[HN Gopher] The Awful German Language (1880)
___________________________________________________________________
The Awful German Language (1880)
Author : 1cvmask
Score : 67 points
Date : 2021-05-16 14:32 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (faculty.georgetown.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (faculty.georgetown.edu)
| mplanchard wrote:
| This has always been a favorite. I also enjoyed this one about
| Chinese, which my wife sent me recently:
| http://pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html
| dang wrote:
| Ah yes - also one with some HN history:
|
| _Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard (1992)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18670031 - Dec 2018 (49
| comments)
|
| _Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard (1992)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7622432 - April 2014 (294
| comments)
|
| _Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1280348 - April 2010 (5
| comments)
|
| _Why Chinese is so damn hard_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=176498 - April 2008 (2
| comments)
| bombcar wrote:
| It's interesting to compare languages on how much you can
| simply ignore and still communicate - for example broken
| English where you don't conjugate anything can usually be
| deciphered and English spelled phonetically is pretty easy to
| read (even if all the words are spelled wrong).
| usr1106 wrote:
| One of the Twain's famous examples that language is full of
| exceptions and hard to learn is that the word for girl is neuter.
|
| However, that shows that he didn't understand things all that
| well. Or the message was more important than the facts. While in
| general gender does indeed not follow much logic and needs to be
| learned by heart it's not true for this class of words. For
| derived words the gender is determined by the kind of derivation.
| E. g. diminutives are always neuter, and so is the word for girl,
| which technically is a diminutive, even if today's speakers don't
| see it like that.
| q-big wrote:
| > One of the Twain's famous examples that language is full of
| exceptions and hard to learn is that the word for girl is
| neuter.
|
| This is logical: "Madchen" is a diminutive (as the prefix -chen
| shows). Diminutives are always neuter.
|
| "Mad[g]dchen" thus simply means "little maid [Magd: maid]".
| q-big wrote:
| Sorry for the typo: correct is of course "Ma[g]dchen".
| jan_Inkepa wrote:
| So right, if he knew more he could give better examples ('das
| Weib', a nowadays pejorative term for woman (related to 'wife'
| presumably) doesn't have that diminutive structure and is still
| neutral), but his point still stands? This feels like Gettier
| problem territory. :P
|
| > diminutives are always neuter
|
| I assume you mean to only talk about "-chen"-suffixed
| diminutives right? [ there are other kinds of diminutive
| construction in German that aren't neutral - e.g. -ling ,
| Zogling, takes masculine ]
| xg15 wrote:
| > _I assume you mean to only talk about "-chen"-suffixed
| diminutives right? [ there are other kinds of diminutive
| construction in German that aren't neutral - e.g. -ling ,
| Zogling, takes masculine ]_
|
| Which is even more fun as -ling is generally seen as _more_
| objectifying than -chen, even though -chen is neutral and
| -ling is male.
| wirrbel wrote:
| Also -ling is not so much a diminutive but more of a suffix
| for Nominalisation (Zogling stems from 'ziehen' [to
| raise],and refers to someone who was raised, Widerling from
| 'widerlich' [despicable], thus a despicable person,
| Schreiberling from 'schreiben' [to write], a Writer],
| Fruhling from 'fruh' early [spring]). Gives a somewhat
| pejorative connotation at times.
|
| The key misunderstanding here is of course that 'Genus' is
| not necessarily 'Sexus'.
| usr1106 wrote:
| -ling is always masculine (I would not call them diminutives,
| you cannot form them from many words)
|
| -chen and -lein (diminutives) are always neuter, they can be
| formed from many nouns
|
| -heit and -keit, and -ung are always feminine
|
| I don't claim that the gender has logical meaning. But for
| derived words the rules typically hold (I would not be
| suprised if a few exceptions could be found)
| riffraff wrote:
| I think your argument is somewhat invalidated by your last
| sentence: the world for girl is generally seen as a standalone
| word, and so it seems odd.
|
| Of course there is reason why is it so, but that is true for
| all oddities in every language: they made sense originally but
| as the new thing became the norm the origin of it is lost.
| wirrbel wrote:
| I am not sure that it is seen as standalone. Surely, one
| doesn't use "Maid" or other archaic terms from which
| "Madchen" is the derived word. But to me I am aware that its
| a diminutive. If I speak dialect I also use the dialectal
| diminutive (Madle). Of course to someone learning the
| language that level of understanding is hard to reach without
| immersion for years.
