12 ms·

English grammar is far simpler than German grammar. Eliminating noun genders, declensions, and cases (as English does) is a great simplification over German. I'

by apo 8y ago

English grammar is far simpler than German grammar. Eliminating noun genders, declensions, and cases (as English does) is a great simplification over German. I've never understood the need for noun genders and I scratch my head at a society that makes its members memorize such useless information. That said, German pronunciation is more regular than English pronunciation. Every letter combination is in most cases pronounced exactly the same in every word. Take, for example, the vowel combination "ie." No matter where you see it in a German word, it will be pronounced "ee". Likewise, the combination "ei" will always be pronounced "eye." Contrast this with the scattershot pronunciations English has for the same combinations: "Neighbor" uses "ay". "Albeit" and "Atheist" uses "ee-i". "Caffeine" uses "ee". And so on.

acomjean 8y ago
I often wonder if all that extra grammatical baggage and more rigid pronouciation would make it easier for a computer to understand german over english.
LolNoGenerics 8y ago
Just today I had a chat with a friend about a movie named "rogue one". Roug, Rook, Roug, Rook. If feel quite fit writing english but talking - as someone with very litte practice - drives me mad.
- azernik 8y ago
  That specific example points to the root cause of most English pronunciation weirdness - an insistence on preserving original spelling for loanwords even if they come from languages with very different orthography. "Rogue" and "chef" are both French loanwords that English still spells as if they were French, not to mention all the Latin loanwords that still give middle-schoolers endless pain.
  - howeman 8y ago
    Interestingly, "chief" is the same word as "chef" just imported from the Normans. French had a consonant shift, while English did not, and then imported the word again with the new pronunciation and spelling.
    - anoncake 8y ago
      A consonant shift from "ie" to "e"?
      - azernik 8y ago
        That vowel shift is not from French, but rather part of the English Great Vowel Shift [1]. The original loanword from Medieval Norman French to Middle English was /tʃeːf/ (spelled "chef"), compared to the re-borrowed /ʃɛf/. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift
  - posterboy 8y ago
    Like fashion and law, spelling and pronounciation are a sign of status. It's not supposed to be easy. From another point of view, what does the state of the orthografy say about the authorities, are they lenient, chaotic ... speaking a different language? School children are very low in the social hierarchy, of course, because they cannot defend themselves. Of course they are going to be oppressed when they note that there's no system behind and when they say it's too complicated they will be called lazy. The parents had to wade to shit, so they don't even notice the smell anymore, and now the children have to, too. On the other hand, conservative orthography can help to learn the related languages (ie. French, Latin), serve as interesting step into history, exercise memory, and what not. There could be no regular spelling. That's an illusory proposition, given the breadth of dialects that exist. So next you will require all the poor children to learn a new dialect, basically. Is that any better? It would be a loss of diversity, each one preserving a little bit of historic language development - and status. It's really a shame that status varies. Learning a language properly might give some stability.
maw 8y ago
> English grammar is far simpler than German grammar. How do you negate in English? How does one eloquently and idiomatically combine English modal verbs? What are the rules governing when and how English deviates from SVO? Whom is still a word in English; how do its corner cases work? I could go on. In other words, maybe English's grammar is simpler than German's and maybe it isn't, but it definitely isn't as clear-cut as you make it out to be.
ThJ 8y ago
I'm a native speaker of Norwegian, a language which also has three grammatical genders. I don't experience it as having to memorise genders. I only notice them when they are wrong. They're not completely useless. "Det regner." - It's raining. "Den regner." - It's calculating. The verb "regne" is ambiguous and the gender helps disambiguate ut. Sometimes, the grammatical gender conveys information about the noun. Is it abstract or inanimate? Probably neuter. Is it alive? Can it move? Probably masculine or feminine. Sometimes, when a follow-on sentence discusses previously introduced objects, gendered articles can clue you onto which objects are being discussed.
- samatman 8y ago
  There is no critique of a language's difficulty which is relevant to native speakers.
- modernerd 8y ago
  There are homonyms in languages with genderless nouns too, such as English, but context usually makes it clear. It's hard to imagine a real-world situation where “it's raining” would be confused with “it's calculating” when stripped of the gender, for example. > Sometimes, when a follow-on sentence discusses previously introduced objects, gendered articles can clue you onto which objects are being discussed. That's the best argument I've heard so far, but it's so rare to require gender for comprehension. It seems a push to burden a whole language with gendered nouns for this purpose.
- Zak 8y ago
  Regardless of the potential use for disambiguation, every noun having a gender affecting the articles and pronouns to be used adds a significant burden when learning the language. In some languages, like Spanish, the spelling of the noun nearly always indicates its gender, but this is not the case in German. Acquiring a language as a native speaker in childhood is a significantly different experience from trying to learn one as an adult.
interfixus 8y ago
> a society that makes its members memorize such useless information That is a really strange angle on the subject of native language. If there's any language my society has made me learn, it's the one I'm writing now, my second (and absolutely indispensable) one. The gendering of nouns (in my national case, two genders) and sundry other weird historical linguistic baggage is just the way things are and ever were.
kingofpandora 8y ago
