorkell, earl, and all his earls and all his people ship, twelve hundred and two hundred, ordained and lay, in England friendly.
Now this one is much harder, especially as the spelling is getting even weirder, and the vocabulary includes a lot more danish words than middle English would, but pretty much every word exists in either modern English, or modern Low German.
> As a native English speaker (who can also read German at an intermediate level), I can read Shakespeare with some difficulty (relying on the copious footnotes that modern editions are peppered with), Chaucer with extreme difficulty, and Beowulf not at all.
The German dialects are clearly divided between Low German and High German, with different vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation. Standard German is based on the vocabulary and grammar of High German, so it won't be very helpful.
The closest living relative to Old and Middle English would be North Frisian, but Low German as spoken in Anglia today is still relatively close (as shown above).
By the way, I don't think "when that April, with his showers sweet" is grammatical modern English -- it should probably be "when April, with its showers sweet" (and even that is unusual poetic syntax: in normal language you'd say "sweet showers").
> Of course, most Western languages have gendered nouns - English is pretty unique in that respect. That likely comes from English being born as a pidgin of French and German.
The John McWhorter theory (not sure if it's generally accepted, but he seems to have evidence that it happened in the right part of England at the right time) is that it comes from Viking-era Danish settlers learning Anglo-Saxon. Similar languages, but different enough that adult learners dumped out all the complications they could.
As a native German speaker, I think it's fair to say that German is a comparatively poorly designed* language. It has too many needless concepts. I envy Chinese and Japanese; I feel like these languages have got it almost right. If they eliminated measure words, they'd probably be as perfect as a language can reasonably be.
* I know languages aren't "designed" for the most part, but I find it helpful to compare them as if they were.
At least with traditional Chinese, reading isn't as bad as people make it out to be. A lot of characters are pictophonetic characters(形聲), where one element describes the sound and the other meaning. While not perfect they allow a reader to guess with decent accuracy the meaning and pronunciation of a character they have never seen before.
Measure words in Chinese are great. They provide so much descriptive capacity in such a short simple way.
一棍棒,
一把棒,
一根盪,
一條棒,
all would translate to English as "a stick", but they convey different perspectives about what that stick is. I can appreciate the frustration with learning words that only have one specific measure word that only really describes it, but even then you can honestly get away with 個.
I totally agree that learning German grammar as an adult is… demoralizing. Knowing, and accepting, that you will make a mistake every time that you open your mouth, hurts.
Also, the increase in possible permutations (and opportunities for mistakes) when you add adjective conjugations to the mix is daunting.
Consider that the text is, in fact, from the 19th century.
Also, 'Weib' is not rude in every context. "Wein, Weib und Gesang" is not diminutive towards women, but in fact appreciative (as in 'necessary for having a good time'). We have Weiberfassnacht. And then there are the dialects, in which "Weib" often is indicative of a homely, loving relationship (-> bairisch, Swabian). Context matters.
You are applying logic and common sense from this century, to words of other centuries. This doesn't work, and never will. I think this is important, because a lot of people do this and nothing good comes out of it.
Are you claiming it was appreciative of women back then? It was expression about loud wild partying, the sort of that is annoying to everyone living on the same street as your beer pub is. The women who were present were not appreciated, they were look down at sort of tramps. A well behaved woman was not supposed to be present.
When you are casting it as appreciative of women because they are necessary for fun, you are applying modern idea that women present at a wild party says something positive about that woman. Back then, it suggested easy sexual availability and that was seen as a bad thing.
Edit: also in general, when people in the past were crass, other people in the past were offended over it. Even women themselves who accepted their role as god given would frequently get offended over hearing what they considered crass language. When women were supposed to be guardians of morality (and Germany had such periods), they would openly take issue with such statement. Because it was their expected role to be offended and to gently positively impact men (in a way that does not actually interfere with what he does).
That saying comes from the "Sturm & Drang" age, the age of Goethe and Schiller, of the German Studentenschaft (basically 18th and 19th century patriotic fraternities). Yes, it is about partying. No, the women were not seen as tramps within that group, you are comparing 'polite society female standards' to a very different subculture. Do not fall into the trap to think that societies now or at any point in history were monolithic blocks of identical beliefs.
And we have plenty of literary evidence that the women in these young subcultures were not feeling being objectified either, such as:
Goethe (Werther, 1774): "The joy with which one sometimes unites with friends is also a very pleasant thing among women."
Also Mozart/Schikaneder (Zauberflöte, 1791): “A woman who does not fear night and death is worthy and will be initiated” - indicating they should be given access to (often occult) lodges, thus more than "entertainment", but an equal
Schiller (Intrigue and Love, 1784): “When reason bows, the heart opens.” (Schiller emphasizes the importance of feelings and passion, reflecting the era’s turn away from pure reason and strict morality, typical also of student life.)
Novalis’ (Hymns to the Night, 1799): "For woman is humanity’s mistress,
And we give ourselves to serve her.”
Doesn't exactly sound like "Women are tramps unless they blush and faint at the idea of partying", does it?
This will be a bit difficult to answer, I think I'm unable to answer. First of all: it is very hard to talk about subtleties of meaning and interpretation in written language. Second: english is not my first language. So please interpret my text as amicably as possible.
"Are you claiming it was appreciative of women back then?"
I think it depends very much on context, who said it, where does it get said, to whom and in what type of voice etc. The saying "Wein, Weib und Gesang" as such could be appreciative towards women, and I think it could be said in a non-demeaning way, also in the times, where women had a much worse standing as of today.
I think this, not because I know anything about that time back then, but because I learned in the last decades how heavily the perception or meaning of words can change. And how very personal those perceptions are. When I went to school, we used words casually, that would be offensive today. And I know that my friends and I used these words without thinking twice if they're offensive, because to us, they just weren't. Others could be offended by those words at that time. But this is because other people have a different moral, or knowledge, or education, or age etc.
What I want to say with all that: we are almost unable to comprehend how people back then thought, talked and meant the stuff, they said back then. Because we are pretty much blinded by our own current perception and moral of things. For example, I tend to think amicably about the past, so my interpretation of stuff that was said in the past gets a "rose tint". Others tend to think that the past was bad, people were stupid and crass, and wrong. So they interpret things in a much darker light, than me. I can't say that anyone is more right than the other, because it comes down to very personal interpretations.
> It was expression about loud wild partying, the sort of that is annoying to everyone living on the same street as your beer pub is. The women who were present were not appreciated, they were look down at sort of tramps. A well behaved woman was not supposed to be present.
This is what you learned and interpreted about that phrase and time. For me this is a possible situation you describe, but there are also very different situations, where this phrase could come from. In my social circles, the word "Weib" was used in a very endearing, appreciative way towards women. Women used that word for describing themselves as strong, and emancipated. So the phrase "Wein, Weib und Gesang" could have a very positive connotation. That says nothing about what happened a few hundred years ago, it just shows how personal language in the end is.
> I think this, not because I know anything about that time back then, but because I learned in the last decades how heavily the perception or meaning of words can change.
Yes, but did you considered that original meaning could have been, roughly, "getting wasted and going to strip club"? That is how I have seen it being used in older books I read. It was not meant to be about women, it was meant to be about certain kind of men, certain kind of partying and lifestyle.
>What I want to say with all that: we are almost unable to comprehend how people back then thought, talked and meant the stuff, they said back then. Because we are pretty much blinded by our own current perception and moral of things.
We can get some idea tho, we are not completely helpless here. When you are making an assumption that it was positive, you are being heavily influenced by how you want it to be. Not even being influence by what it might mean today (fun sentence that means nothing), but by how you want the past people to be.
Reinterpreting past so that it appears more positive then it was is equally incorrect. And it is a bit me pet peeve, because it is frequently used to discount actually factually correct statements about history. It is used to make it sound more conforming to our norms then it actually was in practice.
> This is what you learned and interpreted about that phrase and time. For me this is a possible situation you describe, but there are also very different situations, where this phrase could come from. In my social circles, the word "Weib" was used in a very endearing, appreciative way towards women.
That is todays interpretation word and also of women breaking past social mores. In todays movies, a 19 century woman smoking cigarettes is cool. Because it is always an emancipated strong character dealing with tough guys.
But back then, women smoking cigarettes were scandal and looked down on by polite society. They were not emancipated, they were outcasts with all disadvantages that it brings.
I'm pretty sure, that we understand each other mostly but will strongly disagree on things, that are important to us if we engage further. So let's not do that :-) Thank you for your time, it was an interesting discussion!
Yes, perhaps you are right. But then, look at who responded to my comment - all usernames suggest male companions. We are also now, not back then. Nothing prevents us from rethinking things from time to time.
Yes, sexism is not a new thing from today, and such sentences are witnesses of this. We might be interpreting stuff from the past with today's eyes, true, but that doesn't make the interpretation wrong. There are a lot of things we know now and didn't before. It's even totally possible we have reading keys that might have been unavailable back then.
We should not interpret stuff out of context though, but here I'm not sure taking the context in account would not make the point even stronger. I would be quite surprised about any context changing things for this particular phrase (but happy to be surprised...)
Not sure about the reduction, but "Wine, women and song" somewhat assumes the point of view from an heterosexual male and could feel offensive just for this.
"Wine, man and song" would sound weird, but it should not sound weirder than the "women" version. That's because we are all used to the male pov assumption and that's the core of the issue.
And of course, to add insult to injury, the phrase will feel like the reduction the grand parent describes to many.
So I think we'd be better off dropping those old phrases in favor of things like your version, which doesn't have these issues.
Note: not a German nor an English native speaker so I might be missing some cultural subtlety that could make my POV a bit wrong and disconnected from reality.
> All diminutives in German are neuter, for whatever reason
It’s just one instance of the more general principle that the gender of nouns with a common suffix are based on the suffix. E.g. all nouns ending in -keit or -ung are feminine regardless of whether they have any connection to the biological female sex.
I absolutely love German, it is one of my favourite languages, there's such beauty in it. I am not a native speaker, but enjoy studying it. I am a native Afrikaans speaker and I see so many similarities between the two, which I find intriguing.
Well, if it comes to that. German is not _really_ a single language. It’s a dialect continuum consisting of sometimes barely mutually intelligible variants. And yes, if you continue following that continuum, you get to the languages you mention.
A language is a dialect with an army and a fleet. As they used to say.
A bit of relevant context: the quote is from Yiddish, which is primarily Germanic with significant admixture from Hebrew, Aramaic, and Slavic languages.
(One of my current favorite party tricks is speaking Yiddish to German speakers, and cranking up the other aspects to see where the intelligibility breaks down.)
I took a trip to Germany with my Dad, who grew up with Yiddish-speaking parents, and it was amazing to watch people's eyeballs pop out as they began to understand him and then realize what they were hearing.
And the continuum has two big groups: High and Low German (High and Low here being z-coordinates, High German dialects because they come from the more mountainous Southern areas and Low German from the lower-lying Northern parts). Modern day Standard German is a High German variant, whereas Dutch (and thus Afrikaans) are Low German.
Sorry, got nerd sniped: Isn't it usually the y coordinate that stands for the vertical axis? At least that's how I know 3D coordinate systems, with the z axis either increasing towards or away from the center, left handed vs right handed coordinate systems.
In GIS parlance, elevation is typically z coordinate. Which of x and y correspond to east-west and north-south varies from coordinate system to coordinate system, and is a bountiful source of stupid bugs (at least for me). But yeah, in 3D graphics z is usually distance from the camera I think.
Towards or away from the center is the height, no? As in, you’re the bird at height Z observing the x-y plane under you, and the Z axis goes into you. Or away from you if you happen to be a mole under ground.
I can speak English and German which makes me able to somewhat understand written Dutch (especially if I know the context), but no chance when it's spoken.
As a German, I enjoy reading the Dutch text on supermarket products and manuals, it is a source of great fun in my family :) Children especially love it. Dutch just has so many words that sound extremely cute and funny to Germans:
"Sleep well" -> "Slaap lekker", in German "Schlaf lecker" = "Sleep tasty".
"Nuttig" -> "Useful", in German "nuttig" means "slutty"
"Huren" -> "to rent", in German "huren" means "to whore".
It’s the same for me, a Brit, reading screenshots my Dutch mates send me from say TikTok or whatever localized to Netherlands one that tickles me is ‘reacties’ underneath instagram posts!
Knowing English and German also makes it possible to understand something like 50-75% of written Norwegian, Swedish, or Danish in my experience.
Apparently a part of this is due to a huge number of Low-German loanwords present in all three due to the influence of the Hanseatic league in the region during the middle ages.
Right! I speak English and Dutch, so I can read maybe less than half of German. It's just enough to be tantalising but not enough to really understand it. Likewise with Swedish.
Well, it's not a coincidence that the English word for the language of the Netherlands is the same the German state calls itself: "dutch" / "Deutsch".
A people and their language predated the concept of nation-states, but when the latter arrived obviously (geo-)political interests started to blur the facts.
So if you conflate the German state with Germans (I'd challenge that and view the German state as a continuation of the Prussian state), and you don't like the interests of the German state, it is predictable where you'll land on this issue.
Because of this, even if their national anthem does so, calling the Dutch Germans would infuriate them and rightly so, because it would imply justification to some for things like those happening between Russia and Ukraine right now.
I think in the end it is also a matter of "national" self-confidence. While Luxemburgish is virtually indistinguishable to the German ear from say the dialect of Cologne, Swiss-German is hardly understandable for anyone outside of Switzerland. Yet, the Swiss don't have an urge to re-label their dialect as a separate language. And the urge of the Dutch to re-lable themselves is lesser than that of Luxemburg because seemingly no one questions their identity.
Also noteworthy are the different terms for "German" in different languages, they're quite far apart: "Deutsch", "Allemagne", "Nemți", which all derive from the names of different Germanic tribes. Depending on which tribes surrounding countries (which were faster to establish nation states) were closest to, that's what they called all Germans. And it stuck.
true-ish. I'm not aware of any tribes that would give name to Deutsch and Nemti. Rather, Deutsch is the generic self-description for all tribes, and Nemti was a generic description of all tribes by slavic people (ie Niemy in polish meaining "without the ability to speak")
All national identities are to a large extent constructed (or less charitably: made up). So the 21st-century idea that Germans are people with a passport from the Federal Republic of Germany is not really any more or less valid than the 19th-century idea that Germans are a cultural group spanning various states including Austria (and maybe even including the Netherlands).
Edit: FYI, I've mentioned Luxemburg as a counter-example to Switzerland/Netherlands, because the state of Luxemburg attempts to have their German dialect officially recognized as a separate language…
A Dutch speaker read Afrikaans without too much effort; understanding spoken Afrikaans is a bit harder, but depending on the person it can be fine.
A Dutch speaker can't read or understand German. Some words are similar, but the same can be said about English. There are a number of differences in the grammar and alphabet.
Of course they're related languages; because I can speak English, German, and Dutch I can kind of read Swedish or Danish on account of being Germanic as well. But that doesn't make a "dialect with pretensions". We might as well say that all current Germanic languages are some sort of "dialect with pretensions" of some old Germanic language. But that doesn't really mean anything.
How is English then not a German dialect with pretensions? Is there a certain threshold in number of words that must originate from a different language family, or what's the logic here?
Yep. I find it easier to understand German verbally than Dutch. I struggle when Dutch people speak to me, the way they pronounce words are hard on my ears. German feels softer.
Native Dutch speaker here. I find German softer on the ears too.
Except for Dutch in the South (Belgians and South NL), that's soft on my ears too. But not my accent, we are descendants of monsters. Why otherwise would we pronounce the G the way that we do?
My native language is German, and I don't know whether I like it. It is the most natural to me, so no judgement -- I cannot look at it from the outside. Well, of course I like it, because I can express myself best with it.
Anyway, I absolute love Afrikaans. I also like droëwors, but that's a different topic. You should have a look at Icelandic -- it is the opposite of Afrikaans on the morphological complexity scale of Germanic languages. Quite a bit more going on with endings and such than in German. And yet it is weirdly familiar, because it is, well, also Germanic.
I am a native speaker. And I find German to be a very ugly language. Pronounciation wise. Compared to French or English. It sounds like someone is constantly having a quarrel with you.
There's this fun video from Easy German, where native speakers (Austrians in this case) express their feeling of uneasiness when flirting in German. As in, the German language not being the sexiest.
Weaknesses can become strengths. Sometimes you want to have a quarrel. When French people quarrel they must rely on changes on pitch, cadence and volume because otherwise it sounds like they are ordering baguettes at the boulanger.
German has harsh sound. But in terms of quarrelling, I find that Korean sounds like someone is complaining all the time. But then again I have never learned Korean, so my impression would surely change.
Precisely my thought - try learning French. At some point we've been asking our teacher "but, why would they start writing so many chars (unreadable) and so many different endings". and our guess is there must've been a financial reason to do so - more chars, more money when copying manuscripts, and less chance for the common people to ever have this level of writing skills, which takes years to master.
The French are so proud of their roots, they insist that for every French word you learn, you also learn its entire etymological development all the way back from Vulgar Latin.
I think German poetry can be very elegant and English poems feel dull in comparison. At the same time, the plainness of English makes it much better suited for songs. Lyrical German quickly sounds pretentious.
One of the things that helped me improve German was Poetry Slam contests, they are still quite popular over here in many regions, you get poetry coupled with another German property, plenty enough sarcasm.
Hmm, French definitely has ornamental noun paradigms affecting articles and adjectives, exceptions to every single rule and things like that. But it lakes the cases that German add on top of this. Syntax is not as funny with verb at second position, or end of the phrase, separable verbs, and so on.
French of course also have many original grammatical torture instruments. You might think that as a bastard child between Latin and the Germanic Frank tribe dialects it’s no wonder, though elimination of noun declension is rather surprising from this perspective. The truth is that all languages out there have their own dungeon with many traps and treacheries included.
Fortune, nun ni ĉiuj parolas Esperanton. Kaj ne forgesas la akuzativo nin. :D
> French of course also have many original grammatical torture instruments.
For me it was when I had to realize that for the French, every number larger than what they can count with their fingers becomes a small algebra problem. quatre-vingt-dix-neuf ... four times twenty plus ten plus nine makes 99.
I recently got curious about the roots of this, and it turns out it’s from Celtic languages. All the Celtic languages count in base 20, and they were widespread across continental Europe before the Romans introduced Latin to their conquests and then the Germanic tribes brought the Germanic languages in.
Celtic remained a strong influence around modern France, Belgium, the Netherlands so we end up with French counting partially in 20s, even though continental Celtic languages are extinct (Breton, spoken in north west France is an insular Celtic language, more closely related to Celtic as spoken in the British isles and Ireland.)
I don’t know how Danish got base 20 counting though. Must have more reading to do.
Yeah, you can take an other locale and use "nonante neuf" instead. People generally take "quatre-vingt-dix" as a single token, they don't actually think about it in a compound perspective. Just like onze, douze, treize, quatorze, quinze, seize, where -ze stands for ten, so it's "n + 10". But in this case it's not synchronically as obvious as this composition is analyzed from morphological point of view, -ze in itself is not attached to any autonomous token in French. If anything French will rather lead to analyze numbers in terms of "k*10+n" instead, unlike German.
Well if you like that, you'd love Danish numbers, where 99 is nine and half (before) five times twenty, or »nioghalvfemsindstyve« (or more commonly shorten to »nioghalvfems«).
I suspect that French people aren’t really thinking about this when they speak, just like in English we aren’t usually consciously aware that “ninety” is derived from “nine”. It’s obvious when you stop to think about it, but for the most part “ninety” is just its own separate token in our mind, and so is “quatre-vingt-dix” to the French.
Swiss French seems to have regularized some of this in a sensible way? Indian English does much the same with some things; not strictly “correct” English, to the extent those words don’t exist in British or American English, but I can’t argue that it doesn’t make more sense or isn’t more consistent so I never argue the case. I generally view those regularizing pressures from non-native sources as a positive thing for languages.