| kergonath wrote:
| > the world for girl is generally seen as a standalone word,
| and so it seems odd.
|
| That's the thing: language also change the way you see
| things. Native English people might find it strange for the
| reason you mention, but German people can find it normal,
| because it is a diminutive following the usual rules. It is
| not a "standalone word": it is a root and a suffix.
|
| It is not an oddity at all within the framework of the
| language (which has its share of irregularities already).
| Havoc wrote:
| Very glad I learned it as a kid...
| [deleted]
| locallost wrote:
| As someone who's had to (or maybe wanted to) learn both english
| and german, I'd say german has a steeper initial learning curve,
| but it becomes easier later, whereas english can be easy to get
| going, but it's difficult to master (obviously the spelling, but
| also the more advanced use of tenses etc).
|
| Regarding Twain's complaints, the biggest lesson I learned from
| learning german at an older age was: languages are nonsensical,
| illogical, and the sooner you stop trying to make sense of it
| all, the faster you will advance. Children do not learn languages
| by being analytical and by comparing to what they already know,
| they learn by just accepting it as it is. This leads to a funny
| phenomenon that foreign speakers know the actual rules of a
| language better than most native speakers, simply because native
| speakers know things are as they are, but not why. Whether adults
| are capable of this is a different question, but trying to find
| logic in a language will only lead to frustration.
| dang wrote:
| We changed the URL from
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Awful_German_Language. Please
| don't post Wikipedia links when the original source is easily
| available!
| dang wrote:
| One past discussion:
|
| _The Awful German Language (1880)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18147467 - Oct 2018 (311
| comments)
|
| But there are plenty of other threads where commenters have
| referenced it. For fun here are some:
|
| _Ghoti_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23581841 - June
| 2020 (239 comments)
|
| _On Truth and Lying in the Extra German Sense_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20232136 - June 2019 (52
| comments)
|
| _German for Programmers_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19109371 - Feb 2019 (253
| comments)
|
| _Shavian alphabet_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17844526 - Aug 2018 (113
| comments)
|
| _English is weirdly different from other languages_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14450379 - May 2017 (115
| comments)
|
| _Why the German language has so many great words_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11266465 - March 2016 (158
| comments)
|
| _How language gives your brain a break_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10002595 - Aug 2015 (40
| comments)
|
| _Why God Hates German Words_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2826507 - July 2011 (66
| comments)
|
| _Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo
| buffalo_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1097258 - Feb
| 2010 (69 comments)
|
| _Writing English as a Second Language_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1055465 - Jan 2010 (26
| comments)
| xg15 wrote:
| > _It is a bleak Day. Hear the Rain, how he pours, and the Hail,
| how he rattles; and see the Snow, how he drifts along, and oh the
| Mud, how deep he is! Ah the poor Fishwife, it is stuck fast in
| the Mire; it has dropped its Basket of Fishes; and its Hands have
| been cut by the Scales as it seized some of the falling
| Creatures; and one Scale has even got into its Eye. And it cannot
| get her out. It opens its Mouth to cry for Help; but if any Sound
| comes out of him, alas he is drowned by the raging of the Storm._
|
| As a german, accept my apologies.
|
| Though I don't get which word for "fishwife" exactly he was
| referring to that has a neutral gender.
|
| Closest translations that come to mind are "Fischersfrau",
| "Fischerin" - or even "Fischverkauferin" if you want to be
| bureaucratic. But all of these are grammatically female.
|
| _edit_ : TIL "Fischweib" is a well-established word (and indeed
| neutral). Wikipedia translates it to "mermaid" though, which
| doesn't really seem to fit the story.
| cies wrote:
| Das Fischweib
|
| Quite literally translated. "Weib" in German is more close to
| "broad" in English, it's often but not necessarily derogatory.
| amagasaki wrote:
| Perhaps "Weib" An outdated,today slightly pejorative, word for
| "Frau" But to me the term "das Fischerweib" doesn't sound
| familiar either, so I am not sure
| xg15 wrote:
| "Fischerweib" could work. Doesn't sound familiar to me
| either, but it's a valid compound word at least...
| tweitzel wrote:
| Das Fischweib auf dem Markte, welch' Ware bietet es wohl
| feil?
| holyknight wrote:
| i can relate
| sva_ wrote:
| See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18147467 (2018)
| gweinberg wrote:
| The article seems to miss the point that Twain was a humorist
| trying to be funny, not a linguist trying to write a serious
| criticism of a language's defects.