> I've never understood the need for noun genders What a peculiar comment. It's like saying, what's the use of termites? No, seriously, why _do_ we have termites? Do we really need termites?
- pretendscholar 8y ago
  Recycling tree matter in the woods.
- bobogei81123 8y ago
  If someone is creating a new language now, that is a concept that would definitely not be included.
  - trhway 8y ago
    Or may be there would be more than 3 genders.
  - kingofpandora 8y ago
    > If someone is creating a new language now, that is a concept that would definitely not be included. Natural languages aren't designed, which is why the comment above is so odd.
hv42 8y ago
What's really killing me is that the genders don't matter when you have a plural form. It's all the same (ie. using "die" and the plural cases) In Spanish or French for eg. you still have gender marks (los/Las for eg.) with the plural form but in German, it's all the same. That makes me wonder why it's so necessary to have genders in the first place since the German plural doesn't have marks of it and it doesn't hurt understanding.
- kayoone 8y ago
  It's not necessary and as a native german it is something i can totally live with if foreigners get it wrong in conversations. Even people with years of being fluent in germany still ocassionally screw them up. In a similar way i always struggle pronouncing words like "caffeine, beard, deteriorate" etc after years of speaking english at work.
taneq 8y ago
> I've never understood the need for noun genders and I scratch my head at a society that makes its members memorize such useless information. A lot of redundancy in human languages seems to be related to disambiguation and error correction.
- analog31 8y ago
  Indeed, I once read an article about the Iliad, in which it claimed that the combination of the rhythm and other poetic features made it harder to screw up when reciting from memory.
stewbrew 8y ago
You're mosly right about pronouciation but German pronouncation isn't as regular as e.g. Spanish or Italian. In German you have open and close vowels, i.e. the "e" can sound slightly different depending on its position in a word. There is some variation between local dialects though. IMHO the need for genders, cases etc. becomes obvious in spoken language where these things serve to guide the listener's expecations. "Simpler" languages often use redundant wording, formulaic constructions to make up for them.
delib 8y ago
> I scratch my head at a society that makes its members memorize such useless information. Such a weird perspective on language and on the agency of societies. There are tons of "useless" things in any language. For instance, why not get rid of all the tenses in English? Do we really need the past progressive? To make English spelling more "logical" (so people need to remember less useless information!), we should again look to Mark Twain: > Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld. (http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/twain.htm http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/twain.htm)
- marcus_holmes 8y ago
  I recently started learning Khmer (Cambodian). It's an awesome language. No tenses (all assumed from context... if something happened in the past, you say it happened "already", and there's a single modifier to all verbs to indicate they will happen). No genders, at all (there's no "he/she/they" problem). The numbering system is simple adn consistent, and it's applied to months and hours ("one month" is a measure of duration, "month one" is January). I reminds me of reading good code; simple, elegant, with no unnecessary cruft. It's given me a new perspective on (as you say) all the useless crap we have in English. Oh, and I started learning German, too. TFA made me laugh.
  - therein 8y ago
    I wonder if Khmer speakers are missing out on anything by not having these concepts in their language.
    - marcus_holmes 8y ago
      It does rely a lot on context. If you don't share a context with your listener, it's easy to get confused. Given the cultural gap with the West, it can mean that you're fluent in Khmer, but still miss a lot of the meaning because you don't share the same cultural context. Essentially culture-wide in-jokes. But then, I had to explain British rhyming slang to my German gf the other day, and she thought it was crazy. I guess there's nothing that unusual about culture-wide in-jokes.
zvrba 8y ago
> I've never understood the need for noun genders As a native speaker of Slavic language, I've never understood the need for differentiating between "THE table" and "A table". It's useless and clear from the context what is meant (note that both are different from "THIS/THAT table", which I do NOT deem useless.) For English and Norwegian, I've learned grammatical rules that cover ca 80% of use-cases, the rest is guessing and I still get it wrong sometimes.
- peterlk 8y ago
  I am fascinated by how little syntax is required to actually communicate with each other. You can remove gender from language entirely and still understand what people mean. We can even get rid of time-based tenses and instead say something like "I go to the store yesterday". This is incorrect English, but the point is still communicated. As you say "the" and "a" could be condensed. You could go even further and combine these words with "one". Having traveled to a lot of places where I had to speak languages that I don't speak or understand, the amount of language built on top of the tiny "required" subset is marvelous and interesting. Other questions that make language fun. Any ideas where eenie meanie miney moe comes from? Why does flat (low) German exist, and how far is it from Dutch (or English)? How many dialects of various languages are spoken in the Alps? Why do we call different Chinese dialects "dialects" and not "languages"? Which language has the most diverse set of conjugation rules? But I digress.
  - pantalaimon 8y ago
    I think all this unnecessary 'clutter' serves as error correction when spoken. Even if you don't fully understand a word, you can piece together from the context what was said.
    - ur-whale 8y ago
      That's a common sophism that completely ignores the cost/benefit trade-off of those supposedly useful error correction mechanisms. In German for example, they're IMO total overkill (as in cost far outweighs benefit). But then, you have to take into account that over-engineering things is a national hobby in Germany. The question becomes chicken-and-egg: did the language induce the cultural trait or did the cultural trait structure the language.