He actually learned German well enough to have appreciative audiences in Germany, but he also knows how to make amazing comedic essays on many topics. He did plenty about US-specific topics, and about French too, not just about German.
Which gives us Hitler memes where they audibly says German words that are very similar to their English counterparts, but the /funny/ subtitles is just a Beavis and Butthead level joke.
> everything Twain rants about here we attribute to French
The part where you have to have the equivalent of a LIFO stack in your brain, piling stuff up and praying you won't overflow, until the effing verb finally shows up and deigns informing you of what is actually happening in the sentence, well that is not, I believe an attribute of French, and definitely specific to German (I believe Japanese has that to a certain extent has well).
Yeah, I vividly remember writing whole essays in school with only two sentences like that (sometimes over several pages of relative and temporal sentences and adjective chains), just as a raised middle finger to my German teacher who sleighted me once over the interpretation of some baroque poem.
As someone who studied German at school and has made serious attempts to learn Finnish and Czech, I have feelings about this. Obviously Twain was being humourous. But I took three years of German two decades ago, and to this day it is easier than Czech (I'm embarrassed to say, as I've lived here and tried to learn on and off for the last six years). I'm exaggerating only a bit.
Writing as a native Slavic language speaker, that's fair, but it's mostly a testament to how complex all Slavic languages are. It's like we decided to make it absolutely sure that any foreigner who decided to learn them would be in a world of pain. Declensions? Check. Grammatical gender? Sure, and adjectives and verbs also have it for good measure, not just nouns; and for verbs, it also interacts with tense and number.
And let's not forget about our phonology, with 5-consonant clusters, palatalized labials, utterly unpredictable stress, complex mutations of both consonants and vowels when adding suffixes etc.
By the way, the nearly universal ethnic designation for Germans in Slavic languages - some variation of "nemci" - literally means "mutes".
The main difficulty with most Slavic languages are the grammatical cases/declensions/etc. German does have conjugations, but they have less forms and there are easily noticeable patterns (at least compared to something like Slovene: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slovene_verbs#Full_conjugation...). The words might seem scary, but actually require less thinking to use in sentences.
It's not so much the cases but the interaction with cases and gender. I found Finnish easier in some ways, despite the many cases. Because the case endings are always the same (modulo vowel harmony) so you can extract helpful information - something is inside something else say. In Czech a word ending with u has five different possible gender-case combinations (if I counted right) and that's not counting the distinction between short and long u.
I'm a Polish speaker and have met some Polish learners in my life. Often I have no better advice than "you choose the conjugation patern based on how does the word feel to you".
At the end of the article, Umlauts are written :u, :a, :o. I've never seen them presented this way. Is this some old, typewriter artifact or just a formatting error?
Isn't that called romanization? Similar to turning 刘慈欣 into Liu Cixin because you can't make the characters
I've found that germans take it for granted that it works this way, but I know of no other latin-script-based language that does romanization. Granted, I don't speak very many languages, but at least among the bigger ones like French, it's not like you write cafee (add an e because you dropped an accent), it's just cafe when you can't make the é. That's actually a terrible example, I just realized, because in german you totally use kaffee (yes yes, different word but same root). Let me try again with the word naive, coming from french naïve: you'd never write naieve. Or if you don't know how to make the ï in Dutch geïntegreerd, writing geintegreerd is understood by everyone whereas geientegreerd only leads to confusion. You could argue that it's because these ï don't have an "e" quality to them, but there is no other romanization taking place either for these, it's just dropped. Only Germans romanize to preserve the pronunciation-to-spelling mapping
The reason why it's not unreasonable for German is because those digraphs were the origin of umlaut.
You have a vowel that is roughly in between "o" and "e" as used by Latin, so you start by writing it thus: oe
That feels too long, so you make it a digraph: œ
Some people still think that's too long, so you start putting "e" on top instead: oͤ
That tiny "e" on top is kinda tricky to write in full, though, and slows things down, so handwriting eventually trims it down to just two vertical strokes: ő
Lastly the strokes themselves become shorter and shorter until they become points: ö
But since it's been "e" all along, the old convention still remains, and is arguably just as German as the umlaut diacritic. It's not something imposed on the language from the outside, as is usually the case with latinization of non-Latin-based scripts.
Coincidentally, this is also the origin of Swedish å (literally "o" over "a") and Spanish ñ (literally double "n", with one written on top of another)
In very colloquial settings it would not be unusual for French people to write something like “cafer” for café, but this codes as a bit classless/uneducated.
and IIRC something similar worked for Ctrl-' + e = é , Ctrl-` + a = à, Ctrl-~ + n = ñ, and so on.
So there's at least some association for (punctuation mark) + (vowel) = marked vowel and I could see people dropping the Control key and doing what's done here.
On further research, this appears to be Microsoft's attempt to do something like a Compose key (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compose_key#Common_compose_com...) which I had forgotten about. In turn this is sort of emulating a "dead key" on mechanical typewriters (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_key), although I can't tell if German typewriters actually had a dead key for the umlaut or if they actually had additional keys for ä, ö, ü like modern German keyboards do.
German typewriters generally had dedicated keys for the umlauts.
Windows however does offer a "English (international with dead keys)" keyboard layout that turns :, `, ^, etc into dead keys. Word offering the same at another level of abstraction sounds like a typical Microsoft thing
If it's the English international keyboard variant that I'm familiar with on either Windows or Linux, it's not : that is turned into a dead key but "
(Itś pretty annoying to write with if youŕe typing english, I can recommend toggling the keyboard layout (Alt+Shift in Windows by default) whenever you switch languages)
I wish I could have sent this wikipedia entry to Mark Twain. It would have been a fine addition to his "museum". I'm sure he would have been thrilled to hear about it:
It is interesting that after two world wars the stereotype of German was that of a hard and harsh language. I think Twain earlier take is more correct.
German is indeed a harsh language, filled with glottal stops and harsh consonants. The publicity doesn't help either, but it's mainly the phonemes.
Try to swear loudly and angrily in French, and try it in German. In German like you're cursing the world out of existence, in French it is like wiping your ass with silk.
Just had some menonites come to my place to buy something last evening, and they confer amongst themselves in "low" german, which to my ear is much nicer sounding than the other variety.
I also like the sound of Swiss speaking "swiser dutch", which has a bit of sing song whistly lilt, and is apparently incomprehensable to anyone who wasn't raised with it.
A Canadian/german farmer down the road, did make much of his income translating german to english, mostly for technical manuals of equipment, but that work hss devolved into proof reading the automated translations, the whole translation industry having quietly been taken over.
Though another recent experience in a high end, high volume cabinetry shop full of exotic german equipment, revealed that technical support is done from germany, and requires muliti lingual tech support people to do voice calls.....down time on
a million dollar "saw" running at .1mm accuracy, bieng painfull
I grew up in Germany but haven't lived there for almost 45 years. I pride myself in still being fluent. And yet, this resonates.
Nominative--Mein gutER Freund, my good friend.
Genitives--MeinES GutEN FreundES, of my good friend.
Dative--MeinEM gutEN Freund, to my good friend.
Accusative--MeinEN gutEN Freund, my good friend.
Typing German in an email or Whatsapp, sometimes I get these details wrong and sometimes (shame!) I have to try a Google Translate from English.
The other thing he makes fun of isn't that strange. Splitting "Abreisen" for example (to depart) is natural because it's a compound word in the first place. And more over, in the example, the admittedly funny "De .... [flood of words] ... parted" it's not even one word, it's two (reist ab). German does lend itself to gratuitous nesting of sentences, but that doesn't mean that good German has to.
Nominative is used for subjects and accusative for direct objects. In “I bit the dog” or “the dog bit me”, “I” is nominative whereas “me” is accusative.
Context. "Mein guter Freund" works in the context "he is my good friend". "Meinen guten Freund" works in the context "I like my good friend". You don't actually learn all those grammar rules as such (what the heck is "accusative" anyway), you just pick all this up by actually using the language.
Similarly "Meines guten Freundes" works in the context of "the house of my good friend" and "Meinem guten Freund" works in the context of "I offered a beer to my good friend".
As someone who had to learn German, I actually really appreciated the language being formatted quite like closure functions."I have 'noun' upon which 'verb'" with the pronoun and verb being the parentheses where you can then do stuff like f().g().h() where you chain the returned context: "Ich habe etwas getan, was mir schon immer Spaß gemacht hat und mir jedes Mal Freude bereitet, wenn ich daran denke."
Yes I do have a peeve about the numbering system that screws you over at the end, "Ten thousand, three hundred, four and twenty." Yes I know the French numbering is even worse.
German just makes sense to me programmatically. Unfortunately I no longer have much of any opportunity to practise nowadays outside of online language classes.
Everyone likes their mother tongue better, so does Mark Twain. No need to write a whole treatise about it.
Having lived 10+ years in Switzerland and having learned the language (and the local dialects), I really like German. But like many delicacies, it is an acquired taste.
Speak for your own mother (tongue)! I think there are (many) better languages than my mother tongue but I haven't been able to convince the natives of this yet. The oscillate between catching on and regaining national pride (we're currently in a nationalism phase, where they're pushing to teach more in dutch again rather than a language everybody understands and needs for research and business anyway, source: https://www.universiteitenvannederland.nl/actueel/nieuws/uni...)
> But like many delicacies, it is an acquired taste
Why say lot word when two word do trick? Stockholm syndrome!
Twain is of course being satirical here, but I can tell that many people have an overly strict approach towards language learning. They expect rigid rules and get annoyed when the language does not adhere to them, yet they do not realize that these rules came after the language and they are most often a tool to teach and analyze it. What language instruction is supposed to achieve is providing one with a foundational understanding of language, just enough that immersion learning becomes possible. Since human language is a mix of logical thinking and fuzzy pattern matching, there is no other way to learn it completely than by pattern matching itself.
Languages learning curve can be very funny. Phonetic regularity plays a lot in this game, for instance. French and Italian are very similar languages (more than Italian and Spanish), yet they are so phonetically apart (with Italian at the extremes of regularity and French at the extremes of complexity) that it's complicated for Italians to learn French in the first steps: then the curve flattens a lot.
Italian itself is a strange beast. It is, perhaps, the most single latin language to learn for a random speaker of some other language, at least at a level where you can talk and understand decently, but it is almost impossible to master, even for Italians.
> but it is almost impossible to master, even for Italians.
Well depending on your definition of mastery, that's probably true for nearly every Western European national language since they all have some degree of artificiality and prescriptiveness. Officially, everyone from Lombardy to Calabria speaks "Italian" but what is actually spoken in each region will differ heavily from the national standard.
My first computer-related job was manually typing a part of an extensive German-Russian dictionary into text files. I was about 15, it was around 1990, scanners were a rare thing, and OCRs weren't a thing at all.
The resulting files should be space-aligned at some random column, like 30 or so, of the available 80. I still remember the translations of two words that were longer than that. One was "to attack the enemy in the night while wearing a camouflage robe". The other - "to descend carefully using an unreliable rope".
Rather odd hatred of German considering that English is in effect a regression of German (yes, I know, that simplifies it, but it’s true), i.e., a simplification.
It’s a typical kind of lashing out by hubristic people who reject complexity they cannot master with vigorous anger; kind of like how a child may call math stupid out of frustration. It’s probably a symptom of the jingoistic era, especially in trust-fund-baby-country called America.
German and English have a distant common ancestor (spoken roughly 2000 years ago) but neither is the ancestor of the other. There’s no meaningful scientific reason to say that German is the “main branch” of the Germanic languages and English is the “fork”.
Also, it’s not clear that either is “more complex” than the other across the board. German has more complex noun morphology (cases, etc) whereas English has more complex phonology, for example.
I do think English has deviated more from its Germanic roots due to the pervasive influence of French (there are people who call English a creole although I think that's taking it a bit far).
But I agree that languages with more complex morphology aren't somehow "better", that's just weird elitism coming from an era where every language was analysed as if it were some variant of Latin, Greek or Sanskrit.
> I do think English has deviated more from its Germanic roots
That’s fair, but so have German and many other Germanic languages. For example, Proto-Germanic had six cases whereas German only has four (and colloquially spoken German mostly only has three). Dutch has only vestigial remnants of a case system and Afrikaans has none at all.
The Norman invasion of England in 1066 led to extensive introduction of French vocabulary into English. That's a large part of the reason English has so many Latin cognates that you don't see in German (and German also has been purged of some Latin cognates at times as well).
You're criticizing a satirical book excerpt written by Mark Twain in the middle of the 19th century. It is not meant in any way to be taken seriously, nor does it reflect modern American culture as a whole. Around 70 million Americans speak a second language.
The reason we're talking about it ~150 years later is because it resonates with anyone who has tried to learn a second language, especially one as complex as German.
You might want to keep your pompous kneejerk anti-American sentiment in check until you educate yourself a bit more.
Have you maybe considered the idea that a simplification might actually be an improvement?
As in: a language's first and foremost role is to communicate ideas and feelings as efficiently and clearly as possible, and with the broadest possible reach and not to impress the plebs with how sophisticated your sentences can become.
In that light, which of {English, German} best fits the bill in your opinion?
The compositional powers of German, Dutch and plenty of other languages are really amazing. People invent words on the fly and promptly forget immediately after and the listener just understands what has been said. In my Dutch native language, we had the word "pausbaar" (which means something like "in possession of the necessary properties to become pope) coming up recently.
Russian speakers can produce the same, basically its cognate, папабельный (papabelniy), using the borrowed suffix -bel- (same as -bile), and Russian suffix -n- (passive voice maybe), plus the ending.
This word is widely known in English too, at least among people who follow papal elections. I’m not sure whether it’d count as “an English word originally loaned from Italian” (like “pasta”) or “an Italian word that a lot of English-speakers recognize” (like “buongiorno”), but it is there — probably somewhere in between those two extremes.
also, I've noticed that French and Spanish speaking people have problems trying to perform the composition: "XY" and "YX" will end up meaning completely different things. fe DataRequest fe RequestData.
It adds some additional entropy without making the words themselves longer. This both helps when communicating over an imperfect communication channel, like talking in a noisy place.
A minor benefit is that references with words like "this" are less ambiguous when gendered, and you can unambiguously reference multiple things as long as they have different gender
They're very useful: if you use two nouns in a sentence chances are they're not the same gender. That makes referring back to them very easy as you can do that by gender only, without repeating the nouns or other complicated sentence structure.
It can be useful, but only in the off chance that they're of different genders. But all this is at the expense of canonically having assigned genders to nouns, which the speaker has no way to compute or derive. In other words, even if I know the very word I want to utter, I can't legally form the correct sentence until I know its gender. All things considered, to me, the cost outweighs the benefits.
The gender is part of the word. If you don’t know the gender, then no, you don’t know the word.
There is no way to compute that “dog” begins with the letter “d”, even if you know that the remainder is “og”. So should we ban words that begin with “d”? Of course not. In German you must memorize “der Hund”, not just “Hund”, just like in English you must memorize “dog”, not “_og with unspecified first letter”.
The spelling of the word, and its assigned gender, are two different things. Spelling makes you recognize the word. Gender doesn't contribute anything to semantics, is my point. It's not also the case that 'der' is merely a 3-letter prefix to any or every other word. It is rather irregularly applied, completely unrelated to the function the word serves. Not only that, the entire sentence has to be phrased differently depending on what the gender is. So, no: gender is not just longer spelling. Gender exists even if you decide not to write down the word.
Wait until you hear about adjective and verb gendering. ~
On a more serious note, it's a backwards compatibility thing. Taking a language with grammatical gender and removing it changes the way it looks and sounds rather drastically - more so for some than others. Needless to say, existing speakers are unlikely to appreciate it even if they don't care for gender qua gender.
(See also: numerous polls on how native Spanish speakers react to "Latinx" etc)
Writing is nothing but a translation of speech though. I'm afraid you'd need to have a leading example in speech that you want to encode before this has a chance of catching on even in a subculture :(
One of grading criteria for German B2 exam (mid-level in European framework) is Sprachgefühl, a feeling of (a feel for?) language. As mentioned earlier, if studying as an adult, you will probably keep making mistakes, but a lot just comes from being inside the German bubble.
I had no troubles with the things Twain laments. You can rather quickly learn (but not internalize) the rules, which are exactly the same as in other Indo-European languages. Compound past tense as in Romance languages. Declination like in Slavic, and in Instrumental case the ending is almost the same!
The biggest trouble nowadays with learning German is that all textbooks are DUMB and don't give enough practice. Basically they're tests on steroids. This is not the way you can internalize the grammar. You may know the rules, but still unable to use them correctly when speaking or writing.
All the books are shiny, with lots of drawings, photos, bells and whistles, even media content over an app, etc. But, as said, none of them contains enough excercise to practice grammar. Over last 6 years that I did an effort, I've never seen a textbook step away from this format.
Teaching by Goethe Institut is equally awful: most time you excercise by inserting just one word in a sentence spellt for you. When finally you reach speaking at length and not to the given pattern, everything falls apart, and you're told off: "oh, so many mistakes, go repeat the grammar rules." (No wonder most students choose the strategy to just speak at the kindergarten level. Das Bau ist grün. Berlin ist die Haupstadt Deutschlands. Ich möchte in einem Vorstadthaus leben.)
Germans! Admit, you conspired together to not let us learn your precious language!
Reading the article I guess Mark Twain never had a knowledgeable teacher.
Is there anything hacker news readers would like to know about the German language?
Can I refer to animals as 'them' instead of 'him' or 'her'? Die Katze draußen ist so Süß, ich möchte es unbedingt streicheln. I know that it's not considered correct but to me it feels even wronger to just assume it's a pussycat and not a tomcat. Would people actually mind if I do the more, ehm, to-me-logical thing? Does it take you out of what I'm saying, the way that reading "its you're cat" takes me out of a story?
usually not. You need to guess either cat or tomcat, that designates a grammatical sex. All references are based on grammatical sex.
It is strongly emphasized that a grammatical sex is not the same thing as a natural sex.
It is ok to guess the sex of an animal wrong. The same way nobody (should) cares whether an infant is a boy or a girl.
You can enforce to be neutral be refering to "das Tier" and "das Kind". But since it is just a grammatical sex, why should anyone bother?
There are some culturally assumed defaults:
* a nurse is assumed to be feminine, unless the distinction is important
* a cat is assumed to be feminine, unless the distinction is important
Why do nouns have "random" articles attached to them? In latin languages like Portuguese the ending of the word tells you which article (masculine or feminine) to use, but in German only "die" has some rules. This is my biggest griped with the language and it's major flaw, when you pair that with adjective declensions and other sort of structures that rely on KNOWING which article to use.
The gender of a noun is just a noun class. But because Germanic languages lie more toward the analytic end of the morphological typology continuum (whereas Romance languages lie more toward the synthetical end) the information is latent - or rather, the task of conveying that information is left to other words (the articles).
Just imagine if someone studied Portuguese but learned vocabulary like this, never bothering with the ending vowel:
'gat-'
'cas-'
'bolach-'
Similarly, 'die' should be considered an inherent part of 'Frau'. So don't learn just 'Frau', learn 'die Frau'. The article 'Die' is just as "random" as '-o' or '-a' is in Portuguese. (I'll skip the part where you can have a form of the word in both classes: gata/gato.) People like to try and find "rules" they can remember instead, but it's a pointless endeavor. Language is a Calvinball game.
To make a weird tech analogy: Romance nouns are like laptops, with a touchpad built in. Germanic nouns are like desktops, you have to remember to carry a mouse* along.
That’s especially maddening because Spanish does have gender, and “piña colada” is feminine and even involves feminine gender agreement between the noun and the adjective.
I'd love to see a good textbook with MANY excercises, where I have to say or write an entire sentence, not fill in a word, like in 100% textbooks I saw.
The example with the rain is wrong.