| dang wrote:
| We've since changed the URL. A Wikipedia article about another
| article that's easily available is not a good HN submission.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27177026
|
| Side note - in all the many times Twain's essay has come up on
| HN (partial list at
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27177031), I don't think
| I've ever seen a case of a German speaker taking offence at it
| or even reacting defensively. That's impressive! That is not
| how flamebait usually progresses. In most cases, the title
| would be enough to get hostile reactions, and the text too,
| despite that it's obviously in good fun and that only a serious
| student of German (and master humorist) could have written it.
| henrikschroder wrote:
| > Every noun has a gender, and there is no sense or system in
| distribution; so the gender of each must be learned separately
| and by heart. There is no other way. To do this one has to have a
| memory like a memorandum-book.
|
| And yet, every German speaker seems to be able to remember this,
| without evidence of them being better at memorization than
| others?
|
| As usual, it's easy to forget how hard things are for others when
| you're the expert. I'm sure Twain never thought about how
| ridiculously hard many English words are to spell, and how people
| learning English as a second language struggle quite a lot with
| it.
|
| But the thing is, with practice, we do learn these things. With
| practice speaking German, you'll learn and remember the gender of
| each noun, it simply becomes part of the noun itself. And with
| practice writing English, you'll learn the spelling - illogical
| as it is, it simply becomes part of the word itself.
|
| But looking at my language, I'm not so sure how much of this is
| pure memory. Swedish, like all Scandinavian languages, has four
| genders for nouns, but only one of them stick out and modify
| words and sentences. Being a native speaker, I of course _know_
| the gender for each noun, and you could argue that I have
| memorized this. But I can also properly gender new words. I can
| gender words I 've never heard before. I can construct new words,
| and gender them correctly as well, and have other Swedish
| speakers independently agree with me on what the gender of this
| new word is. So clearly there are rules, it's not the case that
| someone else decided the genders, and then everyone else had to
| memorize what this person arbitrarily chose.
|
| And I'm pretty sure German actually works the same way.
| FabHK wrote:
| > I'm sure Twain never thought about how ridiculously hard many
| English words are to spell
|
| I'm sure Twain was well aware of it, and wrote the article on
| the awful German language tongue in cheek for amusement, rather
| than as an actual complaint.
| yongjik wrote:
| In fact, English does something very similar. There's _a_
| bookshelf, but never _a_ furniture - you can say _a piece of_
| furniture if you want to be fancy. There 's _a_ cow, and cows,
| but never _a_ cattle, or even _cattles_. (What do you mean they
| are uncountable. They are freaking cows.) Then there are crazy
| stuff like _a pair of_ scissors. (I mean, has anyone seen _a
| scissor_?) Somehow native English speakers memorize all of
| this.
|
| At least genders are conceptually easy: given a word, you have
| one gender. (Though I'm sure there are complications.)
| MatmaRex wrote:
| That's called plurale tantum, and it appears in many European
| languages, including German.
| kergonath wrote:
| > As usual, it's easy to forget how hard things are for others
| when you're the expert. I'm sure Twain never thought about how
| ridiculously hard many English words are to spell, and how
| people learning English as a second language struggle quite a
| lot with it.
|
| Exactly. You most often cannot guess the gender of a noun in
| quite a lot of languages (German, Spanish, French, etc), but
| most of the time you also cannot guess how an English word is
| pronounced without having heard it before (and made the
| connection with the spelling, which is sometimes very tricky).
| aspaviento wrote:
| > You most often cannot guess the gender of a noun in quite a
| lot of languages
|
| That's far from true. In Spanish it's quite easy most of the
| time:
|
| Female form (-a): casa (House) taza (cup) armadura (armour)
| luna (moon) leona (lioness) escritora (female writer)
|
| Male form (-o/-or/-on): camion (truck) sillon (sofa) leon
| (lion) escritor (male writer)
|
| You don't even need the article to guess which one is which
| one.
| mejutoco wrote:
| You can very often guess the gender of a word in german using
| some heuristics. For instance, anything ending in -heit is
| feminine, and -chen neutral. I wrote an elaborate analysis os
| these heuristics (if someone is into this kind of thing)
| https://mejuto.co/statistical-grammar-guessing-a-german-noun...
| zvr wrote:
| Thanks for this link; it was very interesting!