wumms 8y ago
> Likewise, the combination "ei" will always be pronounced "eye." That's not true for German, e.g. in some loanwords: "Atheist" and "Koffein" (= caffeine) use "eh-i" > I've never understood the need for noun genders Sometimes they show different meanings of a word: German: Die Leiter = the ladder Der Leiter = the director French: la tour = the tour le tour = the tower
- green7ea 8y ago
  la tour = the tower le tour = the trick
realusername 8y ago
English pronounciation is so irregular it looks like it's written in a wrong alphabet and would benefit greatly from some Cyrillic equivalent.
- dmytrish 8y ago
  In Ukraine, we sometimes have these discussions about moving to a Latin-based alphabet. Some even try to come up with their version of it. It always winds up either as something ugly with a lot of diacritics (like Polish/Hungarian) or having a lot of double/triple-letter sounds (e.g. `sh` instead of 'ш', `ye` instead of `є`, `shch` instead of `щ' and so on). Thanks, but no, I'll take our 33 funny Cyrillic letters over a Latin alphabet.
scirocco 8y ago
In Swedish there are two ways to say "one" - "ett" and "en". Ex. one table = "ett bord" and one cat = "en katt". There is no rule for when to use either. And yes, this makes it extremely difficult for foreigners.
- bokstavkjeks 8y ago
  I can only speak for Norway, but here we use different articles for the different genders. In Bokmål, a masculine noun uses "en", a feminine noun uses "ei or en", and non-gendered nouns use "et". I think it's slightly different in New Norwegian, but I don't really know it so I can't comment on that. Bokmål is closer to Swedish anyway. I do agree that it's difficult to learn though as there are no rules for determining a noun's gender or lack thereof. I certainly don't miss memorising the genders of nouns in primary school, not to mention all the exceptions.
coldtea 8y ago
>I've never understood the need for noun genders and I scratch my head at a society that makes its members memorize such useless information. Society doesn't make anybody do anything. Languages are not built in labs, they grow evolutionary and organically (with some bureaucratic intervention here and there). For that particular people, following the historical lineages they went through, those things evolved in their language. Plus, instead of seeing them as "useless information" (where the main concern is crudely expressing the most basic concepts to another, e.g. utilitarian communication), one could see them as a richer way of describing the world than English, and with more expressive power (not just for raw communication, for expression of feelings, poetry, etc as well). (In fact a common point to many European essays from the past 200 or so years is how English is a cruder language suited mainly for "commerce").
Udo_Schmitz 8y ago
>That said, German pronunciation is more regular than English pronunciation. Yup: https://www.learnenglish.de/pronunciation/pronunciationpoem.html https://www.learnenglish.de/pronunciation/pronunciationpoem....
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
rags2riches 8y ago
English grammar is too simple. I often can't tell if a word is a noun or a verb. In particular, headlines can be really hard for me to parse when they seem like nothing more than a handful of nouns.
h1d 8y ago
For English, aside from do/does useless distinguishment, the lack of a gender neutral noun for a person usually make people write in a way "he/she". You could say, "the person" but it's long. And months should be represented as numbers instead of names in spoken languages too which is easier to use and remember to have a globally common form. Also, as a Japanese, I'm not sure if singular and plural forms make much sense as we mostly don't have it and I doubt it's any source of confusion.
- spiralx 8y ago
  > For English, aside from do/does useless distinguishment, the lack of a gender neutral noun for a person usually make people write in a way "he/she". You could say, "the person" but it's long. You mean "they", used as far back as Shakespear?
  - h1d 8y ago
    There's none for singular form.
    - spiralx 8y ago
      "A person walked down the street. They were wearing a brown coat." Singular they has been in recorded use since 1375, it's only been the last couple of hundred years people started trying to insist it wasn't valid. https://public.oed.com/blog/a-brief-history-of-singular-they/ https://public.oed.com/blog/a-brief-history-of-singular-they...
jnurmine 8y ago
"Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen." For a Finnish speaker, the pronunciation of most languages seems illogical, because things are pronounced differently as they are written, depending on the word itself. One might think: why are they so illogical? Of course, this is not how native speakers of German, English, etc. see things; for them, the words are spoken exactly as they are written, as they are used to it being so. When I was learning English at school, I thought it was odd to sprinkle all the small articles and words all over the speech. And this thing with British vs. US spelling. Later, when I studied German, I thought there were so many concrete rules, yet every rule was followed by a number of exceptions. I don't think one can say grammar/pronunciation of language x is universally difficult or easy. It depends so much on the linguistic background of the learner. For example: those skilled only in Japanese will likely have an easier time learning Chinese than me. But I will likely be able to pick up Estonian or proper Danish/Norwegian easier than them because of my background. PS. Speaking of illogical things: "pronunciation" and "pronounce". Why not "pronunce" or "pronounciation"?
vsl 8y ago
> I've never understood the need for noun genders and I scratch my head at a society that makes its members memorize such useless information. I’ve never understood the need to pronounce completely differently from writing - and irregularly, too - as you guys do in English. Or throwing the the everywhere, or having a gazillion of bizarre tenses. English is simpler in some ways, terribly overcomplicated in others.
xster 8y ago
English is written how it was pronounced https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift We just changed how we pronounced