It's either the proper "wegen des Regens" (Genitiv), or the new idiom "wegen dem Regen" (Dativ).
"wegen den Regen" means something slightly different (more like: "because of _multiple_ rainfalls")
There's a whole book by Bastian Sick (famous German author) named "Der Dativ ist dem Genitiv sein Tod." -- the title about the Dativ being the death of the Genetiv is playing with that idiom.
As much as I like Twain, the English language is one of the hardest European languages, when it comes to pronunciation (contrary to Italian, which sticks to a few simple rules). So, you're welcome, choose your poison.
> "wegen den Regen" means something slightly different (more like: "because of _multiple_ rainfalls")
That's your natural feel of language, and you are deriving from casual use of Dativ plural ... but in these situations, Genitiv would be correct again (wegen DER Regen, but more clearly: wegen der Regenfälle, as Regen is uncountable (unlike, for example, Sturm/Stürme)).
Your example is vernacular German as spoken on the road, but grammatically, it is incorrect.
I would argue (as a native speaker) that "wegen den Regen" is also possible and basically is equivalent to "wegen den Regenfällen".
Of course I am biased but I actually believe that there is no other language that is so elegantly conducive to precise thinking. And above confusing example is actually illustrating this. If thinking is a bit like moving around on a high-dimensional mental manifold then language is an imperfect projection onto a mostly serialized data structure but with referencing (maybe 1.x dimensional). (If you project something from n dimensions onto less than n dimensions you always lose information)
And with German you can explore this mental manifold in a depth and strictness like with no other language. Like entering a meta debug mode where you can form a sentence creating an implicit reprojection into the space where the manifold resides and then muse about how this makes sense.
I often find myself doing that and playing around with "understanding" a sentence in different ways. A simple example would be that you can take almost any German sentence and by stressing a different word the meaning subtly changes. An analogy could be those pictures where you see something and after looking long enough at it it looks different. For example a sketch of a 3D box which you can flip. At some point you can do this intentionally by applying an invisible switch. Same feeling with German statements.
But German has also some short comings especially in the emotional department. For example there are no good translations for "smile" and "to look forward to". Another language I dabbled in is Thai which is pretty much the total opposite of German - very fascinating and refreshing.
As someone who's learned a few (natural) languages over the years, German remains the only one that just instills me with a sense of dread, or maybe some sort of internal animosity. Russian? Sure. French? Yeah. English? Obviously. Japanese? Still in the kanji mines but making progress. Spanish? Sweet.
But German is a blood-and-tears uphill battle for me and I just can't get over it. It's really fascinating on some level.
I am a native German and had Russian as a second foreign language. Try applying Russian Grammar rules to German, you will find they are almost identical.
Verb prefix system is the same. Noun conjugation even uses the same prepositions to decide the case. Compound words are slighly different, instead of a tram-station you would use tramlike station.
For what is worth, I find the ugro-finnic trinity (Finnish, Estonian and Hungarian) a step down towards hell, compared to German, Russian and many other languages traditionally considered hard.
The main issue with learning German is that each grammar rule has a bunch of heavily used exceptions one needs to learn, making the language very illogical and more idiomatic. This leads to a sort of a neurosis when many native Germans are afraid to make any mistake themselves and often prefer not to speak up in order not to embarrass themselves.
slightly offtopic: I would be delighted if Tucholsky had written something hilarious along those lines. But he didn't as far as I know, he focused more on the German language himself.
in a German newspaper they put their verb away over on the next page; and I have heard that sometimes after stringing along the exciting preliminaries and parentheses for a column or two, they get in a hurry and have to go to press without getting to the verb at all. Of course, then, the reader is left in a very exhausted and ignorant state.
Despite the offended Germans here, it is important to realize that Twain learned German well enough to perform (in German) in Germany, and was actually better known as basically the 19th-century version of a stand-up comic in America and Europe in his lifetime rather than the novelist he is remembered for now.
To add to this, I think Germans are usually the most chill about making fun of their own language. Well, I guess except English because it became so international.
As a developer working in a German company the question of translating some domain language items into English comes up here and there. Mostly we fail because the German compound words are so f*** precise that we are unable to find short matching English translations...unfortunately our non-native devs have to learn complex words they can't barely pronounce :D
Most of the time we try to use English for technical identifiers and German for business langugage, leading to lets say "interesting" code, but it works for us.
I think the issue of German compound nouns is seriously overegged. In almost all cases, it’s essentially the same as English, except with some spaces. It’s not like suddenly a short compound word expresses something that couldn’t be in English.
This is true, but some German compound words acquire a meaning that doesn't simply derive from their component words. Well-known ones include Kindergarten and Weltschmerz. This is often the case for domain-specific terms (Gestaltpsychologie, Bildungsroman).
Sure, but again those concepts typically will still have an equivalent way to express them in English. For example, Kindergarten is nursery in en-GB. I'm not entirely sure what the others actually mean, but Bildungsroman is probably "coming-of-age novel" which is a common literary genre.
The biggest challenge I've had when writing multilingual user interfaces aren't lacking a way to translate, but just practical issues like dynamic string construction or where the structure of the UI somehow doesn't work in another language, or when a given string is used in multiple parts of the app in the English version, but the non-English versions need different strings in different places[0], or just where an English single word translates into a whole sentence (or vice versa).
[0] For example some languages don't have a commonly used word that means "limb" - i.e. arm _or_ leg. A bit niche, but if you're doing something medical-related it can cause issues.
The English term for 'Bildungsroman' is actually... 'bildungsroman' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bildungsroman
> coming-of-age novel"
Technically it is correct, but in doing that you lose the essence of the word “roman” and of the whole influence French culture had over the whole of Europe until not that long ago, including in Germany. It is in these cases where it is quite obvious that Britain was an island at the edge of Europe, culturally and not only.
> Technically it is correct, but in doing that you lose the essence of the word “roman”
This isn't specific to concepts like "Bildungsroman." You're essentially saying "this word isn't just a word, but a word with implicit cultural context."
That's true of pretty much every word. Hell, translating "ao" from Japanese, you'd think is so simple: blue. Except it can also mean green because in Japanese there is less historical, cultural distinction between blue and green. So obviously green traffic lights are called "blue" in Japanese, not green.
You'll never get a perfect translation of anything that's longer than a couple words. The point of translation is getting close enough. Translating Bildungsroman as "coming of age novel" gets you so close, that if your conversation hinges on the actual nuance, you're almost assuredly talking to someone who will understand what Bildungsroman means, so you just use that word.
EDIT: One of my friends at uni did his thesis on the difference between Japanese "natsukashii" and English "nostalgic." I've always thought about that as the perfect example of how any simple translation is fraught with cultural complications. There are certainly things I would call "nostalgic" but I'd never call "natsukashii," because nostalgia can come with sadness, but natsukashii never does.
I don’t think the argument that English's book comes from novel as in new and in French book comes ‘of the roman vernacular’ and that this changes the meaning in some profound way. I don’t speak German, but it sounds like it the meaning has been fully lost and now it just means of the French. (unless you know all three languages and then I guess it has more meaning) At most, it is vaguely interesting to think of the etymology when hanging on a word, I guess more so if you know multiple languages
Your objection to translating "Roman" as "novel" seems to be that Roman is closer to the French word for novel than "novel" in English is? But this seems to be more an objection to English using the word "novel" instead of something closer to the modern French term, and not actually an objection related to the translation.
This seems like a slightly strange objection to me; I would have thought the actual semantic problem lies with "Bildung", in that a Bildungsroman generally involves some kind of learning/development/improvement, whereas a coming-of-age novel does not necessarily involve this.
> It is in these cases where it is quite obvious that Britain was an island at the edge of Europe, culturally and not only.
I mean this is a very weird claim, which assumes that Europe is culturally homogenous (e.g. I think you will find that Britain and France are culturally closer than France and Slovenia).
> e.g. I think you will find that Britain and France are culturally closer than France and Slovenia
Not sure about Slovenia but there's a lot more France here in Romania (from where I'm from) compared to the France that is present in Britain, that is if we ignore the 1200-1300s Norman direct influences. But that's a different discussion, related to how the insular Brits cannot really comprehend Napoleon's work to the fullest (as a reminder, what is now Slovenia was indeed, if even for a short period of time, under Napoleonic France, with Ljubljana being indeed the capital of what was then a French autonomous province [1])
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illyrian_Provinces
Slovenia's also been occupied by the Romans, Bavaria, the Austria-Hungarian Empire, the Holy Roman Empire, Fascist Italy, and was part of Yugoslavia. I think any French influence is probably a bit diluted.
> I mean this is a very weird claim, which assumes that Europe is culturally homogenous (e.g. I think you will find that Britain and France are culturally closer than France and Slovenia).
Yeah I don't get this either. The English culture and language both have clear influences from French, courtesy of the Norman invasion (and other influence points over time of course). It's weird to point to Britain of all places as not being influenced by French culture.
All words have history through etymology. Only a few dozen people actually care about it though.
It's worth noting this is normal in language. Consider the highly non-technical English "lighthouse," which has acquired a far more specific meaning than "a house made of light" or "a house that produces light" or "a house that weighs very little."
I'm not familiar with "blackboard" being a valid term for any board that is black, but specifically one used in pairing with chalk to be written on.
etc.
Weltschmerz and Bildungsroman relate very closely to their compositional meaning. Sure, they have become slightly more specialised (a novel about a teacher wouldn't be a "Bildungsroman", I guess), but it's not like you can't make an educated guess.
Also, the fact that collocations can acquire more specialised meanings than just the sum of their parts is hardly unique to German (in English, the "theory of relativity" means something very specific and isn't used, e.g., for moral or epistemic relativism).
You find the same in any language. A «coming of age» story is not about birthdays.
And in any case, "this concept is untranslatable" is nonsense, usually born out of xenophobia or jingoism. "MY language is more expressive than those OTHERS."
Every language has technical words that "cannot be translated." But when we say "cannot be translated," what we mean is "it is unsafe to expect a foreign reader to know what the term means without explanation." It's not that it can't be translated; it's that there isn't necessarily a single-word equivalent. I agree with the original suggestion that these can be a challenge to translate elegantly. But, speaking as a lawyer by training, the solution is obvious: you begin your technical document by describing novel technical terms. Then you use them in your document without explanation.
Consider "sushi": how do you translate that? Nowadays, we don't. But before it was widely known, you could've just said "a sour rice dish" and be done with it. (For those of you thinking "no wait, sushi is raw fish," no. That's sashimi. Sushi is vinegared rice mixed with other stuff, often. (Sushi can be with egg, pickled plum, crab, beef, etc. none of which are fish.)
Makizushi = rolled sour rice
Nigirizushi = sour rice to be gripped
Chirashizushi = sour rice with stuff scattered in it
> Chirashizushi = sour rice with stuff scattered in it
And it annoys me to no end how many restaurants serve "chirashi" with completely plain, non-vinegared, non-seasoned-in-any-way rice. Just "throw some sashimi on some white rice".
You do have to draw a distinction between compounding, where joined words gain their own meaning (some English examples: breakfast, football, highlight), and agglutination, which is the habit of the language to join words together, not necessarily creating a novel word that has its own meaning and dictionary entry, which is what Mr Twain is grumbling about in the article.
Don't forget:
Please keep still and watchen astaunished the blinkenlights.
Das blinkenlights. ;-)
That was actually from the faux English sign that German computer operators put in their facilities.
Heh. TIL.
None of those are actual German words. For some of them, I found references that these words could potentially be used in Pennsylvania, but most of these words are not even German, even when you split them into their components.
The reference you were looking for is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blinkenlights
From your link there:
> written in a mangled form of German.
If you show this to anyone who knows German, they will recognize that this was written by someone who doesn't.
I believe the comment you replied to is what is known as a "joke".
Given that the commenter left another comment about having been misinformed, I don't think it was a Joke.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44008622
So the stereotype rings true then.
The one about German’s lacking a sense of humor?
Ja
yeah, it was a joke and what you just linked to was sarcasm and/or mockery.
> None of those are actual German words
I've been misinformed!
It happens to the best of us!
I also went to Casablanca for the waters.
>Jardin d'enfant.
All languages have noun-phrases. In this case, they are transparent.
The whole is more than the sum of its parts; it's the product.
+1 Baumwolle is my fav.
It's a good one ("tree wool"), but Buschwolle/Strauchwolle (bush/shrub wool) would probably be closer to accurate.
In case any anyone's still wondering: the word is cotton
> Kindergarten
Don't know about that. Garten, garden, a nurturing environment for raising delicate flowers. Children's Garden. Kindergarten.
Garten / garden derive from garte / yard, which just meant an enclosed outdoor space.
I find it really interesting that in Russian they clearly took the same concept but just made it out of Russian words instead. Kindergarten in russion is детский (children's) сад (garden).
There are other words that are straight from German, for instance бутерброд (sandwitch).
iirc at least 3 Russian empresses (and also Russian duchesses) started out as German princesses. The court spoke French. And Russia looked to the West as a role model and source of expertise for modernization and development. It could have been one or the other but France post revolution didn't have princesses to spare, so there is also the political aspect in terms of an absolute monarchy.
Would be interesting to know when these words entered Russian vocabulary: before or after Napoleon.
"From its inception, Russia has desperately needed foreign professionals—to teach Russians about governance, manufacturing, military, mining, and other trades. The Dutch, Swedes, Brits, and French were among the foreigners who came to Russia. But Germans certainly dominated, becoming a privileged nationality in Russia.
"The ruling Romanov dynasty, which shared a lot of the German bloodline, became a branch of the Oldenburg dynasty under the name of Holstein-Gottorp-Romanov. Many of its members were born in Germany and spoke Russian with an accent. Germans, especially the Baltic ones, rapidly advanced through the ranks of the Russian society thanks to their talents, persistence, discipline, and loyalty to the throne (as of 1913, approximately 2,400,000 Germans lived in Russia)."
https://www.the-american-interest.com/2015/08/27/russias-lov...
> iirc at least 3 Russian empresses (and also Russian duchesses) started out as German princesses.
That would be incorrect. Ekaterina II was one, yes. Anna Ioannovna and Elizaveta Petrovna were both Russian. Ekaterina I was probably born in a mixed Baltic German/Polish family, but decidedly not a princess - her early life in general is very murky but the earliest that we know of her for sure, she was a scullery maid. Her ending up as the Russian empress is a truly fantastic story and was probably only possible because Peter I was so quirky yet so dominating, he could actually make someone like that his wife and have it stick.
However, Peter III was German through and through, so between him and Ekaterina II and their son Pavel I, Romanovs were effectively a German dynasty in all but name from there on, although culturally they were thoroughly Russian after Pavel.
Under Alexandr III, who was very stereotypically Russian in both looks and manners and promoted a nationalist domestic policy, there was a political joke that went thus. Okhranka (the secret service) gives him a report that says that after a thorough investigation, they've conclusively determined that Pavel's dad (and thus Alexander's great-great-grandfather) was actually Catherine's lover Sergei Saltykov and not Peter III - which was a very popular rumor even at the time Pavel was born, with some corroborating evidence. Alexandr calmly reads the report and crosses himself, "well, praise the Lord, we Romanovs are actually Russian!". The next day, the same department submits another report saying that the previous one was based on information that was ultimately found to be incorrect, and therefore Alexandr is in fact a descendant of Peter III. He again calmly reads the report and crosses himself again saying, "well, praise the Lord, we Romanovs are actually legitimate!".
> Would be interesting to know when these words entered Russian vocabulary: before or after Napoleon.
Before. In general, Russian words that are clearly derived from German, Swedish, or Dutch entered the language at the time when Peter initiated his Westernization campaigns, as that were his primary sources (him being interested more in things like warfare, shipbuilding, and manufacturing, rather than high culture). At the time of Napoleon, French subsumed German as the primary source of borrowings for new terms, but that process has also started much earlier, and was already underway under Ekaterina II.
LOL, that was a good one. +Thanks for the deep background!
Isn’t “сад” more like orchard?
Not in my experience. One might use the word огород (vegetable garden) for the kind of garden many have in an American residential backyard. But in my experience сад is used generically for many kinds of gardens.
It's true that English uses basically the same method to create compound nouns, but quantitatively it's a difference. Long compounds consisting of 3, 4 or more parts are completely common in German and cause usually no trouble in understanding, whereas English is far more likely to split them up by the introduction of words such as "of", "for", etc.
x100 this. You can sort of derive the meaning of a complex word if you grasp one or two parts of it and offer a hacked together English translation, even if it doesn’t map directly. I find that people online who haven’t actually studied German like to meme this often.
The Latin-derived cases from the article, on the other hand, are the truly maddening, and makes you appreciate the simplicity of English grammar by comparison.
> The Latin-derived cases
They're not Latin-derived, they come originally from Proto-Indo-European (which had even more cases). Many other Indo-European languages retain cases (Slavic languages, Greek, etc.), but were lost in English and the Romance languages.
What does come from Latin is the way we name and analyse these cases traditionally.
Interestingly, several different ways of analysis are in use. I first learned German as a third language and then moved to a German-speaking country, and realized that the way German-speaking people think about their grammar is often different from how foreigners think about the German grammar. The rules end up with the same result, but the angle can often be different.
For instance, we first learned what a direct object was (something which is done with/to, e.g. in “I ate the ice cream”, “the ice cream” would be direct object). Then we learned that in German, the direct object is declined in accusative (which primarily affects the article, and adjective declination). This was consistent across multiple classes and teachers and books and schools. But my German German teachers had never heard of the concept “direct object”; for them, only the “accusative object” existed. Of course, the accusative object would be in accusative, but also, its presence would signal e.g. whether to use “haben” or “ist” for “is” in certain situations (for which I learned an entirely different set of rules that they had never heard of).
You would think that this is because my native language (Norwegian) has different concepts, but our entire way of teaching Norwegian grammar was uprooted at some point pre-WW2 _precisely to map well to German_, to prepare students for German classes when that was a more common second language than English was. (There were tons of things I never understood why were important until I got to apply them to German later.) So you'd think they'd match better.
To be technical, "accusative" etc. are cases (i.e. forms of words) while "direct/indirect object" are grammatical roles - those are different categories. In German, for example, the Dative case can mark an indirect object (although some verbs may require the Genitive case for its indirect object), but it can also have other functions. This is even more pronounced in e.g. Latin where the different cases can have a wide range of different functions, not just direct/indirect object.
This is possibly not something that is taught very explicitly in school, but it's what the terminology means. (Or at least it's how I was taught. Linguistics being such an old discipline used to analyse so many different languages means that different people will use terminology differently.)
I know. But like I said, my German German teachers (all three of them, IIRC) used “Akkusativ Objekt”.
>the way German-speaking people think about their grammar is often different from how foreigners think about the German grammar. The rules end up with the same result, but the angle can often be different.
That's true for most languages, native speakers are almost universally terrible at explaining rules because they just intrinsically know them and never have to name or even think of the rule. To the extent that native speakers are formally taught grammar, it's usually edge cases, formal registers, and more sophisticated tools, none of which are the primary concern of language learners.
It really depends on the country. E.g. in Russia the formal grammar is taught in school very thoroughly, with the complete declension table etc.
We learn direct and indirect object in school as well it’s just not what people remember because they either had to grind the Latin for a test or the number (which js stupid on many different levels).
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And personal pronouns preserve cases even in English (He/him/his).
This is so true. My favourite example is when Top Gear made fun of the German word "Doppelkupplungsgetriebe" by spelling it, when it is quite literally the translation to "dual-clutch transmission". It stil is hilariously funny, but you cannot conclude that German is weird with these words.
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Use of Latin has nothing to do with Americans or whiteness. It's a holdover from the legal and medical professions, and you'll find bird-spotters and gardeners doing it too thanks to Carl Linné's / Carolus Linnæus's love of Latin.