|
| But you should take into account that some rules are more
| general expressions of others. For example, in your
| penultimate "(recommended)" table, there is no point in
| having both "-hen" and "-chen" for neutral, as the latter is
| a specialization of the former. Same for "-ung" and
| "-rung"/"-tung" in feminine.
| misja111 wrote:
| Could you tell something or give a link about that Swedish
| fourth gender? You made me interested when you wrote about it
| but I can't find anything about it on the Internet.
|
| E.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_in_Danish_and_Swedish
| mentions only 3 genders, and says that in modern Swedish two of
| those have merged so now there are only 2?
| henrikschroder wrote:
| All four genders are listed on that page: masculine,
| feminine, common, neuter. The first three are grammatically
| identical, but the fourth one sticks out.
|
| In English, the indefinite article is either a/an, depending
| on the vowel sound of the noun. In Swedish it's either
| en/ett, depending on the gender. Examples:
|
| en mus - a mouse
|
| ett hus - a house
|
| But the grammatical gender carries and modifies more things
| like the definite article (den/det) and every adjective.
|
| den musen - that mouse
|
| de _t_ huse _t_ - that house
|
| en gra mus - a grey mouse
|
| ett gra _tt_ hus - a grey house
| usr1106 wrote:
| > so now there are only 2?
|
| Correct, there is only en-ord and ett-ord and it has been so
| for centuries.
|
| There are 3 personal pronouns (One of them less than 20 years
| old for politically correct language to describe either woman
| or man.) But grammatically all 3 cause declensions like en-
| ord, so they don't form a different grammatical gender.
| henrikschroder wrote:
| Holy crap what a shit article, btw...
|
| > As a solution some feminists in Sweden have proposed to add
| a third class of gender-neutral pronouns for people.
|
| Uh, no, we borrowed it straight up from our neighbours in
| Finland, because Finnish doesn't have gendered third-person
| pronouns!
|
| As an added bonus, "hen" slots in perfectly among the other
| two pronouns (han/hon), it follows broad vowel rules for
| gender, and it's perfectly understandable even if you've
| never seen the word used before.
| merb wrote:
| > And yet, every German speaker seems to be able to remember
| this, without evidence of them being better at memorization
| than others?
|
| actually we don't the system is so stupid that we try to remove
| the gender altogether or try to make stupid words like "der
| Student"/"die Studentin" because Mark Twain tought it is only a
| linguistic gender, but unfortunatly a lot of people do not
| think that our gender is only linguistic, that's why we try to
| re-gender a lot of words. sometimes by splitting it into two,
| sometimes by using special characters. Our language reforms do
| not make it easier, they make it worse.
|
| to make it easy, for us we learn "der tisch" and not just
| "tisch" so the noun is learned aswell.
| turbinerneiter wrote:
| It's our revenge for the "th", my dear Englishman.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| so, German grammarians, irritated by a defect of English,
| debated long among themselves as to how they could mess up
| their own language in revenge?
| turbinerneiter wrote:
| Yes, sadly we lost our ability to tell jokes in the process.
| forinti wrote:
| I find it hilarious that my compatriots try so hard to learn to
| pronounce the th when a good many brits just use an f sound.
| kergonath wrote:
| What you mean bruv?
| scythe wrote:
| Historically, this sound was denoted by a letter called _thorn_
| (Th, th), which you may find poetically appropriate.
| chddzcc wrote:
| Is "th" the fault of Englishmen or of a German?
|
| Specifically Gutenburg and his hellish press. Before movable
| type English had the letter "thorn" - perhaps some of the
| pronunciation problems arose then?
|
| But what do I know? As a nativ spanich spikr, I rimembr bing
| prplexd
| imtringued wrote:
| That doesn't make sense. Typesets are just symbols carved
| into metal. You can just make your own typeset for your own
| language and in this case all it required was one more letter
| so the barrier to entry is practically zero.
| wirrbel wrote:
| IIRC the movable type printing press was imported from the
| continent when printing in England started, and by
| importing that includes the typesets and staff to operate
| the printing presses. French printers typesetting English
| text were not very motivated to establish extra characters.
|
| Random related anecdote: For years the Mormons would
| distribute their Book of Mormon in German translations but
| these were printed overseas and they didn't have the 'ss'
| character, so they used the greek letter b to substitute
| 'dab' instead of 'dass', etc. We tend to forget living in
| the digital publishing age how limiting mechanical
| workflows can be.