by apo 8y ago

acomjean 8y ago

I often wonder if all that extra grammatical baggage and more rigid pronouciation would make it easier for a computer to understand german over english.

LolNoGenerics 8y ago

Just today I had a chat with a friend about a movie named "rogue one". Roug, Rook, Roug, Rook. If feel quite fit writing english but talking - as someone with very litte practice - drives me mad.

azernik 8y ago
That specific example points to the root cause of most English pronunciation weirdness - an insistence on preserving original spelling for loanwords even if they come from languages with very different orthography. "Rogue" and "chef" are both French loanwords that English still spells as if they were French, not to mention all the Latin loanwords that still give middle-schoolers endless pain.
- howeman 8y ago
  Interestingly, "chief" is the same word as "chef" just imported from the Normans. French had a consonant shift, while English did not, and then imported the word again with the new pronunciation and spelling.
  - anoncake 8y ago
    A consonant shift from "ie" to "e"?
    - azernik 8y ago
      That vowel shift is not from French, but rather part of the English Great Vowel Shift [1]. The original loanword from Medieval Norman French to Middle English was /tʃeːf/ (spelled "chef"), compared to the re-borrowed /ʃɛf/. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift
- posterboy 8y ago
  Like fashion and law, spelling and pronounciation are a sign of status. It's not supposed to be easy. From another point of view, what does the state of the orthografy say about the authorities, are they lenient, chaotic ... speaking a different language? School children are very low in the social hierarchy, of course, because they cannot defend themselves. Of course they are going to be oppressed when they note that there's no system behind and when they say it's too complicated they will be called lazy. The parents had to wade to shit, so they don't even notice the smell anymore, and now the children have to, too. On the other hand, conservative orthography can help to learn the related languages (ie. French, Latin), serve as interesting step into history, exercise memory, and what not. There could be no regular spelling. That's an illusory proposition, given the breadth of dialects that exist. So next you will require all the poor children to learn a new dialect, basically. Is that any better? It would be a loss of diversity, each one preserving a little bit of historic language development - and status. It's really a shame that status varies. Learning a language properly might give some stability.