See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_French - "attorney", "culprit", "grand jury", "tort", "voir dire" and so on
I think what you're trying to say is that people who are pretentious and middle-class (who in your experience are affluent white Americans) like to reach for Latin words because they sound grander. Orwell had a lot to say on that in Politics and the English Language:
https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...
> Pretentious diction [is] used to dress up simple statements and give an air of scientific impartiality to biassed judgements. [...] Bad writers, and especially scientific, political and sociological writers, are nearly always haunted by the notion that Latin or Greek words are grander than Saxon ones
> Use of Latin has nothing to do with Americans or whiteness. It's a holdover from the legal and medical professions
The fact that the language has such a degree lf these holdovers has something to do with Americans (or, rather the Anglosphere more generally), which is why the GP can note that it is a difference from German, where once upon a time; Germany had the same use of scientific, clerical, and professional Latin in the past, after all.
Habeas corpus comes from English common law, not Roman law. It was never used in German law.
Latin terms are still used in German legal writing. Just not this one.
Well, perhaps we can congratulate the German-speaking countries for throwing off the yoke of Latin!
It did not happen in the Anglosphere because England was run by the Normans for hundreds of years, during which the common law system grew enormously...
Let's also not forget ecclesiastic Latin! Significantly less common in the HRE since Martin Luther's protestations!
Also accounting!
In English: "assets and liabilities" (Old French derived). In continental languages: "actives and passives" (medieval Latin accounting vocabulary).
That's funny, in English "actives and passives" are videogaming terms!
>Use of Latin has nothing to do with Americans or whiteness.
My first thought was "it's especially strange to come out swinging against 'whiteness' in order to defend... native German language?"
Orwell said it better than I could, naturally. My point isn't that the professions can be traced back to origins in other languages. Nor do I mind a lingua franca for a scientific discipline. My gripe is that jargon, colloquial use and even common parlance haven't evolved away from it.
There could have been a movement away from old inherited terms. But there wasn't. And I have no better idea as to why than classism.
(German has a word for that! Jägerlatein, "hunter's latin", as a term for blowing up terminology to keep away the working population and restrict the game to the upper classes that are better educated, and frankly have a lot of time for that BS.)
On the other hand, as a Brit, I find German abbreviations oddly cutesy and childish — although I think that's just preferring what one grew up with!
That said, I don't think you can discuss German jargon without talking about Beamtendeutsch. I'm fairly comfortable reading in German — I'm slower than I am in English, but I can, say, read a book in German. Then I'll get a letter from some Amt somewhere and it'll be utterly unintelligible. Worse, I'll pass it to my German partner, and she has no idea what it says, and we'll need to go and find someone to translate the document we've just got back into regular German. I'll take "appendicitis" any day of the week over having to learn whole new grammar constructs just to interpret an official document!
I don't think "appendicitis" signifies affluence—it happens to enough people that the word has become very commonly known and used.
In fairness to appendicitis, it dates back to the 1800s and the medical profession only stopped speaking Latin at the end of the 1700s.
The English lay term is probably something like "bursten belly" that would also cover everything from hernias to intestinal rupture.
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>the (very white) American latinization of jargon that signifies affluence ... Habeas Corpus. All these terms have German names that are embarrassingly straightforward.
BlueSky brainrot take. Habeas corpus predates modern Germany.
"Habeas corpus originally stems from the Assize of Clarendon of 1166, a reissuance of rights during the reign of Henry II of England in the 12th century.[12] The foundations for habeas corpus are "wrongly thought" to have originated in Magna Carta of 1215 but in fact predate it."
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habeas_corpus
I don't understand what argument you're trying to make, but I'm almost certain you did not understand mine either.
>American latinization of jargon that signifies affluence ... Habeas Corpus.
Habeas corpus predates the United States of America by hundreds of years. It has nothing to do with "American latinization." You should remove that from your comment.
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In some way yes, but not really. Had a colleague working on a project for Deutsche Bahn (state owned train operator), he was developing an app and the domain knowledge was full of long German words, no one outside this bubble ever uses: Bremshundertstel, Bremszettel, Mindestbremshundertstel, Notbremsüberbrückung... In a way it's better to have a super long name for this, so there are no 2-3 ways to describe the same thing.
I wonder 'where' these compound words end up in an n-dim embedding space (relative to their German and say English 'parts'). In fact this brings up the interesting question of tokenization of the long German compound words, and how all this plays out in German to English (and reverse) LLM translation and text generation.
Sure, you can say three nouns in a row in English. But can you then make them into a verb? Or and adjective? What happens when some of the three words in English already are in a form that also parses as a verb or an adjective?
English is a bastard language and it shows in its grammar.
I have verbified nouns on several occasions.
My colleague this week took this a step further with this sentence: "We can model the data in [such and such way]. But then the user can PEBCAK their way into [impossible situation]." So close to poetry.
I was asking you to string three nouns together and verbify the resulting noun, like you effortlessly do in a language like German.
Also, note how your verbified noun is identical to the original noun. That's the lacking grammar of the bastardised English language showing.
The grammar isn't lacking, it's just that word function is determined by its position in the sentence and/or prepositions, rather than word mutation.
With respect to composite-noun-verbifying, it works so long as you use hyphens to make clear it's a single unit.
Buffalo buffalo buffalo.
My favorite example is "kartoffellerntepause", it's the German word for the school break in southern Idaho for potato harvest.
I really agree. I think this is particularly peculiar to English speakers because the mix of origin in our vocabulary is such a grab bag.
Windschatten is an exception.
Yes, "windshadow" one is more descriptive than "slipstream". (At least for me.)
"Rain shadow" is a common idiom in English. "Wind shadow" is not because English has multiple dedicated words for this concept, including "lee" [2] as well as slipstream.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rain_shadow
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windward_and_leeward
I worked on a case management system for a few years that dealt with Norwegian criminal law, and we did the same. Technical terms and conventional parts of method identifiers (like getFoo, setFoo, isFoo and such) were in English while the domain terminology was left in Norwegian. It looks a bit weird when you first encounter it, but honestly it was fine. Especially for a domain with as much emphasis on nuance and as many country specific details as the legal domain anything else would be a terrible idea IMO. Not only would it be really hard to translate many cases, it would probably make the code harder to understand and in some cases even cause misunderstandings.
Yeah nothing worse than entering a translated to English portal for Dutch tax purposes. Because those English words also ended up in Business Dutch but then got another meaning. Dutchlish, or at least the original term in parenthesis) is really preferable to anything else.
Words like beamer for projector... but isn't that similar between all countries? Even within English-speaking countries? You don't know what some Australian-specific or AAVE word means until someone tells you, no matter where you're from. Every version of English is a dialect of English so long as it's still a complete language (having semantics and all that)
Same as a friend of mine who works for NAV. There's a whole lot of long-ass variable and function names because they use the Norwegian name for whatever they are calculating. It makes sense for them though, as the ones who review your code are lawyers...
I work with a lot of Germans and have noticed this. For me to provide the English translation that is the most accurate I have to dig deep. The unabridged English dictionary has plenty of words but I feel slightly guilty providing them with a word which I know is the best fit but which they will probably never encounter anywhere else, and where most English people would just not know this word. The definition is often quite contextual and nuanced, hinting at (for example) the reliability of the thing that is described by it, or the way it is used (or was used) in society (e.g. for good or ill). The "baggage" I suppose.
I've had this same discussion with a colleague at my job in the Netherlands. He will ask me to choose from a list he provides for variable names. Usually I need to ask for more context and then I end up leaning towards the more "well known/normal" option, both because it still fits and will be more likely to be understood another decade from now when we've probably both moved on and are not there to answer anymore questions.
Discussing the words is a fun way to take a little break during the workday, but I don't consider it more than that.
I don't know where the idea about the preciseness of German language comes from, especially in anything computer-related. For one, German language famously fails to distinguish between safety and security as well as between an error, a fault and a mistake. Whenever Germans discuss any software matters, they seem to be "code-switching" to English terms themselves.
Compounds have to be translated using multiple words, yes - that's just a few extra white space, it doesn't result in loss of precision.
There very much was a well defined distinction between safety and security: Sicherheit and Schutz, as in Datensicherheit and Datenschutz.
And yeah, you can see with those two latter terms where the issue lies :)
Those two were traditionally actually used this way in the safety and security context - I think I even have the script for the "Datenschutz und Datensicherheit" lecture I had on uni in the '90s lying around somewhere in the attic.
But their meaning has changed and muddled so much over the years - probably not helped by the fact that "Sicherheit" is much closer to "security" in colloquial usage, and probably vice versa(?) - that they stopped being useful and used in this context.
I meant the difference between safety-critical and security-critical systems, safety goals and security goals etc. It's all Sicherheit in German.
Schutz is protection. Can refer to both I guess. E.g. Datenschutz would be about security, while Arbeitsschutz is about safety.
Datenschutz is about legal protections for personal information (protection of the rights of the individual). Datensicherheit is about technical measures to ensure security of information (security).
I always thought it was from philosophy, Kant and the likes. Order, precision, detail (allegedly!).
Similarly for English and French, seen as practical and artsy, resepectively, due to say Hobbes/Smith and the likes of Baudelaire or Rimbaud.
Whether any of that makes any sense is a problem for the philologists, I suppose.
These things happen in any languages. English, for example, has "number" - which could mean cardinality of something (how many of something is here?), a number in the mathematical sense (real number, complex number, etc.), a digit (0/1/2/...), or a numeric identifier (room number, telephone number).
Also the infamous "free" bear vs. software.
I also work in Germany and the code-switching has nothing to do with the question of precision, but simply because English is the technical language for CS. Also, Germans apparently like everything American, so some of their own words which originally existed in German (and have exactly the same meaning as their English counterpart) have pretty much fallen out of use, cf. computer / Rechner.
It's not that German lacks precision per se but most of the jargon originated in the US or even England, and rather than coming up with German translations, it has become custom to use the original English. Which, frankly, makes everyday tasks like looking up documentation or debugging a lot easier.
Compare this to French where the Académie Française makes sure that you don't have to use these nasty English words! Yikes. And if there isn't a good French translation, they just make one up - my favorite example: the word "bug" (as in programming) has a made-up "French" alternative: "bogue". As far as I understand, no-one uses it, but it exists.
Also between painting and drawing. And between pumpkin and squash lol
Painting - Gemälde
Drawing - Zeichnung
Picture - Bild
You were thinking of Bild, I guess?
Mahlen
painting = Malen
a painting = Gemälde
drawing = Zeichnen
a drawing = Zeichnung
Mahlen is grinding, you mean Malen
Fixed. I should have gotten a clue when I spelled Gemälde without the extra h.
Native German here: In my experience the issue is in most cases not compounds, but the domain language.
There are terms that are specific to certain domains and used by everyone to precisely name a certain process. Belegprüfung, Indexpartizipation, Zessionär, etc.
Sometimes germans outside of your field of work don’t know these terms either, but those who do all use the same term. If you use english expressions you have to replace a domain term with one of multiple possible translations, making it confusing in many cases.
We have the same with translated documentation. Ever read the german version of Azure Docs? I have no clue what they are talking about until i switch to the english version.
> * English for technical identifiers and German for business langugage, leading to lets say "interesting" code*
So it's code-switching code.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code-switching
Good reference to a higher level concept. Your linked article was a fun jumping off point.
Have to think of a translation for an EinfacheBeansFabrikBewusstAspektInstanzFabrik
What is “Simple Beans Factory Aware Aspect Instance Factory” supposed to actually mean?
That does not seem like a concept at all, let alone an actual German word. “Beans” is not even German, there is no German word spelled “Beans”.
You have not programmed Java with J2EE / Jakarta EE right?
(me neither but that is the kind of factories you build there ... at least in folklore)
Example: https://ws.apache.org/xmlrpc/apidocs/org/apache/xmlrpc/serve...
https://web.archive.org/web/20170629103902/http://www.bash.o...
it's obviously a joke, because that would be a technical term not a business one.
The issue is not so much one of language but of habit and usage. That's why in that sense it is important for scientific and technical domains to be taught and practiced in your own language. This allows terms to evolve and be used habitually in the language.
Totally get where you’re coming from—German can feel like a surgical tool when it comes to precision, especially in law or certain engineering domains where it’s still dominant. But from my (very subjective) experience, that sharpness doesn’t always carry over to areas like machine learning or modern software architecture.
Most cutting-edge research and discussion happens in English, and honestly, I find it pretty tough to have a deep technical conversation in German—even with other Germans. The language just doesn’t seem to reflect the latest advancements in those fields.
I used to agree with the “German is super precise” sentiment—especially when it came to legal or philosophical stuff. But the more I’ve immersed myself in English, the more I’ve seen how nuanced and expressive it can be too. And ironically, German law often ends up being a case-by-case “interpretation party” anyway.
Don’t get me wrong, I still appreciate the poetic weight of words like Müßiggang—there’s real beauty there. But when it comes to actually getting things done or discussing complex, evolving ideas? I’m not sure German gives us much of a practical edge anymore.
> I find it pretty tough to have a deep technical conversation in German
...loan words?
Dutch doesn't have a word for computer other than computer, SSD is SSD, machine learning is machine learning, WiFi is WiFi (with a 50/50 split on people saying it the english or the dutch way), generative AI is generatieve AI and I don't think anyone would count loaning generative as-is as a typo either (maybe if you work for a publisher with a strict rulebook)
And from there you apply the normal grammar. To do stuff on the computer is computering (or, actually, we make verbs with -en so it's actually computeren) and machine learning applications are machinelearning-toepassingen. At least, to me it's normal to mix languages like that. It's also not like we avoid the word fingerspitzengefühl or überhaupt just because they once came from german, or like the english don't throw in a kindergarten or zwischenzug where applicable. It just gets mixed into the existing language
I don’t think that comment makes sense in context of the original comment I replied to.
How so? They're talking about finding it hard to translate words, so then don't?
We're exactly in the same position (FinTech):
Translating German into English resulted in code being understood neither by Germans nor by Englishmans :-)
Fintech, hmm, can Linus or the Nokia folks understand your code?
Maybe you could look into establishing a proper-technical-terminology-direct-literal-translation-enforcement-protocol that uses "-" and translates German words more or less literally. The effect should be very obvious for German speakers, and more obvious than German words to English speaking folks.
This leads to cringy non-idiomatic kf nit nonsensical English though. As a non-native but fluent English speaker, working in projects where people with only basic English proficiency translated the native terms into English by naive dictionary lookup, or sometimes by selecting false friends, is really painful, because the translations give all the wrong signals and connotations in English.
The exact same issue exists with translating English to German - long German words suddenly dont fit. And with translating English into Polish too.
yes, this can cause even major-ish UI issues - like in android where this happens:
cut,copy,paste auschneiden,kopieren,einfügen
this can break the UI so you have scroll on a popup just to copy a piece of text because google put "copy" last in the selection.
I was once involved in building the UI for a video game. There was some kind of labels for baseic color selection ... "czerwony" instead of "red" broke everything :F
> unfortunately our non-native devs have to learn complex words they can't barely pronounce
I simultaneously know too little about German and have seen too much horror stories on German that I cannot identify whether this is but a typographical-error or actually pursuant to DIN orthographical standards
Back in the day, my programming techniques professor said something similar.
Technical entities get English names, domain entities get German names.
I also dimmly remember a German version of VBA.
Care to share an example or two?
I hope he will give us an actual example from his work. But meanwhile, here's a classic example:
The Donau is a river. On this river is a steamship (Dampfshiff): Donaudampfschiff
This ship is part of an organisation (Gesellschaft) that manages cruises (Fahrt): Donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaft
The ship has a captain (Kapitän) who has a cap (Mütze): Donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaftskapitänsmütze
On this cap is a button (Knopf): Donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaftskapitänsmützenknopf
You could extend this example: The button is colored with a special paint (Farbe), which is produced in a factory (Fabrik): Donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaftskapitänsmützenknopffarbenfabrik
And the factory has an entry gate (Eingangstor): Donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaftskapitänsmützenknopffarbenfabrikeingangstor
In English, this would be a huge sentence, all in reverse order: The entry gate of the factory that produces the color for the button on the captain's cap of the ship belonging to the cruise organization on the Donau.
The German is a lot more compact, if sometimes hard to parse :-)
In fact, with added spaces, works fine in English too (since English is also a Germanic language):
the Donau steamship cruise organization's captain's cap button.
And extended:
the Donau steamship cruise organization's captain's cap button's colour factory's entry gate.
EDIT: Let's not forget to mention its Java implementation, which goes full German:
DonauSteamshipCruiseOrganizationCaptainButtonsColorFactory
The German is only worse because we want to treat it worse, the sentence isn't much longer and they're broadly equal in conceptual cost.
Which isn't surprising since Anglo Saxon is at the heart of the non French bits of English.
Exactly. It’s not like you can even hear the absence of spaces in one or the other. It’s purely a writing choice.
Australian ad of 30+ years ago:
avagoodweekend and dontforgetaboutheaeroguard
And I think the use of spaces between pieces of nouns in English has more to do with the fact that -- in comparison to German -- the pronounciation is so unpredictable from the spelling that not having the visual indicator between pieces could leave you completely lost -- "what word is this?" Whereas German has very regular and consistent rules of pronounciation that map closely to spellings, so once habituated you can scan it from the page and spit it out more reliably.
Still, having grown up with English as my first language and (partially) learned German as a young man, learning German gave me more appreciation for English. Which only grew once I studied a bit of Anglo-Saxon. I love our language, there's just something about its character.
A spelling reform would be nice (though entirely impractical) though.
If you enjoy English and German but want something with a more modern twist, might I suggest Dutch? I started learning it about 3 years ago and it's very regular in terms of spelling/pronunciation. Once you learn the irregular verbs (the most common ones, like in any language it seems...), many things will just "make sense", especially if you already know English and German!
Awesome example.
Germans are allowed to write compound nouns in hyphens
Donau-Dampfschifffahrts-Gesellschafts-Kapitänsmützenknopf-Farbenfabrik-Eingangstor
It’s not considered prescriptively correct, but often nowadays people just write them with spaces (like in English), especially on phones, because hitting spacebar makes spellcheck/autocorrect kick in.
Which is a combination of lisp-case and CamelCase. Neat!
I believe some dashes would make that even more correct English.
Normally whatever is acting as an adjective ie "donut-eating relative" but with such a long example it seems a bit trickier.
I rather see the Objective-C one, https://github.com/Quotation/LongestCocoa
The river has an English name - the Danube
I don't remember many events from 1996 but my German boss walking into the office excited about the spelling reform of "Schiffahrt" certainly stood out as a memorable event.
(They added the third f or maybe re-added it)
Context, maybe just for others: Schiff is ship and Fahrt is ride, so eine Schifffahrt is a cruise (and without the article, it is also the term for seafaring in general). Anyway, you can see that Schiff ends with two Fs and Fahrt starts with one, so if you put them together to form a compound word, you get three Fs in a row, Schifffahrt. In pre-reform German spelling, this was deemed excessive, so one would write Schiffahrt, instead. The German spelling reform in the mid-90s changed this, so now you do the logical thing. (Whether the old way really was confusing and which way is more aesthetic are separate questions.)
Yeah, there has been a changeset in spelling rules
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reform_der_deutschen_Rechtschr...
... several times: 1996,2004,2006,2011,2017.
The current correct spelling is either Schiff-Fahrt or Schifffahrt.
Impartial foreigner here who has no stake in the old or new spelling. If you're combining ship and port, you can't just write shiport. Of course it's shiff-fahrt / shifffahrt? By what logic does anyone argue anything else?
I can only guess:
Once upon a time we used to write by hand. It was considered time consuming.
Once upon a time we used to set books in lead letters. There were ligatures, where two consecutive letters hat a special spacing - like "fi" or "sz". If we allowed three consecutive letters, we would need to invent new ligatures.
It is probably easier/cheaper to just forbid the spelling.
