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Heh, its honestly not that bad of a language, and has undergone two reforms (maybe 3? I forget) since this document was created. The "awful" parts of German ar
by mitchty 8y ago
Heh, its honestly not that bad of a language, and has undergone two reforms (maybe 3? I forget) since this document was created.
The "awful" parts of German are in some ways its saving grace. Example: surfing is Wellenreiten, literally wave-riding or riding waves. This whole thing is all over German with compound words.
Its really no different conceptually from "the old blue car" in English, its just mashed together as a single compound word without spaces. You get used to it fast and then get to (maybe) impress your friends by belting out insanely long words in German.
- louisswiss 8y agoThose aren't the awful parts though, really. I would do away with the 'formal' form of addressing people (Germans have two ways of saying 'you') which serves no real purpose. I'd also get rid of gendered articles and finally simplify word endings (adjective endings can go for a start)!
- kaybe 8y agoMany people feel that having a formal way to address people is useful. It allows you to express very quickly how close you want to have them to you. A stranger you don't like? Formal. A stranger who seems to be your own age and from similar circumstances? Try using non-formal and see how they react. The most beautiful form of this is 'Sie Arschloch', I think. At the same time kind of polite and a rude insult.
- wolfgke 8y ago> Many people feel that the having a formal way to address people is useful. It allows you to express very quickly how close you want to have them to you. A stranger you don't like? Formal. A stranger who seems to be your own age and from similar circumstances? Try using non-formal and see how they react. Or when a couple came apart (in conflict). He started to formulate the letters/emails in a overly formal addressing - she was really furious about that, because this sent a clear message to her.
- balfirevic 8y agoMy native language has that distinction and I have never found it useful - it's nuisance at best. I'm thankful it's something I don't have to think about when speaking in English.
- et2o 8y agoAnd two more for plural "you" since (ihr and overloaded Sie). I like having a second person plural. I sometimes say "you guys" (although this is becoming less acceptable) or "you all" since we don't have one.
- cfallin 8y agoSome of the compound words are really quite funny, too... two of my favorites, randomly encountered recently: gloves/mittens are "Handschuhe" (hand shoes), and a porcupine is "Stachelschwein" (spike/quill pig). Very intuitive actually!
- mishac 8y agoPorcupine is the same thing, just using latinate roots rather than native English/Germanic ones.
- cfallin 8y agoAh, yes, that makes perfect sense! So many word roots hiding in plain sight...
- acjacobson 8y agoDitto for Hippopotamus (Greek base for River Horse) and the German Nilpferd - Nile Horse.
- novembermike 8y agoA lot of stuff is like this. If you replace Geology with Rocklore then it sounds kind of weird but it's basically what it was in Greek.
- pantalaimon 8y agoSee also: this old essay about "Uncleftish Beholding" (Atomic Theory) - English without the non-Germanic words. https://groups.google.com/forum/message/raw?msg=alt.language.artificial/ZL4e3fD7eW0/_7p8bKwLJWkJ https://groups.google.com/forum/message/raw?msg=alt.language...
- thaumasiotes 8y agoRocklore would be lithology or petrology. Geology is the study of the earth.
- NeedMoreTea 8y ago
- k__ 8y agoTo me, as a Germany, it felt rather strange that in English it isn't the same. Like, why would you add a space between two words that are meant to be read together?
- schoen 8y agoOne answer is parsing ambiguities. https://german.stackexchange.com/questions/1705/w%c3%b6rter-mit-ung%c3%bcnstiger-silbentrennung https://german.stackexchange.com/questions/1705/w%c3%b6rter-... (replaced with better link) English has tons of ambiguities, including many possible parsing ambiguities of this kind, but written English would have many more ambiguities without a delimiter between words.
- yorwba 8y agoSeparating parts of compounds by spaces prevents ambiguous decompositions, but allows ambiguous groupings. (Like "Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana.", which would be less confusing if "fruit flies" were written "fruitflies" or at least "fruit-flies".) I'm not sure which is worse.
- jacobush 8y agoIt makes for a different intended, pun, kind of?
- schoen 8y agoI had the intuition that the spaces strictly decreased ambiguity, but your point makes me really unsure of this. But written German already distinguishes nouns from verbs with capitalization; can the grouping problem be made worse by spaces in the absence of ambiguities about which part of speech a word is? (Obviously the German convention doesn't totally eliminate all such ambiguities, since "wie" 'like (preposition)' and "mögen" 'like (verb)' are both lower case, although "Fliegen" 'flies (insects) and "fliegen" 'flies (verb)' can be distinguished sufficiently to remove the specific kind of ambiguity present in this particular sentence even if "wie" and "mögen" were homonyms.) (corrected thanks to commenter below!)
- emsy 8y agoThen there are also slightly funny ones -plane / Flugzeug / flight stuff -lighter / Feuerzeug / fire stuff -light bulb / Glühbirne / Glow pear -eyeball / Augapfel / Eye apple
- jacobush 8y agoYes, yes, but to my ear, "zeug" feels closer to "thing" than "stuff" in these examples. That's no less funny.
- the8472 8y ago-zeug indicates that it is a set of things. Historically the fire stuff has been a set of tools to make fire. Zaumzeug was the set of gear you put on a horse etc.
- tomjakubowski 8y agoTexas German has a less funny word for airplane: Luftschiff.
- kaybe 8y agoI think that would be an airship - zeppelin.
- hoppelhase 8y agoA Luftschiff is not an airplane, it's a Zeppelin because it floats in the air like a ship in the water.
- anoncake 8y agoMaybe it is in Texas German
- v_lisivka 8y agoYeah, English is funny language. - plane - flat surface - lighter - a lamp - light bulb - empty bulb - eyeball - a sport (Non-native speaker).
- Tehnix 8y agoEh, it's not anything like it. German is very different from English, especially in the way you position the verbs. It's a rather silly example, with one word. Following that logic, French would be a lot easier for anything English speaking person, with all their words that are 90% equivalent to their English counterparts
- tomjakubowski 8y agoThe hardest part of reading (not-simplified) German for me, as a sadly monolingual English speaker, is the word order. At times you have to sort of keep a mental stack of all the dative / accusative case nouns as you read, and then as you encounter the verbs at end of the sentence you kinda pop the nouns off that stack and piece together what's happening. Reading Spanish has no such difficulty for me. The word order is much more like in English.
- ummonk 8y agoYup. SOV word order is natural conceptually and generally has less ambiguity in parsing, but the working memory requirements are really high. This is why simplified modern languages tend to shift to SVO word order. It is similar to how math operators are written in infix which makes equations easier to read than if we had written then as postfix.
- jhasse 8y agobtw: "Surfen" is a lot more common than "Wellenreiten" in Germany.
- tomjakubowski 8y agoYes, just ask any of the friendly and very patient surfers waiting their turn for the standing waves in Munich's Eisbach.
- TulliusCicero 8y agoI always have a little internal chuckle when I hear "gedownloadet". I realize that English does the same thing (uses English rules for pluralization/verb modifiers for foreign loanwords), but for some reason it just sounds really funny to me.