maw 8y ago

> English grammar is far simpler than German grammar. How do you negate in English? How does one eloquently and idiomatically combine English modal verbs? What are the rules governing when and how English deviates from SVO? Whom is still a word in English; how do its corner cases work? I could go on. In other words, maybe English's grammar is simpler than German's and maybe it isn't, but it definitely isn't as clear-cut as you make it out to be.

ThJ 8y ago

I'm a native speaker of Norwegian, a language which also has three grammatical genders. I don't experience it as having to memorise genders. I only notice them when they are wrong. They're not completely useless. "Det regner." - It's raining. "Den regner." - It's calculating. The verb "regne" is ambiguous and the gender helps disambiguate ut. Sometimes, the grammatical gender conveys information about the noun. Is it abstract or inanimate? Probably neuter. Is it alive? Can it move? Probably masculine or feminine. Sometimes, when a follow-on sentence discusses previously introduced objects, gendered articles can clue you onto which objects are being discussed.

samatman 8y ago
There is no critique of a language's difficulty which is relevant to native speakers.
modernerd 8y ago
There are homonyms in languages with genderless nouns too, such as English, but context usually makes it clear. It's hard to imagine a real-world situation where “it's raining” would be confused with “it's calculating” when stripped of the gender, for example. > Sometimes, when a follow-on sentence discusses previously introduced objects, gendered articles can clue you onto which objects are being discussed. That's the best argument I've heard so far, but it's so rare to require gender for comprehension. It seems a push to burden a whole language with gendered nouns for this purpose.
Zak 8y ago
Regardless of the potential use for disambiguation, every noun having a gender affecting the articles and pronouns to be used adds a significant burden when learning the language. In some languages, like Spanish, the spelling of the noun nearly always indicates its gender, but this is not the case in German. Acquiring a language as a native speaker in childhood is a significantly different experience from trying to learn one as an adult.

interfixus 8y ago

> a society that makes its members memorize such useless information That is a really strange angle on the subject of native language. If there's any language my society has made me learn, it's the one I'm writing now, my second (and absolutely indispensable) one. The gendering of nouns (in my national case, two genders) and sundry other weird historical linguistic baggage is just the way things are and ever were.

kingofpandora 8y ago

> I've never understood the need for noun genders What a peculiar comment. It's like saying, what's the use of termites? No, seriously, why _do_ we have termites? Do we really need termites?

pretendscholar 8y ago
Recycling tree matter in the woods.
bobogei81123 8y ago
If someone is creating a new language now, that is a concept that would definitely not be included.
- trhway 8y ago
  Or may be there would be more than 3 genders.
- kingofpandora 8y ago
  > If someone is creating a new language now, that is a concept that would definitely not be included. Natural languages aren't designed, which is why the comment above is so odd.

hv42 8y ago

What's really killing me is that the genders don't matter when you have a plural form. It's all the same (ie. using "die" and the plural cases) In Spanish or French for eg. you still have gender marks (los/Las for eg.) with the plural form but in German, it's all the same. That makes me wonder why it's so necessary to have genders in the first place since the German plural doesn't have marks of it and it doesn't hurt understanding.

kayoone 8y ago
It's not necessary and as a native german it is something i can totally live with if foreigners get it wrong in conversations. Even people with years of being fluent in germany still ocassionally screw them up. In a similar way i always struggle pronouncing words like "caffeine, beard, deteriorate" etc after years of speaking english at work.

taneq 8y ago

> I've never understood the need for noun genders and I scratch my head at a society that makes its members memorize such useless information. A lot of redundancy in human languages seems to be related to disambiguation and error correction.