First of all, it was probably a descriptivist move. What I think happened is that people wrote 'ff' because 'fff' looked like a typo or was less convenient to write, so the linguistics codified that.
Also, there are portmanteau words where the middle letters overlap, e.g. bro+romance=bromance.
I found a word like this in English.
https://www.etymonline.com/word/chaffinch
There may be others.
When we turn to the letter 'l', we have the word skill-less which is not always written with a hyphen, in which case the three l's remain intact.
Bromance does not sound like broromance in speech
Swedish works the same (unsurprisingly), but note that programming languages also kind of do that. If you had to use a word like that in Java you would just mash all the words together in CamelCase and it would be pretty much the same as using the long German word (and almost exactly as difficult to read) even if technically it moved from being a single word to being a long list of words. It can still be a single identifier without spaces even if you translate to a language where it can not be a single word.
German is a prime candidate to implement PascalCase in a natural language.
This is not necessary. Practiced German speakers generally do not struggle with splitting words into their components because syllables follow relatively predictable patterns. You will run into ambiguities from time to time, of course, but the same applies to tons of other features of natural languages as well. (Do you want to outlaw homophones in English?)
Anyway, there is also a perfectly acceptable and established way of making German words easier to parse if need be: hyphens. So Hyphen-Case instead of PascalCase.
When I was learning to read German, for the longest time I thought the word “letztendlich” was “letz-tendlich” (which is meaningless but at least theoretically pronounceable) rather than “letzt-endlich” (which is what it actually is).
I’m sure a native German speaker wouldn’t make the same mistake, though.
The century old tradition has set up a couple rakes for native speakers to step into.
"Selbständig" (freelancing) is obviously derived like self-standing, but "selb" is archaic and completely unused, prompting native learners to write 'selbstständig, which is wrong.
Couple more ones like this. Ask a native speaker about hinüber vs herüber, they will be perplexed, because it feels so dialectal. And nobody even knows about imperfect tense vs perfect tense, it's just stylistics to most.
> prompting native learners to write 'selbstständig, which is wrong.
Not anymore:
https://www.duden.de/rechtschreibung/selbststaendig
Heh.
Interesting insight, thanks! Linguistics is fascinating, especially in the wider cognitive science context.
This is not an accurate or precise example. You surely know you are misleading people.
German does not simply just concatenate words ad infinitum across logical classification, a concatenated, compound word is generally logically limited by classification. The concatenation generally only tends to be used in relevant (operative word being “relevant”), increasing smaller/lower logical classification. You generally will not rise and fall in that classification, let alone jump horizontally as you concatenate. It is really just a logic tree, you don’t all the sudden jump trunks or branches. It has to be a logically precise unit.
You’re essentially just saying ManBearPig. It’s not an actual thing.
So the entry gate of the factory that produces paint that happens to maybe also be used on the button of the cap of the captain of the ship on the Danube and is also part of a union, is not…
Donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaftskapitänsmütze nknopffarbenfabrikeingangstor
I mean is this really one word though, or a bunch of words just spelled with no spacing?
It is one word in German. It has one article, Germans talk about it as about a single word and treat it as a single word for grammar purposes. You can use it as a single noun in any sentence.
But it also odd example for this, because it is long as hell anyway already and additional spacing that English equivalent would require is just opportunity to wrap. It is just harder to read, but English equivalent would be easier to layout.
> It is one word in German
Is it in the dictionary?
It really is one "new" word consisting of a bunch of words spelled without spaces. It is a compound, where every word adds additinal information to the last component. An easier example is sth like "Altbauwohnung" which would be an apartment (Wohnung) in an old (alt) building (Bau) where "Altbau" is also a compound. This way of compunding enables you to build new words everyone can understand the first time they encounter them, but also to build those stupidly long words.
What if I said in English, you can "compound" words with adjectives so for example if you have a book, you can add red and say redbook, and you can keep going and do stuff like uselessoldreddirtyneverusedbook. You can even add possessives which have their own adjectives, like if the book was owned by a redbearded german army vet you'd say
The redbeardedgermanarmyvet'suselessoldreddirtyneverusedbook
It’s one word, like watchmaker or bookkeeper are in English.
What is your definition of “word”? This is not at all a simple question in linguistics. By the way, it can’t just be “written without spaces”, as languages with no writing system at all, and languages whose writing system has no spaces (like Chinese), still have various concepts of “word”.
Fun fact: when writing on a smartphone in German, autocorrect lets you chain words indefinitely
An example from my work: in Norwegian criminal law, the prosecutor can in some cases hand out what is called a «påtaleunnlatelse», which means something like «decision to not prosecute». This is a legal punishment in the sense that it goes on your criminal record, but no punishment beyond that is handed out. Basically, the prosecutor’s office can note down «we are convinced we can prove this was done, but have decided not to prosecute».
A special kind of this is the «prosessøkonomisk (process economical) påtaleunnlatelse» where in a large and complex case with many serious offences, some less serious can be non-prosecuted in this way to not spend eternity in the courtroom.
In Australian English, this is known as "Section 10".
In English English it’s a ‘caution’.
So these are kind of fun to compare. At the high level they clearly all have the same purpose: in some cases it's socially useful to have the punishment for a crime simply be a statement of "person X did this thing". But the details vary a bit:
- It seems the Australian section 10 is handed out by the court, where the English and Norwegian options dispense with a trial entirely. It also looks like a Section 10 doesn't go in a person's criminal record, unlike the other two.
- It looks like the English caution requires an admission of guilt, while the Norwegian option is at the prosecutor's discretion within the rules of applicability of the procedure. Of course someone not demanding a trial when given this can be seen as an _implicit_ admission of guilt, but the legal nuance can probably be important.
- The English and Norwegian procedures are nominally also different in who makes the decision: the English procedure is handled by the police, while in Norway it's the prosecutor's office. But this is more a theoretical than practical difference I think, because the Norwegian prosecutor's office is organized differently than the English Crown Prosecution Service: here, the lowest levels of prosecutors are integrated into the police services they work with, so in practice I think it works out much the same.
In law of England and Wales we also have recording of non-crimes, which aren't cautions (it goes back to combating institutional racism).
Only in New South Wales Australian English. Not understood interstate.
In the US, a nol pros.
Another example, not involving compound nouns: Norwegian criminal process distinguishes two levels of suspicion. The first level «mistenkt» (suspect) is basically the investigation noting down in their log «we think this guy might have done it», but the second level «siktet» (literally aimed at, no idea how to translate to English or even if an equivalent term exists) is a formal decision made by the prosecutor’s office. And importantly, the use of «tvangsmidler» (coercive instruments, like arrest, search, seizure and so on) requires there to be a siktelse and this status also triggers legal rights for the accused like the right to a defence attorney.
There are similar distinctions in American law, e.g. with the police's right to tarry you. A short stop by the police can be conducted for 'reasonable articulable suspicion' of committing a crime, such as seeing you make a rash judgment in driving, while a longer stop or an arrest requires 'probable cause' such as smelling marijuana in your car after the initial stop.
You mean 'Terry' which is not a verb. The name comes from a Supreme Court case I am too lazy to look up. Correct usage is, "the police conducted a Terry stop and frisked the subject for weapons for their own protection."
Hah! That's amazing. Thanks for the correction. I had only heard it, not read it; I assumed it was from the verb 'to tarry'. The meaning is similar enough that it made sense.
Eierschalensollbrucherzeuger...
Hühnerfruchtharfe...
Eierschalensollbruchstellenverursacher, please!
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In my experience, problems is not with German as a language, but with Germans requiring to use their hard language, I live in neighboring country and since like 2010, nobody bothers to learn German anymore, (some small percent still learn, ok) and everyone who I know rather works in different country because of this. Like Netherlands, still hard language (multiple) but they don't expect you to learn it when working for multi-national company.
In every country there will be some expat bubble which can get away with not learning the local language(s). Sometimes that bubble will be bigger and sometimes smaller, but it definitely exists in Germany too (mostly in Berlin).
That said, I simply don't understand the mindset of people who move somewhere for an extended period of time and don't bother to learn the language. It locks you out of a lot of opportunities and makes you dependent on other people (especially for official/administrative/legal purposes). It also simply doesn't work in many places - (younger) Germans may speak decent English, but try going to Spain, Italy, or even Japan and see how far you get if you insist on speaking only English.
It depends.
I live in Zürich and I get by just fine unable to speak German. I can read it just fine because it is similar enough to Swedish, my native language. I doubt I will ever learn Swiss deutsch, it really is a language on its own - with very strong dialects.
But today there are amazing translator apps that can make it so much easier parsing official documents.
They don't expect it, but the amount of opportunities that will open up for you if you can speak the local language should not be discounted. I've found that my professional circle has been widely broadened because I can speak the local language. As an immigrant from a non EU country, the peace of mind that I get from knowing that I can leverage my own personal growth into more professional opportunities is worth the "hassle" of learning a new language.
As an added bonus, learning a new language has been one of the most enriching hobbies I've ever begun! Exercising a new part of my brain and opening myself up to new cultural experiences is something I'm very grateful for. If anyone is considering a move abroad, I strongly suggest not only weighing the financial factors, but also the cultural and self-enriching ones.
Strange.
In my experience as a German, everyone instantly switches to English if just one non-German speaker is in the group.
I suspect it's largely a generational/regional thing. My wife has lots of family from various rural parts of Eastern Germany, and half of the people over 50 speak effectively no English.
It’s definitely generational and regional. It’d be hard to find a young educated German in Berlin who doesn’t speak English well.
Do they know Russian? They had no reason to learn English if they’re over 50 and lived in East Germany, for obvious reasons. Someone that is 50 now would’ve graduated high school in 1993, only a few years after German reunification.
They probably learned Russian in school in the former communist part of Germany.
"problems is [..] with Germans requiring to use their hard language [..] nobody bothers to learn German anymore, (some small percent still learn, ok) everyone who I know rather works in different country because of this"
I assure you, as a matter of fact, (A) the size of your social circle is very limited, and (B) such an attitude as yours could safely be labeled as cultural ignorance bordering on cultural arrogance.
Can't confirm this. I'm a native German working for a company in Munich and as soon anybody joins to the meeting that is not German we switch to English. 90% of meetings are in English.
When my Russian colleague asks me to speak German because he wants to practice then I speak some German with him. Otherwise all our conversations are in English.
The experience might be different in "older" companies.
Related. Others?
The Awful German Language (1880) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27173967 - May 2021 (253 comments)
The Awful German Language (1880) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18147467 - Oct 2018 (311 comments)
My experience couldn't be further from this. As an English-speaker natively, French was the alien language which took yonks to get, German was 1. oh, these 5 things are pronounced like that, now you can read anything with confidence and people know what word you mean when you talk, and 2. oh, here's maybe 15h worth of grammar to learn and now you can make sentences up to upper intermediate level, and they feel pretty intuitiive as soon as you start flipping verbs to the end sometimes. French was ten times the struggle!
i spent like 10y studying German in school, and was pretty good at it. Then life happened, and we moved to France. I could speak good enough French after 1 year, and speak/understand basically everything after 2 years.
German was PITA, French was pretty easy but obviously I had a personal French teacher, and old lady who was amazing
I don't speak German at all anymore :/
Can confirm. 11 years of French education and 3 of German left me with considerably worse French.
(Given https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44001832, maybe it's because I learned French first?)
How old were you when you first "learned" French? I've observed that kids/teenagers who aren't actually interested in learning the language retain just enough to pass their classes and then it all just drifts away. I was the same "learning" Spanish in high school in Texas.
Until I moved to a new country and _wanted_ to learn the language, I could barely remember how to ask where the toilet was. Now that I'm invested and interested, things are much more sticky.
I believe this is why much of the world has latched on to learning English. There is so much content available that people _want_ to consume, that it becomes a hobby they are actually interested in, rather than a chore. As more and more people learn English, it becomes a positive feedback loop of content creation that nearly the entire planet can participate in.
I've been studying German in my spare time for about a year now, and it seems very similar to Old English. Lots of subject-object-verb, lots of suffixes, noun gender.
I can certainly confirm that learning German grammar as an adult is...challenging. Even though I am now fluent, learning as an adult means that you will always make mistakes on the gender of nouns. There are effectively four genders (male/neuter/female/plural), plus four cases (nominative/accusative/dative/genetive), so you have a 4x4 table giving you a choice of 16 articles that can appear in from of a noun. Only, the 16 articles are not unique: the table contains lots of duplicates in unexpected places.
Of course, most Western languages have gendered nouns - English is pretty unique in that respect. That likely comes from English being born as a pidgin of French and German.
Verbs in German are valuable things. You collect them, hold on to them as long as you can, and then - at the end of the sentence - they all come tumbling out. The order of the nouns at the end of the sentence differs by region. In purest German, they come out in reverse order, giving you a nice, context-free grammar. In Swiss dialects, they come out in the order they were conceived, meaning that the grammar is technically context sensitive. In Austrian dialects, the order can be a mix.
Of course, every language has its quirks. French, for example, puts extra letters on the ends of words that you are not supposed to pronounce. Well, unless the right two words are next to each other, in which case, you pronounce the letters after all.
English, meanwhile, gives learners fits, because the pronunciation has nothing whatsoever to do with spelling. Consider the letters "gh" in this sentence (thanks ChatGPT): "Though the tough man gave a sigh and a laugh at the ghost, he had a hiccough and coughed through the night by the slough, hoping to get enough rest."
>You collect them, hold on to them as long as you can, and then - at the end of the sentence - they all come tumbling out.
as a German native I felt oddly at home with Japanese because funnily enough building seemingly endless verbs at the end of sentences felt very natural. Despite the fact that German, most of the time, is an ordinary SVO language. It's one of the mistakes English natives who just learn German make, that only made sense for me after I thought how odd that structure is.
I've also heard live TV translators really hate this about German because it's annoying, depending on the context, to have to wait to the end of a sentence to translate the whole thing.
Or the tale about a speaker, being translated into German. He tells a joke, the English speakers laugh. He says "ok, and seriously now...", the German speakers finally hear the verb and start to laugh.
Also, English has the 5 vowels of the Latin script representing some 25 vowels sounds, to the point that consonants can turn into vowels with no rhyme or reason. The best way to learn that English is nonsense is to live in Britain and learn local city and village names. They all have made up pronunciation rules, evolved over the centuries, sure, but they forgot to update the bloody name on the map to match the sounds.
As a descendant of the Romans, I can only shake my head at such barbarism.
Ha! And don’t even get me started with the Scots and their whiskey. Bruichladdich, Pittyvaich, and Tè Bheag? Bunnahabhain Stiuireadair? Auchroisk??
I swear they only do this to mess with people.
In these cases it's all Scottish Gaelic, which has a complex but very consistent phonics system. Complaining about it would be like complaining that Russian vodka brands are hard to pronounce because you can't read Cyrillic
"Scots and their whiskey"
Nobody in Scotland makes whiskeyWhat a delight, I haven't seen that smiley in a while!
When and why did we all collectively decide not to use those any more? (I know why, but still.)
So true. I always wondered why is Leicester pronounced as "lester" and not as "laichester".
Because the components are Leice-ster, not Lei-cester. Same for Glouce-ster, Worce-ster etc. A very refined pronunciation might emit both "s" sounds, but colloquially they get smooshed together into one.
Grenich anyone?
Soderk (Southwark), Marlibon (Marylebone), Reding (Reading), Bister (Bicester), Sozbery (Salisbury), Frum (Frome), Worick (Warwick), Noridge (Norwich), Darby (Derby), and the various Gloster, Lester, Wooster
Yeah but Greenwich is a place known world-wide, and I guess a high percentage of people mispronounce it (I was one of them).
It's known worldwide, but many people never heard an actual Britt pronouncing it.
In my country, it was always pronounced as green-each. Only in this thread I realised it's written Green-wich and pronounced gren-each.
And I'm pretty sure I'll forget it quickly and just keep calling it green-each.
It's more like gren-itch than gren-each (native UK speaker).
... Hoyk (Hawick), Kircoodbree (Kirkcudbright), Mullguy (Milngavie), Cooriss (Culross), Geeree (Garioch), Eyela (Islay)
However, some Americans even have trouble with Glasgow (Glaz-go, not Glass-gow) and Edinburgh (Ed-in-burra, not Edin-bro)
Edinburgh is morr commonly pronounced “edinbruh”.
Glasgow and Edinburgh are pronounced "Glesca" and "Embra" by their natives but I wouldn't recommend it to others.
I've heard some Americans pronounce it "Edin-bo-ro" which is entirely off.
Southwark is “suh-thuk”. Salisbury “sorlsbry”. Norwich “norrich”.
Yeah trying to map English sounds to Latin letters is the exact problem. It's a very lossy transformation.
The perks of coming late. Finnish did job properly with only one or two warts...
That depends on how one defines «properly». Finnish, with its nearly 20 noun cases and vowel harmony, has made a spellchecker a computationally unsolvable problem.
If you're counting sounds (i.e. phones), then most languages with those same 5 vowel letters have quite a lot because of numerous allophones.
English is criminal in that it has many vowel phonemes - British more so than American - and then on top of that its mapping of them to vowel letters is completely out of whack with both traditional Latin values of them, and how they're used in most other languages out there. I mean, cmon, <ea> for /i:/?
Still, with a sensible orthography, General American would only need something like 9-10 distinct vowel characters (for monophthongs; but diphthongs are best spelled as the obvious corresponding vowel-vowel or vowel-semivowel sequences anyway).
"Verbs in German are valuable things. You collect them, hold on to them as long as you can, and then - at the end of the sentence - they all come tumbling out."
Franz Kafka put this property to good use and sometimes keeps the reader in suspense for half a page or more until the sentence falls in place.
Swedish had some of this until the second world war, since then we've made it into an english-like pidgin.
> Of course, every language has its quirks. French, for example, puts extra letters on the ends of words that you are not supposed to pronounce. Well, unless the right two words are next to each other, in which case, you pronounce the letters after all.
A lot of this is to due with latin, which pronounciation evolved over time to give modern French but which origin is still kept in spelling. So it's not that the language "puts extra letters" it's that it kept old spelling when the pronunciation change.
An example: 'est' (to be, third person singular) is very obviously verbatim latin spelling but pronunciation has shifted so that the 't' is not pronounced (and arguably the 's' could go, too).
Sometimes there are useful "rules" about how spelling and pronunciations evolved, which can be useful for English speakers writing in French, too, to remember your accents:
hospital -> hôpital
hostel -> hôtel
castel (castle in English) -> château
The question is: why hasn't the spelling been updated.
In my native German spelling, while there are irregularities, has been updated over times. Sometimes out of habit, sometimes by "order."
There have been some minor French spelling reforms over the years but French people are affectionately proud of their language with all its quirks, and changing the spelling of basic vocabulary like “est” would be a bridge too far for them.
Well, the last big German spelling reform in 1996 also had been quite a culture war, where big newspapers resisted for a while, rejecting "Delfin" over "Delphin" or reducing usage of "ß" and using more "ss" depending on the previous vowel etc.
But over time most of the change have proven to be successful ...
And yes, the French "est" will remain for the time being, but for me as a student of French there would have been a lot of low hanging fruit.
But today the interesting thing to me is how modern communication changes this. Text messaging leads to a massive increase in "dialect writing" while at the same time auto correction (and more recently AI) counters that. Back in the days™ writing was mostly done by the elites (authors, news papers, authorities) and the private letter was well thought. But test messaging, online forums, ... lead to more text being generated by "average" public, which over time certainly impacts "professional" writing.
The thing is that reforms are not needed. Usually they are pushed under the argument of "simplification" by people who have arguably too much tome onbtheir hands but why is it needed and how far should you go?
It is not just spelling. There are periodic calls to simplify grammar for no other reason than apparently people get dumber and dumber over time and can't learn the language anymore so it should be simplified.