| coinerone wrote:
| Learning the correct pronunciation of "th" was tough though. :)
| advanced-DnD wrote:
| 1. Push your tongue against your upper inner-teeth.
|
| 2. Let out all the air out until your tongue separates said
| teeth
| turbinerneiter wrote:
| I can do it on individual words, but as soon as I speak in
| full sentences and with speed, it comes out however it wants.
|
| Though and tough aren't a problem though, "thinking" in the
| middle of a sentence is real tough though.
| thesuperbigfrog wrote:
| English pronunciation only vaguely follows word spelling and must
| be memorized in many cases. The classic phrase:
|
| "A rough-coated, dough-faced, thoughtful ploughman strode through
| the streets of Scarborough; after falling into a slough, he
| coughed and hiccoughed."
|
| shows how the "-ough" has no reasonable rule that can be used to
| determine word pronunciation, despite similar spelling.
|
| By comparison, spelling and word pronunciation in Spanish and
| Italian (and probably many others as well) match exactly. You
| know how to spell a word from the way it sounds. You can easily
| read aloud written text and have little to no idea what it means.
| hinoki wrote:
| You should have used Loughborough instead of Scarborough :)
|
| Low-barrow? Luf-baruff? I certainly had to look it up.
| rsj_hn wrote:
| The thing is, there _are_ rules and explanations for
| everything, but they are not the kind of rules that would help
| a foreigner learn the language. They are the rules of languages
| and orthography being transformed as a result of waves of
| invasions, with each invader bringing their own language and
| changing the pronounciation of some of the native words, to be
| replaced by another invader doing the same.
|
| This is not unique to English, but I do think that English is
| more eclectic than most other languages.
| Digit-Al wrote:
| My favourite joke about that sort of thing is how following the
| exact rules of the English language "ghoti" is a perfectly
| valid spelling of fish :-)
| snapetom wrote:
| English is my second language. I took German throughout middle
| school and high school. I did alright with it. When I went to
| college, I decided to switch it up and take French.
|
| I could not get it. At all. Part of it was an extremely easy
| first semester professor followed by an awful, hard second
| semester professor. However, it just never, ever clicked with me.
| I went back to German to satisfy my two year college requirement.
|
| Later, upon reflection, I realized that I am heavily reliant on
| knowing grammar rules, and French was just too much of a change
| from German/English. Sure, German's verb conjugations and genders
| were new to an English speaker. However, because of the similar
| grammar, German was a lot easier for me to pick up than anything
| I've seen since.
| wirrbel wrote:
| Its funny how sometimes 'antiquated' English text uses word
| order that is so similar to German ('When I Was One-and-
| Twenty'... etc). Sometimes when I read such stuff, I get the
| feeling that my English teacher might have marked the sentence
| as incorrect or 'sounding to German'.
| bumbada wrote:
| For those that learn a new language, it is a good idea to suspend
| criticism on the language while you learn it.
|
| Every language has its pains. German using Sein and haven for
| auxiliary verbs in the past makes things way more complicated to
| learn. Not to talk about the irregularities of the past
| participle of verbs(that are not used in speech) that makes
| reading and writing way harder.
|
| But if you focus your mind on that you will for sure stop
| learning the language because you will have an excuse. The fact
| is that you could learn it like Germans could too, and in the end
| English is part germanic.
|
| And you can cheat. I learned Mandarin very fast, simplified and
| traditional script, which is crazy for most people because I
| cheated. I created my own software tools of spaced repetition
| software and because as a foreigner I did not have to follow the
| rules like Chinese nationals do.
|
| For example, Chinese take the order of writing characters and the
| process itself as sacred. For Chinese there is only one way of
| writing a character, but it doesn't need to be that way, you can
| cheat and learn to identify most important symbols you find on
| the street fast. The order and calligraphy is secondary.
|
| Ironically, the faster you use a language and can read things,
| the faster you will be able to write it. Just blocking yourself
| not being able to read a newspaper or novel because you can not
| write perfectly a symbol does not make sense.
|
| The phonetics of Mandarin unless you create software to repeat
| and repeat and repeat every day is simply impossible for any
| adult foreigner, because we as children have not learned the
| basic sounds. German phonetics by comparison is trivial in a
| tenth of the time.
| for1nner wrote:
| > The phonetics of Mandarin unless you create software to
| repeat and repeat and repeat every day is simply impossible for
| any adult foreigner, because we as children have not learned
| the basic sounds. German phonetics by comparison is trivial in
| a tenth of the time.