analog31 8y ago
Indeed, I once read an article about the Iliad, in which it claimed that the combination of the rhythm and other poetic features made it harder to screw up when reciting from memory.

stewbrew 8y ago

You're mosly right about pronouciation but German pronouncation isn't as regular as e.g. Spanish or Italian. In German you have open and close vowels, i.e. the "e" can sound slightly different depending on its position in a word. There is some variation between local dialects though. IMHO the need for genders, cases etc. becomes obvious in spoken language where these things serve to guide the listener's expecations. "Simpler" languages often use redundant wording, formulaic constructions to make up for them.

delib 8y ago

> I scratch my head at a society that makes its members memorize such useless information. Such a weird perspective on language and on the agency of societies. There are tons of "useless" things in any language. For instance, why not get rid of all the tenses in English? Do we really need the past progressive? To make English spelling more "logical" (so people need to remember less useless information!), we should again look to Mark Twain: > Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld. (http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/twain.htm http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/twain.htm)

marcus_holmes 8y ago
I recently started learning Khmer (Cambodian). It's an awesome language. No tenses (all assumed from context... if something happened in the past, you say it happened "already", and there's a single modifier to all verbs to indicate they will happen). No genders, at all (there's no "he/she/they" problem). The numbering system is simple adn consistent, and it's applied to months and hours ("one month" is a measure of duration, "month one" is January). I reminds me of reading good code; simple, elegant, with no unnecessary cruft. It's given me a new perspective on (as you say) all the useless crap we have in English. Oh, and I started learning German, too. TFA made me laugh.
- therein 8y ago
  I wonder if Khmer speakers are missing out on anything by not having these concepts in their language.
  - marcus_holmes 8y ago
    It does rely a lot on context. If you don't share a context with your listener, it's easy to get confused. Given the cultural gap with the West, it can mean that you're fluent in Khmer, but still miss a lot of the meaning because you don't share the same cultural context. Essentially culture-wide in-jokes. But then, I had to explain British rhyming slang to my German gf the other day, and she thought it was crazy. I guess there's nothing that unusual about culture-wide in-jokes.

zvrba 8y ago

> I've never understood the need for noun genders As a native speaker of Slavic language, I've never understood the need for differentiating between "THE table" and "A table". It's useless and clear from the context what is meant (note that both are different from "THIS/THAT table", which I do NOT deem useless.) For English and Norwegian, I've learned grammatical rules that cover ca 80% of use-cases, the rest is guessing and I still get it wrong sometimes.

peterlk 8y ago
I am fascinated by how little syntax is required to actually communicate with each other. You can remove gender from language entirely and still understand what people mean. We can even get rid of time-based tenses and instead say something like "I go to the store yesterday". This is incorrect English, but the point is still communicated. As you say "the" and "a" could be condensed. You could go even further and combine these words with "one". Having traveled to a lot of places where I had to speak languages that I don't speak or understand, the amount of language built on top of the tiny "required" subset is marvelous and interesting. Other questions that make language fun. Any ideas where eenie meanie miney moe comes from? Why does flat (low) German exist, and how far is it from Dutch (or English)? How many dialects of various languages are spoken in the Alps? Why do we call different Chinese dialects "dialects" and not "languages"? Which language has the most diverse set of conjugation rules? But I digress.
- pantalaimon 8y ago
  I think all this unnecessary 'clutter' serves as error correction when spoken. Even if you don't fully understand a word, you can piece together from the context what was said.
  - ur-whale 8y ago
    That's a common sophism that completely ignores the cost/benefit trade-off of those supposedly useful error correction mechanisms. In German for example, they're IMO total overkill (as in cost far outweighs benefit). But then, you have to take into account that over-engineering things is a national hobby in Germany. The question becomes chicken-and-egg: did the language induce the cultural trait or did the cultural trait structure the language.

wumms 8y ago

> Likewise, the combination "ei" will always be pronounced "eye." That's not true for German, e.g. in some loanwords: "Atheist" and "Koffein" (= caffeine) use "eh-i" > I've never understood the need for noun genders Sometimes they show different meanings of a word: German: Die Leiter = the ladder Der Leiter = the director French: la tour = the tour le tour = the tower

green7ea 8y ago
la tour = the tower le tour = the trick

realusername 8y ago

English pronounciation is so irregular it looks like it's written in a wrong alphabet and would benefit greatly from some Cyrillic equivalent.