One example in France is reform to reduce the use of the subjunctive tense. For example, now when I read the news I see horrible stuff like "Après qu'ils ont" (instead of "Après qu'ils aient" [and btw "est" and "aient" are pronounced the same ;)]), which would have sent my primary school teacher into a rage. Why do that? Cynically just because the members of the Académie Française need to find something to do...
I think the fact that that reform was successful at all, even with resistance, is evidence that Germans have less of a nationalistic attachment to their language than French people do. Even the extremely common grammatical particle “daß” was changed (to “dass”) — it’s just impossible for me to imagine anything similar ever being accepted in France.
They also create a french version for every new word they include into their dictionary instead of taking the international version.
True, but for what it’s worth the rulings of the French Academy are usually widely ignored. You would be hard-pressed to find a French person who says “courriel” for e-mail.
Some of the French neologisms instead of English words are more popular in Quebec (but on the other hand, Quebecers also use a huge amount of English loanwords that French people don’t).
There is no such thing as an "international version" of words...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internationalism_(linguistic...
There is still no such thing as an "international version" of words... at most there are some loanwords that appear in several to many languages, which is what this Wikipedia article is about.
I know what you’re getting at when you say that English is a pidgin of German and French, but that’s kind of a distorted version of the truth.
First of all, it is not German, but Old English, which is not particularly more similar to German than it is to any other Germanic language e.g. Icelandic.
Second, the idea that middle/modern English began as a pidgin is a very fringe view in linguistics; the vast majority of people who have studied the question would instead say that it indeed has a huge amount of French (or more precisely, Norman) influence, but not to the extent that we can say it went through a pidgin/creolization process.
IIRC (not sure about this) English is thought to have lost its case system mainly due to influence from Old Norse (which had a similar case system but with different and not mutually intelligible endings), not French.
> First of all, it is not German, but Old English, which is not particularly more similar to German than it is to any other Germanic language e.g. Icelandic.
While English is changing relatively quickly, German isn't. Children today read original texts from the Gutenberg era in school without any trouble.
Where I grew up, we actually read some old english texts in school. It was hard, but certainly doable, using just our knowledge of modern German and English and the local dialects (north frisian and low german).
> we actually read some old english texts in school
How old? “Old English” is a term of art meaning the language exemplified e.g. by Beowulf or the writings of Aelfric, which I would be very impressed if you could read without special study, so perhaps you meant Middle English or Early Modern English.
As an example, the beginning of Beowulf reads: “Hwæt! We Gardena in geardagum, þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon, hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon.”
Middle English is the language of Chaucer and Early Modern English that of Shakespeare.
As a native English speaker (who can also read German at an intermediate level), I can read Shakespeare with some difficulty (relying on the copious footnotes that modern editions are peppered with), Chaucer with extreme difficulty, and Beowulf not at all.
> How old?
Well that's a good question I don't know the exact answer to. So I looked at the examples you provided.
Early Modern English:
Shakespeare's early modern English is something I can read fluently (and I know we read & acted his plays in original in school). To me that's basically the same as current English, just with slightly different vocabulary.
Middle English:
Original: "Whan that Aprill, with his shoures soote" / Platt: "Wenn dat April, mit sien schuren sööte" / English: "When that April, with his showers sweet"
Original: "Inspired hath in every holt and heeth" / Platt: "Inspireert hett in elk Holt un Heid" / "Inspired has in every wood and heath"
That's probably the one we read in school. If you read it, it sounds like a grandparent combining mispronounced english and their dialect.
Old English:
Original: Cnut cyning gret his arcebiscopas and his leod-biscopas and Þurcyl eorl and ealle his eorlas and ealne his þeodscype, tƿelfhynde and tƿyhynde, gehadode and læƿede, on Englalande freondlice
Platt: Knut König greet sien Arzbischopes un sien Lüüd-Bischopes un Thorkell, jarl, un all sien jarls un all sin löödschaft, twalfhunnerte un tweehunnerte, widmete un laien, Engellande fründliche
English: Cnut, king, greets his archbishops and his people-bishops and Thorkell, earl, and all his earls and all his people ship, twelve hundred and two hundred, ordained and lay, in England friendly.
Now this one is much harder, especially as the spelling is getting even weirder, and the vocabulary includes a lot more danish words than middle English would, but pretty much every word exists in either modern English, or modern Low German.
> As a native English speaker (who can also read German at an intermediate level), I can read Shakespeare with some difficulty (relying on the copious footnotes that modern editions are peppered with), Chaucer with extreme difficulty, and Beowulf not at all.
The German dialects are clearly divided between Low German and High German, with different vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation. Standard German is based on the vocabulary and grammar of High German, so it won't be very helpful.
The closest living relative to Old and Middle English would be North Frisian, but Low German as spoken in Anglia today is still relatively close (as shown above).
Thanks, this is really interesting!
By the way, I don't think "when that April, with his showers sweet" is grammatical modern English -- it should probably be "when April, with its showers sweet" (and even that is unusual poetic syntax: in normal language you'd say "sweet showers").
> Of course, most Western languages have gendered nouns - English is pretty unique in that respect. That likely comes from English being born as a pidgin of French and German.
The John McWhorter theory (not sure if it's generally accepted, but he seems to have evidence that it happened in the right part of England at the right time) is that it comes from Viking-era Danish settlers learning Anglo-Saxon. Similar languages, but different enough that adult learners dumped out all the complications they could.
As a native German speaker, I think it's fair to say that German is a comparatively poorly designed* language. It has too many needless concepts. I envy Chinese and Japanese; I feel like these languages have got it almost right. If they eliminated measure words, they'd probably be as perfect as a language can reasonably be.
* I know languages aren't "designed" for the most part, but I find it helpful to compare them as if they were.
> I envy Chinese and Japanese;
Up until the point you have to read and write them.
Especially written Japanese, which is a giant mess of stuff they borrowed from the west, china as well as native stuff.
At least with traditional Chinese, reading isn't as bad as people make it out to be. A lot of characters are pictophonetic characters(形聲), where one element describes the sound and the other meaning. While not perfect they allow a reader to guess with decent accuracy the meaning and pronunciation of a character they have never seen before.
Hangul fits Korean like a glove, at least.
Measure words in Chinese are great. They provide so much descriptive capacity in such a short simple way. 一棍棒, 一把棒, 一根盪, 一條棒, all would translate to English as "a stick", but they convey different perspectives about what that stick is. I can appreciate the frustration with learning words that only have one specific measure word that only really describes it, but even then you can honestly get away with 個.
I totally agree that learning German grammar as an adult is… demoralizing. Knowing, and accepting, that you will make a mistake every time that you open your mouth, hurts.
Also, the increase in possible permutations (and opportunities for mistakes) when you add adjective conjugations to the mix is daunting.
> English, meanwhile, gives learners fits, because the pronunciation has nothing whatsoever to do with spelling. Consider ...
the poem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chaos :)
> I can certainly confirm that learning German grammar as an adult is...challenging.
Don't worry, only few German natives speakers are actually able to speak or write without grammar errors. Let's not even get started on spelling.
> The order of the nouns at the end of the sentence differs by region.
Could you give some examples? As a German native speaker I have to admit I have no idea what you are talking about. :)
I think he meant verbs, and specifically how you say things like "could have done" - the order of "hätte machen können".
"Tomcat" is male in German, not female: Der Kater.
"Wife" is female in German, not neutral: Die Ehefrau. "Weib" is old language and rude to use these days.
Consider that the text is, in fact, from the 19th century.
Also, 'Weib' is not rude in every context. "Wein, Weib und Gesang" is not diminutive towards women, but in fact appreciative (as in 'necessary for having a good time'). We have Weiberfassnacht. And then there are the dialects, in which "Weib" often is indicative of a homely, loving relationship (-> bairisch, Swabian). Context matters.
If you involve Swabian (which I could argue is more than just a dialect), everything goes out the window and you start again anyway.
And “weiblich” is the commonly used adjective instead of the Latin derived feminine.
An example:
"Eine Göttin ist eine weibliche Gottheit."
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6ttin
> Wein, Weib und Gesang
This saying exists in English too: "wine, women and song".
Actually it means "sex, drugs and rock'n'roll".
Sorry to be picky, but "Wein, Weib und Gesang" is not neutral. It reduces "Weib" to the value of Wein and Gesang, something only needed for pleasure.
You are applying logic and common sense from this century, to words of other centuries. This doesn't work, and never will. I think this is important, because a lot of people do this and nothing good comes out of it.
Are you claiming it was appreciative of women back then? It was expression about loud wild partying, the sort of that is annoying to everyone living on the same street as your beer pub is. The women who were present were not appreciated, they were look down at sort of tramps. A well behaved woman was not supposed to be present.
When you are casting it as appreciative of women because they are necessary for fun, you are applying modern idea that women present at a wild party says something positive about that woman. Back then, it suggested easy sexual availability and that was seen as a bad thing.
Edit: also in general, when people in the past were crass, other people in the past were offended over it. Even women themselves who accepted their role as god given would frequently get offended over hearing what they considered crass language. When women were supposed to be guardians of morality (and Germany had such periods), they would openly take issue with such statement. Because it was their expected role to be offended and to gently positively impact men (in a way that does not actually interfere with what he does).
That saying comes from the "Sturm & Drang" age, the age of Goethe and Schiller, of the German Studentenschaft (basically 18th and 19th century patriotic fraternities). Yes, it is about partying. No, the women were not seen as tramps within that group, you are comparing 'polite society female standards' to a very different subculture. Do not fall into the trap to think that societies now or at any point in history were monolithic blocks of identical beliefs.
And we have plenty of literary evidence that the women in these young subcultures were not feeling being objectified either, such as:
Goethe (Werther, 1774): "The joy with which one sometimes unites with friends is also a very pleasant thing among women."
Also Mozart/Schikaneder (Zauberflöte, 1791): “A woman who does not fear night and death is worthy and will be initiated” - indicating they should be given access to (often occult) lodges, thus more than "entertainment", but an equal
Schiller (Intrigue and Love, 1784): “When reason bows, the heart opens.” (Schiller emphasizes the importance of feelings and passion, reflecting the era’s turn away from pure reason and strict morality, typical also of student life.)
Novalis’ (Hymns to the Night, 1799): "For woman is humanity’s mistress, And we give ourselves to serve her.”
Doesn't exactly sound like "Women are tramps unless they blush and faint at the idea of partying", does it?
This will be a bit difficult to answer, I think I'm unable to answer. First of all: it is very hard to talk about subtleties of meaning and interpretation in written language. Second: english is not my first language. So please interpret my text as amicably as possible.
"Are you claiming it was appreciative of women back then?"
I think it depends very much on context, who said it, where does it get said, to whom and in what type of voice etc. The saying "Wein, Weib und Gesang" as such could be appreciative towards women, and I think it could be said in a non-demeaning way, also in the times, where women had a much worse standing as of today.
I think this, not because I know anything about that time back then, but because I learned in the last decades how heavily the perception or meaning of words can change. And how very personal those perceptions are. When I went to school, we used words casually, that would be offensive today. And I know that my friends and I used these words without thinking twice if they're offensive, because to us, they just weren't. Others could be offended by those words at that time. But this is because other people have a different moral, or knowledge, or education, or age etc.
What I want to say with all that: we are almost unable to comprehend how people back then thought, talked and meant the stuff, they said back then. Because we are pretty much blinded by our own current perception and moral of things. For example, I tend to think amicably about the past, so my interpretation of stuff that was said in the past gets a "rose tint". Others tend to think that the past was bad, people were stupid and crass, and wrong. So they interpret things in a much darker light, than me. I can't say that anyone is more right than the other, because it comes down to very personal interpretations.
> It was expression about loud wild partying, the sort of that is annoying to everyone living on the same street as your beer pub is. The women who were present were not appreciated, they were look down at sort of tramps. A well behaved woman was not supposed to be present.
This is what you learned and interpreted about that phrase and time. For me this is a possible situation you describe, but there are also very different situations, where this phrase could come from. In my social circles, the word "Weib" was used in a very endearing, appreciative way towards women. Women used that word for describing themselves as strong, and emancipated. So the phrase "Wein, Weib und Gesang" could have a very positive connotation. That says nothing about what happened a few hundred years ago, it just shows how personal language in the end is.
> I think this, not because I know anything about that time back then, but because I learned in the last decades how heavily the perception or meaning of words can change.
Yes, but did you considered that original meaning could have been, roughly, "getting wasted and going to strip club"? That is how I have seen it being used in older books I read. It was not meant to be about women, it was meant to be about certain kind of men, certain kind of partying and lifestyle.
>What I want to say with all that: we are almost unable to comprehend how people back then thought, talked and meant the stuff, they said back then. Because we are pretty much blinded by our own current perception and moral of things.
We can get some idea tho, we are not completely helpless here. When you are making an assumption that it was positive, you are being heavily influenced by how you want it to be. Not even being influence by what it might mean today (fun sentence that means nothing), but by how you want the past people to be.
Reinterpreting past so that it appears more positive then it was is equally incorrect. And it is a bit me pet peeve, because it is frequently used to discount actually factually correct statements about history. It is used to make it sound more conforming to our norms then it actually was in practice.
> This is what you learned and interpreted about that phrase and time. For me this is a possible situation you describe, but there are also very different situations, where this phrase could come from. In my social circles, the word "Weib" was used in a very endearing, appreciative way towards women.
That is todays interpretation word and also of women breaking past social mores. In todays movies, a 19 century woman smoking cigarettes is cool. Because it is always an emancipated strong character dealing with tough guys.
But back then, women smoking cigarettes were scandal and looked down on by polite society. They were not emancipated, they were outcasts with all disadvantages that it brings.
I'm pretty sure, that we understand each other mostly but will strongly disagree on things, that are important to us if we engage further. So let's not do that :-) Thank you for your time, it was an interesting discussion!
Yes, perhaps you are right. But then, look at who responded to my comment - all usernames suggest male companions. We are also now, not back then. Nothing prevents us from rethinking things from time to time.
Yes, sexism is not a new thing from today, and such sentences are witnesses of this. We might be interpreting stuff from the past with today's eyes, true, but that doesn't make the interpretation wrong. There are a lot of things we know now and didn't before. It's even totally possible we have reading keys that might have been unavailable back then.
We should not interpret stuff out of context though, but here I'm not sure taking the context in account would not make the point even stronger. I would be quite surprised about any context changing things for this particular phrase (but happy to be surprised...)
Would "wine, friends, and song" do the same?
No gender is weirdly specific in your version.
Not sure about the reduction, but "Wine, women and song" somewhat assumes the point of view from an heterosexual male and could feel offensive just for this.
"Wine, man and song" would sound weird, but it should not sound weirder than the "women" version. That's because we are all used to the male pov assumption and that's the core of the issue.
And of course, to add insult to injury, the phrase will feel like the reduction the grand parent describes to many.
So I think we'd be better off dropping those old phrases in favor of things like your version, which doesn't have these issues.
Note: not a German nor an English native speaker so I might be missing some cultural subtlety that could make my POV a bit wrong and disconnected from reality.
Why do you assume reduction?
And a girl is a "Mädchen", which is neuter, even though a boys is a "Knabe" and definitely male.
Amongst guys, women are still sometimes referred collectively to as "Weiber".
Fun fact: “Das Mädchen” (“little girl”, neuter) is diminutive form for “Die Mad” (“girl”, female).
All diminutives in German are neuter, for whatever reason. You could do the same for “Der Knabe” (“boy”) → “Das Knäbchen” (“little boy”).
Curiously, saying “Die Mad” would be as uncommon – at least nowadays – as saying “Das Knäbchen”.
> All diminutives in German are neuter, for whatever reason
It’s just one instance of the more general principle that the gender of nouns with a common suffix are based on the suffix. E.g. all nouns ending in -keit or -ung are feminine regardless of whether they have any connection to the biological female sex.
> Curiously, saying “Die Mad” would be as uncommon – at least nowadays – as saying “Das Knäbchen”.
I liked that The Handmaids Tale in German is der Report der Magd.
A German guy once told me "Weizen und Weiber stößt man von unten"
Instant „Fremdscham“.
secondhand embarrassment, for anyone not speaking german here
I'm not translating the post above that
This word is used in An Die Freude, is it considered ofensive when I sing this? Lack of talent aside of course.
I absolutely love German, it is one of my favourite languages, there's such beauty in it. I am not a native speaker, but enjoy studying it. I am a native Afrikaans speaker and I see so many similarities between the two, which I find intriguing.
Don't tell the people in the Netherlands and Belgium, but Dutch is a German dialect with pretensions, and Afrikaans is a Dutch dialect, so...
Well, if it comes to that. German is not _really_ a single language. It’s a dialect continuum consisting of sometimes barely mutually intelligible variants. And yes, if you continue following that continuum, you get to the languages you mention.
A language is a dialect with an army and a fleet. As they used to say.
'A language is a dialect with an army and a fleet ' --> I hadn't heard this before, love it! For the curious: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_language_is_a_dialect_with_a...
A bit of relevant context: the quote is from Yiddish, which is primarily Germanic with significant admixture from Hebrew, Aramaic, and Slavic languages.
(One of my current favorite party tricks is speaking Yiddish to German speakers, and cranking up the other aspects to see where the intelligibility breaks down.)
I took a trip to Germany with my Dad, who grew up with Yiddish-speaking parents, and it was amazing to watch people's eyeballs pop out as they began to understand him and then realize what they were hearing.
zaftig.
זאַפטיג איז יא אַ גוט װאָרט :-)
> A language is a dialect with an army and a fleet. As they used to say.
I usually say "A dialect is a language that lost a war", but this one might be better :)
And the continuum has two big groups: High and Low German (High and Low here being z-coordinates, High German dialects because they come from the more mountainous Southern areas and Low German from the lower-lying Northern parts). Modern day Standard German is a High German variant, whereas Dutch (and thus Afrikaans) are Low German.
Sorry, got nerd sniped: Isn't it usually the y coordinate that stands for the vertical axis? At least that's how I know 3D coordinate systems, with the z axis either increasing towards or away from the center, left handed vs right handed coordinate systems.
In GIS parlance, elevation is typically z coordinate. Which of x and y correspond to east-west and north-south varies from coordinate system to coordinate system, and is a bountiful source of stupid bugs (at least for me). But yeah, in 3D graphics z is usually distance from the camera I think.
Probably z pointing upwards is more common.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-dimensional_space
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartesian_coordinate_system#Th...
https://www.google.com/search?udm=2&q=3d+coordinate+system
I see, fascinatingly inconsistent :D I somehow have the urge to popularise a coordinate system where the x axis represents elevation now.
Towards or away from the center is the height, no? As in, you’re the bird at height Z observing the x-y plane under you, and the Z axis goes into you. Or away from you if you happen to be a mole under ground.
Then just to muddy things you also have the Low Lands, which aren't in Germany, but they do speak a Germanic language there. ;)
I can speak English and German which makes me able to somewhat understand written Dutch (especially if I know the context), but no chance when it's spoken.
As a German, I enjoy reading the Dutch text on supermarket products and manuals, it is a source of great fun in my family :) Children especially love it. Dutch just has so many words that sound extremely cute and funny to Germans:
"Sleep well" -> "Slaap lekker", in German "Schlaf lecker" = "Sleep tasty".
"Nuttig" -> "Useful", in German "nuttig" means "slutty"
"Huren" -> "to rent", in German "huren" means "to whore".
"Oorbellen" -> "earrings", "ear bells".
"Uitvaart" -> Funeral, in German "Ausfahrt" -> exit
:-)
It’s the same for me, a Brit, reading screenshots my Dutch mates send me from say TikTok or whatever localized to Netherlands one that tickles me is ‘reacties’ underneath instagram posts!
Knowing English and German also makes it possible to understand something like 50-75% of written Norwegian, Swedish, or Danish in my experience.
Apparently a part of this is due to a huge number of Low-German loanwords present in all three due to the influence of the Hanseatic league in the region during the middle ages.