|
| I'm not sure what you mean by this - that is very much person-
| dependent. As a primary English speaker, I was near-fluent in
| German before attempting Mandarin, and I found the inflection
| and tonal side of the language relatively trivial, whereas
| writing/reading (and generally rote vocabulary) have always
| been a struggle for me (similar experience across attempts to
| learn Latin, German, French, and Mandarin).
| j4yav wrote:
| As a student of Dutch I empathize with some of these. Though it
| is pretty cool that, if you stick with it, your brain is capable
| of reshaping itself into these new forms. Even as an adult - I
| started learning it at around 35.
| greatpatton wrote:
| German has a difficult grammar (was a real pain when learning
| German as a kid) but at least when reading German you know how to
| pronounce it, English pronunciation like German gender must be
| learn by heart :)
| TomAnthony wrote:
| Alas, that isn't as true as German's tell me it is, I find.
|
| "Weg" <- how do you pronounce this?
|
| "Geh weg" (go away) "Der Weg ist da druben!" (the path is over
| there)
| advanced-DnD wrote:
| Once you learnt the phonetics for the alphabet, you'll find
| German is pretty consistence.
|
| I don't know what you're trying convey in your examples
| though, because all the example have consistent
| pronunciation. Inconsistence pronunciation often because it
| is borrowed words from French (das Experiment (Ex-pe-ri-
| mo'n?)) or English (das Schedule, informal vocab.)
| seritools wrote:
| Weg != weg, so it's pretty clear.
|
| You missed "Gehweg" (sidewalk) though. :^)
| usr1106 wrote:
| There are some exceptions, sure.
|
| But German pronunciation is 80% simple and regular at least
| whereas English is more like 80% complicated and irregular.
| pacaro wrote:
| Compound words do have the potential to throw this for a
| loop. The pronunciation is regular if you can decompose the
| word, but if you miss where the word boundaries are all
| bets are off. For example "linkshandig"
| usr1106 wrote:
| > German has a difficult grammar
|
| I am not sure whether this can be objectively measured. All
| kids learn (at least) one language the natural way. I have the
| strong feeling that related languages will always be easier for
| them.
|
| I speak English as a foreign language. I don't think articles
| in English are a challenge. It's the USA, but not the France. I
| can feel the cold or a cold and know the difference. I don't
| know many rules, it's mostly like I would use them in my mother
| tongue.
|
| I have many colleagues, whose mother tongue does not know
| articles at all. If they write a page of text, there are often
| a dozen of mistakes related to articles to correct.
|
| But it's not that I would just be smarter. I have spoken
| another foreign language daily for over 25 years. I speak
| fluently and can make myself fully understood. Still I make
| quite some mistakes all the time.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| Unsurprisingly, there are many articles published about _" The
| Awful English Language"_, such as: [1], [2], [3]
|
| Some examples from [2]:
|
| _Let 's face it -- English is a crazy language. Besides the
| above, there is no egg in eggplant, nor ham in hamburger; neither
| apple nor pine in pineapple. English muffins weren't invented in
| England or French fries in France. Sweetmeats are candies while
| sweetbreads, which aren't sweet, are meat._
|
| _We tend to take English for granted. But if we explore its
| paradoxes, we find that quicksand can work slowly, boxing rings
| are square and a guinea pig is neither from Guinea nor is it a
| pig. And why is it that writers write but fingers don 't fing,
| grocers don't groce and hammers don't ham?_
|
| _If the plural of tooth is teeth, why isn 't the plural of booth
| beeth? One goose, two geese. So one moose, two meese? One index,
| two indices? Doesn't it seem crazy that you can make amends but
| not one amend? If you have a bunch of odds and ends and get rid
| of all but one of them, what do you call it? If teachers taught,
| why didn't preachers praught? If a vegetarian eats vegetables,
| what does a humanitarian eat?_
|
| [1] -
| https://www.angelo.edu/faculty/kboudrea/cheap/cheap3_english...
|
| [2] - https://neth.de/Interact/Sprachspiele/homowords.html
|
| [3] - https://ronaldyatesbooks.com/2017/03/the-awful-english-
| langu...
| russellbeattie wrote:
| I have to admit still being confused about sweetmeats. If a
| Brit uses the word, are they talking about a specific _type_ of
| candy, made in a specific way, from a specific type of shop?