Right! I speak English and Dutch, so I can read maybe less than half of German. It's just enough to be tantalising but not enough to really understand it. Likewise with Swedish.
Well, it's not a coincidence that the English word for the language of the Netherlands is the same the German state calls itself: "dutch" / "Deutsch".
A people and their language predated the concept of nation-states, but when the latter arrived obviously (geo-)political interests started to blur the facts.
So if you conflate the German state with Germans (I'd challenge that and view the German state as a continuation of the Prussian state), and you don't like the interests of the German state, it is predictable where you'll land on this issue.
Because of this, even if their national anthem does so, calling the Dutch Germans would infuriate them and rightly so, because it would imply justification to some for things like those happening between Russia and Ukraine right now.
I think in the end it is also a matter of "national" self-confidence. While Luxemburgish is virtually indistinguishable to the German ear from say the dialect of Cologne, Swiss-German is hardly understandable for anyone outside of Switzerland. Yet, the Swiss don't have an urge to re-label their dialect as a separate language. And the urge of the Dutch to re-lable themselves is lesser than that of Luxemburg because seemingly no one questions their identity.
Also noteworthy are the different terms for "German" in different languages, they're quite far apart: "Deutsch", "Allemagne", "Nemți", which all derive from the names of different Germanic tribes. Depending on which tribes surrounding countries (which were faster to establish nation states) were closest to, that's what they called all Germans. And it stuck.
true-ish. I'm not aware of any tribes that would give name to Deutsch and Nemti. Rather, Deutsch is the generic self-description for all tribes, and Nemti was a generic description of all tribes by slavic people (ie Niemy in polish meaining "without the ability to speak")
I thought:
Deutsch: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teutons
Nemți: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nemetes
But at least Deutsch does indeed appear to have other origins according to: https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/deutsch
All national identities are to a large extent constructed (or less charitably: made up). So the 21st-century idea that Germans are people with a passport from the Federal Republic of Germany is not really any more or less valid than the 19th-century idea that Germans are a cultural group spanning various states including Austria (and maybe even including the Netherlands).
Edit: FYI, I've mentioned Luxemburg as a counter-example to Switzerland/Netherlands, because the state of Luxemburg attempts to have their German dialect officially recognized as a separate language…
I mean, they put umlauts on Es, that's got to count for something....
Hehe, but so does https://newyorker.com
A Dutch speaker read Afrikaans without too much effort; understanding spoken Afrikaans is a bit harder, but depending on the person it can be fine.
A Dutch speaker can't read or understand German. Some words are similar, but the same can be said about English. There are a number of differences in the grammar and alphabet.
Of course they're related languages; because I can speak English, German, and Dutch I can kind of read Swedish or Danish on account of being Germanic as well. But that doesn't make a "dialect with pretensions". We might as well say that all current Germanic languages are some sort of "dialect with pretensions" of some old Germanic language. But that doesn't really mean anything.
> A Dutch speaker can't read or understand German.
A Dutch speaker can't necessarily read or understand German. However, a Dutch person nearly always does, and often flawlessly so.
This is just wrong. I have nothing more to add, because this is just not the case. Maybe it was true 60 years ago, but not today.
How is English then not a German dialect with pretensions? Is there a certain threshold in number of words that must originate from a different language family, or what's the logic here?
Yep. I find it easier to understand German verbally than Dutch. I struggle when Dutch people speak to me, the way they pronounce words are hard on my ears. German feels softer.
Native Dutch speaker here. I find German softer on the ears too.
Except for Dutch in the South (Belgians and South NL), that's soft on my ears too. But not my accent, we are descendants of monsters. Why otherwise would we pronounce the G the way that we do?
https://youtube.com/shorts/oNv7SBY32a8
Yes, yes you are.
I did once tell one of them something quite like that.
I was assured with a smile that the feeling is mutual.
My native language is German, and I don't know whether I like it. It is the most natural to me, so no judgement -- I cannot look at it from the outside. Well, of course I like it, because I can express myself best with it.
Anyway, I absolute love Afrikaans. I also like droëwors, but that's a different topic. You should have a look at Icelandic -- it is the opposite of Afrikaans on the morphological complexity scale of Germanic languages. Quite a bit more going on with endings and such than in German. And yet it is weirdly familiar, because it is, well, also Germanic.
I am a native speaker. And I find German to be a very ugly language. Pronounciation wise. Compared to French or English. It sounds like someone is constantly having a quarrel with you.
There's this fun video from Easy German, where native speakers (Austrians in this case) express their feeling of uneasiness when flirting in German. As in, the German language not being the sexiest.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEx0edmLdLo
Weaknesses can become strengths. Sometimes you want to have a quarrel. When French people quarrel they must rely on changes on pitch, cadence and volume because otherwise it sounds like they are ordering baguettes at the boulanger.
Is this the game ‘Tell me you've never visited Italy without telling me you've never visited Italy’?
German has harsh sound. But in terms of quarrelling, I find that Korean sounds like someone is complaining all the time. But then again I have never learned Korean, so my impression would surely change.
I invite you to listen to Danes conversing before forming an opinion on German pronunciation.
> Schmetterling!
I feel the same about Afrikaans, ugly and harsh as hell :D
I speak both and to me Dutch is the super harsh spitty one, compared to German and Afrikaans it's not even close!
Precisely my thought - try learning French. At some point we've been asking our teacher "but, why would they start writing so many chars (unreadable) and so many different endings". and our guess is there must've been a financial reason to do so - more chars, more money when copying manuscripts, and less chance for the common people to ever have this level of writing skills, which takes years to master.
The French are so proud of their roots, they insist that for every French word you learn, you also learn its entire etymological development all the way back from Vulgar Latin.
I think German poetry can be very elegant and English poems feel dull in comparison. At the same time, the plainness of English makes it much better suited for songs. Lyrical German quickly sounds pretentious.
One of the things that helped me improve German was Poetry Slam contests, they are still quite popular over here in many regions, you get poetry coupled with another German property, plenty enough sarcasm.
Cool, Afrikaans is my 2nd language after German :) Groete van Duitsland boet!
Lekker!
As a native German speaker: Everything Twain rants about here we attribute to French.
Hmm, French definitely has ornamental noun paradigms affecting articles and adjectives, exceptions to every single rule and things like that. But it lakes the cases that German add on top of this. Syntax is not as funny with verb at second position, or end of the phrase, separable verbs, and so on.
French of course also have many original grammatical torture instruments. You might think that as a bastard child between Latin and the Germanic Frank tribe dialects it’s no wonder, though elimination of noun declension is rather surprising from this perspective. The truth is that all languages out there have their own dungeon with many traps and treacheries included.
Fortune, nun ni ĉiuj parolas Esperanton. Kaj ne forgesas la akuzativo nin. :D
> French of course also have many original grammatical torture instruments.
For me it was when I had to realize that for the French, every number larger than what they can count with their fingers becomes a small algebra problem. quatre-vingt-dix-neuf ... four times twenty plus ten plus nine makes 99.
I recently got curious about the roots of this, and it turns out it’s from Celtic languages. All the Celtic languages count in base 20, and they were widespread across continental Europe before the Romans introduced Latin to their conquests and then the Germanic tribes brought the Germanic languages in.
Celtic remained a strong influence around modern France, Belgium, the Netherlands so we end up with French counting partially in 20s, even though continental Celtic languages are extinct (Breton, spoken in north west France is an insular Celtic language, more closely related to Celtic as spoken in the British isles and Ireland.)
I don’t know how Danish got base 20 counting though. Must have more reading to do.
Yeah, you can take an other locale and use "nonante neuf" instead. People generally take "quatre-vingt-dix" as a single token, they don't actually think about it in a compound perspective. Just like onze, douze, treize, quatorze, quinze, seize, where -ze stands for ten, so it's "n + 10". But in this case it's not synchronically as obvious as this composition is analyzed from morphological point of view, -ze in itself is not attached to any autonomous token in French. If anything French will rather lead to analyze numbers in terms of "k*10+n" instead, unlike German.
Well if you like that, you'd love Danish numbers, where 99 is nine and half (before) five times twenty, or »nioghalvfemsindstyve« (or more commonly shorten to »nioghalvfems«).
I suspect that French people aren’t really thinking about this when they speak, just like in English we aren’t usually consciously aware that “ninety” is derived from “nine”. It’s obvious when you stop to think about it, but for the most part “ninety” is just its own separate token in our mind, and so is “quatre-vingt-dix” to the French.
Swiss French seems to have regularized some of this in a sensible way? Indian English does much the same with some things; not strictly “correct” English, to the extent those words don’t exist in British or American English, but I can’t argue that it doesn’t make more sense or isn’t more consistent so I never argue the case. I generally view those regularizing pressures from non-native sources as a positive thing for languages.
In some victorian-era (possibly earlier) writing you will find numbers Four score and 5, which is just that: four times 20 plus 5, 85.
Laking the cases is Danish.
I suppose like the general American of today, he has just never really learnt an n-th language (where n>1).
He actually learned German well enough to have appreciative audiences in Germany, but he also knows how to make amazing comedic essays on many topics. He did plenty about US-specific topics, and about French too, not just about German.
Which gives us Hitler memes where they audibly says German words that are very similar to their English counterparts, but the /funny/ subtitles is just a Beavis and Butthead level joke.
Doesn't work as good if one has ears.
Werner Herzog on French:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6pY-0JfEdLY
(From a mockumentary)
> everything Twain rants about here we attribute to French
The part where you have to have the equivalent of a LIFO stack in your brain, piling stuff up and praying you won't overflow, until the effing verb finally shows up and deigns informing you of what is actually happening in the sentence, well that is not, I believe an attribute of French, and definitely specific to German (I believe Japanese has that to a certain extent has well).
Yeah, I vividly remember writing whole essays in school with only two sentences like that (sometimes over several pages of relative and temporal sentences and adjective chains), just as a raised middle finger to my German teacher who sleighted me once over the interpretation of some baroque poem.
Good times.
Related video by RobWords "Is German really 'Awful'?" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VcekIrFjwe0
I came across this video about this from a linguist on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VcekIrFjwe0 It's a good video.
RobWords' last month's "Is German as bad as people say?", for anyone wondering where that random ID goes
Edit: same link posted 9 hours earlier in this thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44001765
As someone who studied German at school and has made serious attempts to learn Finnish and Czech, I have feelings about this. Obviously Twain was being humourous. But I took three years of German two decades ago, and to this day it is easier than Czech (I'm embarrassed to say, as I've lived here and tried to learn on and off for the last six years). I'm exaggerating only a bit.
Writing as a native Slavic language speaker, that's fair, but it's mostly a testament to how complex all Slavic languages are. It's like we decided to make it absolutely sure that any foreigner who decided to learn them would be in a world of pain. Declensions? Check. Grammatical gender? Sure, and adjectives and verbs also have it for good measure, not just nouns; and for verbs, it also interacts with tense and number.
And let's not forget about our phonology, with 5-consonant clusters, palatalized labials, utterly unpredictable stress, complex mutations of both consonants and vowels when adding suffixes etc.
By the way, the nearly universal ethnic designation for Germans in Slavic languages - some variation of "nemci" - literally means "mutes".
The main difficulty with most Slavic languages are the grammatical cases/declensions/etc. German does have conjugations, but they have less forms and there are easily noticeable patterns (at least compared to something like Slovene: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slovene_verbs#Full_conjugation...). The words might seem scary, but actually require less thinking to use in sentences.
It's not so much the cases but the interaction with cases and gender. I found Finnish easier in some ways, despite the many cases. Because the case endings are always the same (modulo vowel harmony) so you can extract helpful information - something is inside something else say. In Czech a word ending with u has five different possible gender-case combinations (if I counted right) and that's not counting the distinction between short and long u.
I'm a Polish speaker and have met some Polish learners in my life. Often I have no better advice than "you choose the conjugation patern based on how does the word feel to you".
Ahaha, was für ein Scheißkerl! Frankly, I used this text to tease my teacher when he suggested to read something in German together.
At the end of the article, Umlauts are written :u, :a, :o. I've never seen them presented this way. Is this some old, typewriter artifact or just a formatting error?
It's definitely not common. Either use the correct letters (ü,ä,ö,ß) or the "ASCII" alternatives (ue, ae, oe, ss).
> the "ASCII" alternatives (ue, ae, oe, ss)
Isn't that called romanization? Similar to turning 刘慈欣 into Liu Cixin because you can't make the characters
I've found that germans take it for granted that it works this way, but I know of no other latin-script-based language that does romanization. Granted, I don't speak very many languages, but at least among the bigger ones like French, it's not like you write cafee (add an e because you dropped an accent), it's just cafe when you can't make the é. That's actually a terrible example, I just realized, because in german you totally use kaffee (yes yes, different word but same root). Let me try again with the word naive, coming from french naïve: you'd never write naieve. Or if you don't know how to make the ï in Dutch geïntegreerd, writing geintegreerd is understood by everyone whereas geientegreerd only leads to confusion. You could argue that it's because these ï don't have an "e" quality to them, but there is no other romanization taking place either for these, it's just dropped. Only Germans romanize to preserve the pronunciation-to-spelling mapping
The reason why it's not unreasonable for German is because those digraphs were the origin of umlaut.
You have a vowel that is roughly in between "o" and "e" as used by Latin, so you start by writing it thus: oe
That feels too long, so you make it a digraph: œ
Some people still think that's too long, so you start putting "e" on top instead: oͤ
That tiny "e" on top is kinda tricky to write in full, though, and slows things down, so handwriting eventually trims it down to just two vertical strokes: ő
Lastly the strokes themselves become shorter and shorter until they become points: ö
But since it's been "e" all along, the old convention still remains, and is arguably just as German as the umlaut diacritic. It's not something imposed on the language from the outside, as is usually the case with latinization of non-Latin-based scripts.
Coincidentally, this is also the origin of Swedish å (literally "o" over "a") and Spanish ñ (literally double "n", with one written on top of another)
TIL! Thanks for sharing
In very colloquial settings it would not be unusual for French people to write something like “cafer” for café, but this codes as a bit classless/uneducated.
It looks like Microsoft Word at some point had the convention that typing Ctrl-: followed by a vowel got the umlauted vowel:
https://resources.german.lsa.umich.edu/schreiben/umlaute/ https://www.novalutions.de/en/how-to-type-an-umlaut-in-micro... https://www.process.st/how-to/type-an-umlaut-in-microsoft-wo...
and IIRC something similar worked for Ctrl-' + e = é , Ctrl-` + a = à, Ctrl-~ + n = ñ, and so on.
So there's at least some association for (punctuation mark) + (vowel) = marked vowel and I could see people dropping the Control key and doing what's done here.
On further research, this appears to be Microsoft's attempt to do something like a Compose key (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compose_key#Common_compose_com...) which I had forgotten about. In turn this is sort of emulating a "dead key" on mechanical typewriters (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_key), although I can't tell if German typewriters actually had a dead key for the umlaut or if they actually had additional keys for ä, ö, ü like modern German keyboards do.
German typewriters generally had dedicated keys for the umlauts.
Windows however does offer a "English (international with dead keys)" keyboard layout that turns :, `, ^, etc into dead keys. Word offering the same at another level of abstraction sounds like a typical Microsoft thing
If it's the English international keyboard variant that I'm familiar with on either Windows or Linux, it's not : that is turned into a dead key but "
(Itś pretty annoying to write with if youŕe typing english, I can recommend toggling the keyboard layout (Alt+Shift in Windows by default) whenever you switch languages)
Fun fact: Because of compound words it's possible in German to create words with triple consonants like "Sauerstoffflasche".
And of course, one must mention https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gG62zay3kck
Google's auto translated subtitles are hopeless here.
I think that, whatever the German version of that has that makes it special, the Danish version has even more: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqmIR0nj9Cg
I think it's the faster pace that does it. Didn't know this gimmick worked in more than one language.
I wish I could have sent this wikipedia entry to Mark Twain. It would have been a fine addition to his "museum". I'm sure he would have been thrilled to hear about it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rinderkennzeichnungs-_und_Rind...
The currently longest word in the Duden is Aufmerksamkeitsdefizit-Hyperaktivitätsstörung (ADHS, German for ADHD).
It is interesting that after two world wars the stereotype of German was that of a hard and harsh language. I think Twain earlier take is more correct.
German is indeed a harsh language, filled with glottal stops and harsh consonants. The publicity doesn't help either, but it's mainly the phonemes.
Try to swear loudly and angrily in French, and try it in German. In German like you're cursing the world out of existence, in French it is like wiping your ass with silk.
Have you been to the French country side or listened to French rap? No silk, only gravel.
I have indeed, multiple times and for many years. I'm sorry, it still does not compare in my ears.
Just had some menonites come to my place to buy something last evening, and they confer amongst themselves in "low" german, which to my ear is much nicer sounding than the other variety. I also like the sound of Swiss speaking "swiser dutch", which has a bit of sing song whistly lilt, and is apparently incomprehensable to anyone who wasn't raised with it. A Canadian/german farmer down the road, did make much of his income translating german to english, mostly for technical manuals of equipment, but that work hss devolved into proof reading the automated translations, the whole translation industry having quietly been taken over. Though another recent experience in a high end, high volume cabinetry shop full of exotic german equipment, revealed that technical support is done from germany, and requires muliti lingual tech support people to do voice calls.....down time on a million dollar "saw" running at .1mm accuracy, bieng painfull
I grew up in Germany but haven't lived there for almost 45 years. I pride myself in still being fluent. And yet, this resonates.
Nominative--Mein gutER Freund, my good friend. Genitives--MeinES GutEN FreundES, of my good friend. Dative--MeinEM gutEN Freund, to my good friend. Accusative--MeinEN gutEN Freund, my good friend.
Typing German in an email or Whatsapp, sometimes I get these details wrong and sometimes (shame!) I have to try a Google Translate from English.
The other thing he makes fun of isn't that strange. Splitting "Abreisen" for example (to depart) is natural because it's a compound word in the first place. And more over, in the example, the admittedly funny "De .... [flood of words] ... parted" it's not even one word, it's two (reist ab). German does lend itself to gratuitous nesting of sentences, but that doesn't mean that good German has to.
The first and the last are the same (nominative, accusative). Do they mean the same in German also? Surely you can't just swap one out for the other?
Nominative is used for subjects and accusative for direct objects. In “I bit the dog” or “the dog bit me”, “I” is nominative whereas “me” is accusative.
Context. "Mein guter Freund" works in the context "he is my good friend". "Meinen guten Freund" works in the context "I like my good friend". You don't actually learn all those grammar rules as such (what the heck is "accusative" anyway), you just pick all this up by actually using the language.
Similarly "Meines guten Freundes" works in the context of "the house of my good friend" and "Meinem guten Freund" works in the context of "I offered a beer to my good friend".
moreover, haha.
As someone who had to learn German, I actually really appreciated the language being formatted quite like closure functions."I have 'noun' upon which 'verb'" with the pronoun and verb being the parentheses where you can then do stuff like f().g().h() where you chain the returned context: "Ich habe etwas getan, was mir schon immer Spaß gemacht hat und mir jedes Mal Freude bereitet, wenn ich daran denke."
Yes I do have a peeve about the numbering system that screws you over at the end, "Ten thousand, three hundred, four and twenty." Yes I know the French numbering is even worse.
German just makes sense to me programmatically. Unfortunately I no longer have much of any opportunity to practise nowadays outside of online language classes.
Everyone likes their mother tongue better, so does Mark Twain. No need to write a whole treatise about it.
Having lived 10+ years in Switzerland and having learned the language (and the local dialects), I really like German. But like many delicacies, it is an acquired taste.
> Everyone likes their mother tongue better
Speak for your own mother (tongue)! I think there are (many) better languages than my mother tongue but I haven't been able to convince the natives of this yet. The oscillate between catching on and regaining national pride (we're currently in a nationalism phase, where they're pushing to teach more in dutch again rather than a language everybody understands and needs for research and business anyway, source: https://www.universiteitenvannederland.nl/actueel/nieuws/uni...)
> But like many delicacies, it is an acquired taste
Why say lot word when two word do trick? Stockholm syndrome!
Twain is of course being satirical here, but I can tell that many people have an overly strict approach towards language learning. They expect rigid rules and get annoyed when the language does not adhere to them, yet they do not realize that these rules came after the language and they are most often a tool to teach and analyze it. What language instruction is supposed to achieve is providing one with a foundational understanding of language, just enough that immersion learning becomes possible. Since human language is a mix of logical thinking and fuzzy pattern matching, there is no other way to learn it completely than by pattern matching itself.
Languages learning curve can be very funny. Phonetic regularity plays a lot in this game, for instance. French and Italian are very similar languages (more than Italian and Spanish), yet they are so phonetically apart (with Italian at the extremes of regularity and French at the extremes of complexity) that it's complicated for Italians to learn French in the first steps: then the curve flattens a lot.
Italian itself is a strange beast. It is, perhaps, the most single latin language to learn for a random speaker of some other language, at least at a level where you can talk and understand decently, but it is almost impossible to master, even for Italians.
> but it is almost impossible to master, even for Italians.
Well depending on your definition of mastery, that's probably true for nearly every Western European national language since they all have some degree of artificiality and prescriptiveness. Officially, everyone from Lombardy to Calabria speaks "Italian" but what is actually spoken in each region will differ heavily from the national standard.
Thanks for creating Redis, by the way.
My first computer-related job was manually typing a part of an extensive German-Russian dictionary into text files. I was about 15, it was around 1990, scanners were a rare thing, and OCRs weren't a thing at all.
The resulting files should be space-aligned at some random column, like 30 or so, of the available 80. I still remember the translations of two words that were longer than that. One was "to attack the enemy in the night while wearing a camouflage robe". The other - "to descend carefully using an unreliable rope".
Robwords has a good video on this article! https://youtu.be/VcekIrFjwe0?si=4rZqHqunKa3epKQP
Twain also poked some fun at French, when he found a translation of his first successfully published story and mapped it back to English.
"The Jumping Frog: in English, then in French, and then Clawed Back into a Civilized Language Once More by Patient, Unremunerated Toil"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Celebrated_Jumping_Frog_of...
Rather odd hatred of German considering that English is in effect a regression of German (yes, I know, that simplifies it, but it’s true), i.e., a simplification.
It’s a typical kind of lashing out by hubristic people who reject complexity they cannot master with vigorous anger; kind of like how a child may call math stupid out of frustration. It’s probably a symptom of the jingoistic era, especially in trust-fund-baby-country called America.
German and English have a distant common ancestor (spoken roughly 2000 years ago) but neither is the ancestor of the other. There’s no meaningful scientific reason to say that German is the “main branch” of the Germanic languages and English is the “fork”.
Also, it’s not clear that either is “more complex” than the other across the board. German has more complex noun morphology (cases, etc) whereas English has more complex phonology, for example.
I do think English has deviated more from its Germanic roots due to the pervasive influence of French (there are people who call English a creole although I think that's taking it a bit far).
But I agree that languages with more complex morphology aren't somehow "better", that's just weird elitism coming from an era where every language was analysed as if it were some variant of Latin, Greek or Sanskrit.
> I do think English has deviated more from its Germanic roots
That’s fair, but so have German and many other Germanic languages. For example, Proto-Germanic had six cases whereas German only has four (and colloquially spoken German mostly only has three). Dutch has only vestigial remnants of a case system and Afrikaans has none at all.
The Norman invasion of England in 1066 led to extensive introduction of French vocabulary into English. That's a large part of the reason English has so many Latin cognates that you don't see in German (and German also has been purged of some Latin cognates at times as well).
keep in mind that the author is a comedian
LOL.
You're criticizing a satirical book excerpt written by Mark Twain in the middle of the 19th century. It is not meant in any way to be taken seriously, nor does it reflect modern American culture as a whole. Around 70 million Americans speak a second language.
The reason we're talking about it ~150 years later is because it resonates with anyone who has tried to learn a second language, especially one as complex as German.
You might want to keep your pompous kneejerk anti-American sentiment in check until you educate yourself a bit more.
You don't write something like this without being enchanted thoroughly by the language.
> simplification
Have you maybe considered the idea that a simplification might actually be an improvement?
As in: a language's first and foremost role is to communicate ideas and feelings as efficiently and clearly as possible, and with the broadest possible reach and not to impress the plebs with how sophisticated your sentences can become.
In that light, which of {English, German} best fits the bill in your opinion?
This very classical piece is nothing short of admirable.
Really funny, very well written, and most of all, while exaggerated: all true.
German is laden with a ton of fairly useless and purely ornamental flourishes, it's truly a pain to master.
Every step of the way, your mind is haunted by this recurring thought: "why in heaven's name would they inflict this to themselves?"
It's even worse than French if you count the number of genders.
The compositional powers of German, Dutch and plenty of other languages are really amazing. People invent words on the fly and promptly forget immediately after and the listener just understands what has been said. In my Dutch native language, we had the word "pausbaar" (which means something like "in possession of the necessary properties to become pope) coming up recently.
Ahhh, the recurring themes of popeability and pope-worthiness.
In some languages there is an actual word for this in the dictionary: papabile
https://de.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/papabile
Russian speakers can produce the same, basically its cognate, папабельный (papabelniy), using the borrowed suffix -bel- (same as -bile), and Russian suffix -n- (passive voice maybe), plus the ending.
Examlpe of pure Russian word: смотрибельный (smotribelniy) = watcheable. Root smotr- (Slavic root, "to watch") + suffix -bel-, + -n- + gender ending.
I bet the German -bar suffix and Latin -bil- are cognates.
This word is widely known in English too, at least among people who follow papal elections. I’m not sure whether it’d count as “an English word originally loaned from Italian” (like “pasta”) or “an Italian word that a lot of English-speakers recognize” (like “buongiorno”), but it is there — probably somewhere in between those two extremes.
Ah, I read "pausbaar" as the "ability to pause" since "pauzebaar" would be odd to say :')
if you want to build "ability to be paused" you would end up with "pauzeerbaar" from "pauzeren" (to pause)
ah yea, fair
also, I've noticed that French and Spanish speaking people have problems trying to perform the composition: "XY" and "YX" will end up meaning completely different things. fe DataRequest fe RequestData.
I would outlaw noun gendering globally. Does it serve any semantic purpose? It does damn good job at making learning unnecessarily difficult.
It adds some additional entropy without making the words themselves longer. This both helps when communicating over an imperfect communication channel, like talking in a noisy place.
A minor benefit is that references with words like "this" are less ambiguous when gendered, and you can unambiguously reference multiple things as long as they have different gender
They're very useful: if you use two nouns in a sentence chances are they're not the same gender. That makes referring back to them very easy as you can do that by gender only, without repeating the nouns or other complicated sentence structure.
It can be useful, but only in the off chance that they're of different genders. But all this is at the expense of canonically having assigned genders to nouns, which the speaker has no way to compute or derive. In other words, even if I know the very word I want to utter, I can't legally form the correct sentence until I know its gender. All things considered, to me, the cost outweighs the benefits.
> even if I know the very word I want to utter
The gender is part of the word. If you don’t know the gender, then no, you don’t know the word.
There is no way to compute that “dog” begins with the letter “d”, even if you know that the remainder is “og”. So should we ban words that begin with “d”? Of course not. In German you must memorize “der Hund”, not just “Hund”, just like in English you must memorize “dog”, not “_og with unspecified first letter”.
The spelling of the word, and its assigned gender, are two different things. Spelling makes you recognize the word. Gender doesn't contribute anything to semantics, is my point. It's not also the case that 'der' is merely a 3-letter prefix to any or every other word. It is rather irregularly applied, completely unrelated to the function the word serves. Not only that, the entire sentence has to be phrased differently depending on what the gender is. So, no: gender is not just longer spelling. Gender exists even if you decide not to write down the word.
Wait until you hear about adjective and verb gendering. ~
On a more serious note, it's a backwards compatibility thing. Taking a language with grammatical gender and removing it changes the way it looks and sounds rather drastically - more so for some than others. Needless to say, existing speakers are unlikely to appreciate it even if they don't care for gender qua gender.
(See also: numerous polls on how native Spanish speakers react to "Latinx" etc)
I feel like German compound nouns are just begging for ternary conditionals:
Was ist das für ein Raum?
Das ist mein Schläfrig?schlaf:wohnzimmer.
Writing is nothing but a translation of speech though. I'm afraid you'd need to have a leading example in speech that you want to encode before this has a chance of catching on even in a subculture :(
One of grading criteria for German B2 exam (mid-level in European framework) is Sprachgefühl, a feeling of (a feel for?) language. As mentioned earlier, if studying as an adult, you will probably keep making mistakes, but a lot just comes from being inside the German bubble.
I had no troubles with the things Twain laments. You can rather quickly learn (but not internalize) the rules, which are exactly the same as in other Indo-European languages. Compound past tense as in Romance languages. Declination like in Slavic, and in Instrumental case the ending is almost the same!
The biggest trouble nowadays with learning German is that all textbooks are DUMB and don't give enough practice. Basically they're tests on steroids. This is not the way you can internalize the grammar. You may know the rules, but still unable to use them correctly when speaking or writing.
All the books are shiny, with lots of drawings, photos, bells and whistles, even media content over an app, etc. But, as said, none of them contains enough excercise to practice grammar. Over last 6 years that I did an effort, I've never seen a textbook step away from this format.
Teaching by Goethe Institut is equally awful: most time you excercise by inserting just one word in a sentence spellt for you. When finally you reach speaking at length and not to the given pattern, everything falls apart, and you're told off: "oh, so many mistakes, go repeat the grammar rules." (No wonder most students choose the strategy to just speak at the kindergarten level. Das Bau ist grün. Berlin ist die Haupstadt Deutschlands. Ich möchte in einem Vorstadthaus leben.)
Germans! Admit, you conspired together to not let us learn your precious language!
Yes, I wish an equivalent of “Lingua latina per se illustrata” would exist in every language.
German is just statically typed :).
With a couple of macros and keywords that don't even try to fit into the otherwise sensible syntax.
A analytic language speaker discovers synthetic/fusional languages.
I see German, and I'm required by the law to leave this reference: https://youtu.be/l3_tRPRt9x8.
Hilarious, wish I would have seen this when I was studying German.
Reading the article I guess Mark Twain never had a knowledgeable teacher. Is there anything hacker news readers would like to know about the German language?
Can I refer to animals as 'them' instead of 'him' or 'her'? Die Katze draußen ist so Süß, ich möchte es unbedingt streicheln. I know that it's not considered correct but to me it feels even wronger to just assume it's a pussycat and not a tomcat. Would people actually mind if I do the more, ehm, to-me-logical thing? Does it take you out of what I'm saying, the way that reading "its you're cat" takes me out of a story?
usually not. You need to guess either cat or tomcat, that designates a grammatical sex. All references are based on grammatical sex. It is strongly emphasized that a grammatical sex is not the same thing as a natural sex.
It is ok to guess the sex of an animal wrong. The same way nobody (should) cares whether an infant is a boy or a girl.
You can enforce to be neutral be refering to "das Tier" and "das Kind". But since it is just a grammatical sex, why should anyone bother?
There are some culturally assumed defaults:
* a nurse is assumed to be feminine, unless the distinction is important
* a cat is assumed to be feminine, unless the distinction is important
Why do nouns have "random" articles attached to them? In latin languages like Portuguese the ending of the word tells you which article (masculine or feminine) to use, but in German only "die" has some rules. This is my biggest griped with the language and it's major flaw, when you pair that with adjective declensions and other sort of structures that rely on KNOWING which article to use.
The gender of a noun is just a noun class. But because Germanic languages lie more toward the analytic end of the morphological typology continuum (whereas Romance languages lie more toward the synthetical end) the information is latent - or rather, the task of conveying that information is left to other words (the articles).
Just imagine if someone studied Portuguese but learned vocabulary like this, never bothering with the ending vowel:
Similarly, 'die' should be considered an inherent part of 'Frau'. So don't learn just 'Frau', learn 'die Frau'. The article 'Die' is just as "random" as '-o' or '-a' is in Portuguese. (I'll skip the part where you can have a form of the word in both classes: gata/gato.) People like to try and find "rules" they can remember instead, but it's a pointless endeavor. Language is a Calvinball game.To make a weird tech analogy: Romance nouns are like laptops, with a touchpad built in. Germanic nouns are like desktops, you have to remember to carry a mouse* along.
* Die Maus
From a foreign learners perspective, it is easier to just learn the article together with the noun.
But there are rules for 2/3 of cases. https://sprachekulturkommunikation.com/genus-der-substantive...
You can classify by suffix.
* -ung, -heit, -keit -> feminin, e.g. die Schönheit
* -ling -> masculin, e.g. der Flüchtling
* -chen, -lein -> neutrum, e.g das Mädchen
You can classify by category. Every alcoholic drink is masculin, except for beer.
You can classify by phonetic spelling. That is probably the closest you have to Portugese.
> Every alcoholic drink is masculine
- das Piña Colada
- die Bowle
- die Weißschorl (ÖD: der weiße Spritzer)
That’s especially maddening because Spanish does have gender, and “piña colada” is feminine and even involves feminine gender agreement between the noun and the adjective.
> - das Piña Colada
Been living here for 35 years, and I'd have said "die Piña Colada".
> there are rules for 2/3 of cases
LOL.
And are they rules to remember which word falls in the 2/3rd ?
Nope, but it's not so different to irregular plural forms or verbs in english.
Afaik: At some point in the history of the language there would(?) have been rules for these nouns, but not today.
I'd love to see a good textbook with MANY excercises, where I have to say or write an entire sentence, not fill in a word, like in 100% textbooks I saw.
I guess that beginner text books need to focus on teaching you one feature at a time.
It could be better if you aim for C1 level text books. But since free exercises are hard to check, it is probably not meant for a book.
The example with the rain is wrong. It's either the proper "wegen des Regens" (Genitiv), or the new idiom "wegen dem Regen" (Dativ). "wegen den Regen" means something slightly different (more like: "because of _multiple_ rainfalls")
There's a whole book by Bastian Sick (famous German author) named "Der Dativ ist dem Genitiv sein Tod." -- the title about the Dativ being the death of the Genetiv is playing with that idiom.
https://languagetool.org/insights/de/beitrag/dativ-genitiv-s... -- it's in German and discusses the (perceived) change of that idiom.
As much as I like Twain, the English language is one of the hardest European languages, when it comes to pronunciation (contrary to Italian, which sticks to a few simple rules). So, you're welcome, choose your poison.
> "wegen den Regen" means something slightly different (more like: "because of _multiple_ rainfalls")
That's your natural feel of language, and you are deriving from casual use of Dativ plural ... but in these situations, Genitiv would be correct again (wegen DER Regen, but more clearly: wegen der Regenfälle, as Regen is uncountable (unlike, for example, Sturm/Stürme)).
Your example is vernacular German as spoken on the road, but grammatically, it is incorrect.
Yes, I am lots of fun at parties.
You sound like a prescriptivist ;)
I would argue (as a native speaker) that "wegen den Regen" is also possible and basically is equivalent to "wegen den Regenfällen".
Of course I am biased but I actually believe that there is no other language that is so elegantly conducive to precise thinking. And above confusing example is actually illustrating this. If thinking is a bit like moving around on a high-dimensional mental manifold then language is an imperfect projection onto a mostly serialized data structure but with referencing (maybe 1.x dimensional). (If you project something from n dimensions onto less than n dimensions you always lose information)
And with German you can explore this mental manifold in a depth and strictness like with no other language. Like entering a meta debug mode where you can form a sentence creating an implicit reprojection into the space where the manifold resides and then muse about how this makes sense.
I often find myself doing that and playing around with "understanding" a sentence in different ways. A simple example would be that you can take almost any German sentence and by stressing a different word the meaning subtly changes. An analogy could be those pictures where you see something and after looking long enough at it it looks different. For example a sketch of a 3D box which you can flip. At some point you can do this intentionally by applying an invisible switch. Same feeling with German statements.
But German has also some short comings especially in the emotional department. For example there are no good translations for "smile" and "to look forward to". Another language I dabbled in is Thai which is pretty much the total opposite of German - very fascinating and refreshing.
I just spent 10 minutes in the Grimm dictionary checking if there was ever a case where wegen would be followed by accusative....
Interestingly, they tend to say wegen comes from "von wegen" with the meaning of "by ways of" making genitive more evident.
> the English language is one of the hardest European languages, when it comes to pronunciation
I always found it weird, the vast difference between phonetics of English and literally EVERYBODY ELSE, including closely related German languages.
They're the only ones who were conquered by French speaking post-Vikings.
des Regens wegen FIFY
As someone who's learned a few (natural) languages over the years, German remains the only one that just instills me with a sense of dread, or maybe some sort of internal animosity. Russian? Sure. French? Yeah. English? Obviously. Japanese? Still in the kanji mines but making progress. Spanish? Sweet.
But German is a blood-and-tears uphill battle for me and I just can't get over it. It's really fascinating on some level.
I am a native German and had Russian as a second foreign language. Try applying Russian Grammar rules to German, you will find they are almost identical.
Verb prefix system is the same. Noun conjugation even uses the same prepositions to decide the case. Compound words are slighly different, instead of a tram-station you would use tramlike station.
For what is worth, I find the ugro-finnic trinity (Finnish, Estonian and Hungarian) a step down towards hell, compared to German, Russian and many other languages traditionally considered hard.
The main issue with learning German is that each grammar rule has a bunch of heavily used exceptions one needs to learn, making the language very illogical and more idiomatic. This leads to a sort of a neurosis when many native Germans are afraid to make any mistake themselves and often prefer not to speak up in order not to embarrass themselves.
Glad I learned it as a kid rather than adult. Seems like an absolute nightmare.
Though not quite chinese level
I would love to read "The Awful English Language" written in an alternative universe where Twain is German.
Is https://guidetogrammar.org/grammar/twain.htm not what you are looking for?
I'd expect a lot of moaning about how something is written and how it is spelled to appear to come from two different planets.
I think you're looking for the poem "the chaos" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chaos
https://ncf.idallen.com/english.html
Ghoti.
Fish?
slightly offtopic: I would be delighted if Tucholsky had written something hilarious along those lines. But he didn't as far as I know, he focused more on the German language himself.
https://www.eventpeople.de/aktuelles/eventmarket/ratschlaege...
previous https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27173967
German is by far the best language to swear in :)
I think you lack familiarity with Arabic.
I have a copy of this book in German.
Enjoying my schadenfreude
in a German newspaper they put their verb away over on the next page; and I have heard that sometimes after stringing along the exciting preliminaries and parentheses for a column or two, they get in a hurry and have to go to press without getting to the verb at all. Of course, then, the reader is left in a very exhausted and ignorant state.
(1880)
Twain's style was so accessible, it's easy to forget this essay is almost 150 years old.
Despite the offended Germans here, it is important to realize that Twain learned German well enough to perform (in German) in Germany, and was actually better known as basically the 19th-century version of a stand-up comic in America and Europe in his lifetime rather than the novelist he is remembered for now.
I didn't see any offended Germans! People seem to be taking the article in its intended (fun) spirit.
Edit: Seems true of the previous threads as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44002116
To add to this, I think Germans are usually the most chill about making fun of their own language. Well, I guess except English because it became so international.
If only Mark Twain knew the noble Germans would instigate a world war that killed the likes of 70 million people. So charming.
I guess, If you consolidate all articles in German to a single one, it loses almost nothing (noun genders) and becomes easier than English to learn.
Eeh you can downvote sure, but I actually tried to rewrite some German text with using an LLM and it ended up quite decent.