| Does it need to be baked? Or have flour? Or does a Snickers bar
| count as a sweetmeat? Or a gumdrop? Hard candy? Or is it more
| like something from a bakery? Indian sweetmeats also seems to
| be a thing (from an image search right now). What 's the
| difference, if any? Is any of this related to Turkish Delights?
|
| I don't understand the _connotation_ of the word, as much as
| the meaning of it.
| cameronh90 wrote:
| As a Brit, I've never heard of sweetmeats. Is it not an
| American thing?
| yrro wrote:
| Quicksand is quick in that it seems to be living. See also
| quicksilver, another name for mercury.
| tralarpa wrote:
| Fun fact: the words "quick" and "zoo" have the same indo-
| european root.
| forinti wrote:
| If you look at an eggplant in its early stages, you will
| understand the name.
| imtringued wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6v9hvK3rdxA
|
| So nope, not "an" eggplant, some eggplants, and those only
| may look like eggs in their early stages. They may also look
| like plums. Do we call the purple eggplants plumplants
| because they resemble plums at some indeterminate stage in
| their growth?
| burnished wrote:
| ..do you not?
| blahedo wrote:
| More importantly, they were _historically_ egg-shaped and
| (off-)white; the large and phallic purple variant that now
| dominates is the result of selective breeding over centuries.
| OJFord wrote:
| > Sweetmeats are candies while sweetbreads, which aren't sweet,
| are meat.
|
| My favourite one, which I had the er pleasure of trying to
| explain to a vegetarian unfamiliar with mince pies; which might
| also be British English-specific is:
|
| - mince is meat * but mince *pies* contain no
| meat
|
| - mincemeat is not meat * and is the key
| ingredient in mince pies
|
| - minced meat is meat * and =mince *
| and could be used in the making of a pie * which
| would be extremely different from a mince pie
| ojosilva wrote:
| Mincemeat used to contain beef. Now, typically, it doesn't,
| although I recall having mince pie with beef and brandy in
| Swindon in another life.
|
| So maybe this is not good example of English being like a
| Mark Twain's German schizo language. Gastro-culture changed
| on it and the folks at Merriem-Webster didn't get the email,
| that's all.
| memsom wrote:
| Are you sure that is it? Meat[1] used to mean food in
| general. In Swedish, the cognate would be "mat", and that
| still means meat, much like hund (hound) means dog, and
| djyr (deer) means animal. I rather thought that meat in
| mincemeat was from "minced [sweet]meat". Or, just "minced
| food".
|
| [1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/meat#English
| NaturalPhallacy wrote:
| >boxing rings are square
|
| They used to be round!
| nine_k wrote:
| But now they are box-shaped!
| sorokod wrote:
| and books, e.g. "Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue"
| Causality1 wrote:
| McWhorter's an amazing author. Highly recommend getting any
| of his audiobooks.
| LatteLazy wrote:
| English is this way because it doesn't really exist.
|
| English started as old German. Then vowels shifted. Then the
| Normans arrived and added a lot of French words on top. When
| German grammar proved too hard for them that was simplified
| too.
|
| On top of all that is a bunch of Latin and Greek added when
| England lead the scientific and industrial revolutions (in part
| because English couldn't logically supply words for new
| things). These kept their own rules grammatically. Or they
| didn't, pretty much randomly.
|
| None of these jobs were ever "finished", so nouns in English
| don't have genders (like they would in German) but actually
| some do still (mainly pronouns) and some words right next to
| each other come from different languages (Cow is German, Beef
| is French hence they sound nothing alike).
|
| Since England has not been conqoured or undergone unification
| since before all this started (except for the Norman conquests
| which were part of this) nothing has every been standardised.
| This is why spelling English words is all but impossible
| (German words are spelt almost exactly as they sound, English
| words almost never as they sound, you just have to memorise
| them, ALL of them).
|
| Compare this to German or French with logical spelling, strict,
| consistency in grammar and single root languages.
|
| English really is awful and quite an unusual language.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| English did not start off as "old German", that's factually
| incorrect. It started off as Old English aka Anglo-Saxon,
| that is the languages of the Saxons, Angles, and Jutes which
| emmigrated from the north sea and areas which are now in the
| Netherlands, Denmark and Schleswig Holstein. Not the same as
| "old German" which would be Old High Franconian, an entirely
| different branch of the Germanic family.
|
| German and English have almost 2000 years of separation. More
| than Italian and French and Spanish.
|
| But yes Old Norman (and Old Norse) modified the language
| extensively.
| [deleted]
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