dmytrish 8y ago
In Ukraine, we sometimes have these discussions about moving to a Latin-based alphabet. Some even try to come up with their version of it. It always winds up either as something ugly with a lot of diacritics (like Polish/Hungarian) or having a lot of double/triple-letter sounds (e.g. `sh` instead of 'ш', `ye` instead of `є`, `shch` instead of `щ' and so on). Thanks, but no, I'll take our 33 funny Cyrillic letters over a Latin alphabet.

scirocco 8y ago

In Swedish there are two ways to say "one" - "ett" and "en". Ex. one table = "ett bord" and one cat = "en katt". There is no rule for when to use either. And yes, this makes it extremely difficult for foreigners.

bokstavkjeks 8y ago
I can only speak for Norway, but here we use different articles for the different genders. In Bokmål, a masculine noun uses "en", a feminine noun uses "ei or en", and non-gendered nouns use "et". I think it's slightly different in New Norwegian, but I don't really know it so I can't comment on that. Bokmål is closer to Swedish anyway. I do agree that it's difficult to learn though as there are no rules for determining a noun's gender or lack thereof. I certainly don't miss memorising the genders of nouns in primary school, not to mention all the exceptions.

coldtea 8y ago

>I've never understood the need for noun genders and I scratch my head at a society that makes its members memorize such useless information. Society doesn't make anybody do anything. Languages are not built in labs, they grow evolutionary and organically (with some bureaucratic intervention here and there). For that particular people, following the historical lineages they went through, those things evolved in their language. Plus, instead of seeing them as "useless information" (where the main concern is crudely expressing the most basic concepts to another, e.g. utilitarian communication), one could see them as a richer way of describing the world than English, and with more expressive power (not just for raw communication, for expression of feelings, poetry, etc as well). (In fact a common point to many European essays from the past 200 or so years is how English is a cruder language suited mainly for "commerce").

Udo_Schmitz 8y ago

>That said, German pronunciation is more regular than English pronunciation. Yup: https://www.learnenglish.de/pronunciation/pronunciationpoem.html https://www.learnenglish.de/pronunciation/pronunciationpoem....

deleted 8y ago

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rags2riches 8y ago

English grammar is too simple. I often can't tell if a word is a noun or a verb. In particular, headlines can be really hard for me to parse when they seem like nothing more than a handful of nouns.

h1d 8y ago

For English, aside from do/does useless distinguishment, the lack of a gender neutral noun for a person usually make people write in a way "he/she". You could say, "the person" but it's long. And months should be represented as numbers instead of names in spoken languages too which is easier to use and remember to have a globally common form. Also, as a Japanese, I'm not sure if singular and plural forms make much sense as we mostly don't have it and I doubt it's any source of confusion.

spiralx 8y ago
> For English, aside from do/does useless distinguishment, the lack of a gender neutral noun for a person usually make people write in a way "he/she". You could say, "the person" but it's long. You mean "they", used as far back as Shakespear?
- h1d 8y ago
  There's none for singular form.
  - spiralx 8y ago
    "A person walked down the street. They were wearing a brown coat." Singular they has been in recorded use since 1375, it's only been the last couple of hundred years people started trying to insist it wasn't valid. https://public.oed.com/blog/a-brief-history-of-singular-they/ https://public.oed.com/blog/a-brief-history-of-singular-they...

jnurmine 8y ago

"Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen." For a Finnish speaker, the pronunciation of most languages seems illogical, because things are pronounced differently as they are written, depending on the word itself. One might think: why are they so illogical? Of course, this is not how native speakers of German, English, etc. see things; for them, the words are spoken exactly as they are written, as they are used to it being so. When I was learning English at school, I thought it was odd to sprinkle all the small articles and words all over the speech. And this thing with British vs. US spelling. Later, when I studied German, I thought there were so many concrete rules, yet every rule was followed by a number of exceptions. I don't think one can say grammar/pronunciation of language x is universally difficult or easy. It depends so much on the linguistic background of the learner. For example: those skilled only in Japanese will likely have an easier time learning Chinese than me. But I will likely be able to pick up Estonian or proper Danish/Norwegian easier than them because of my background. PS. Speaking of illogical things: "pronunciation" and "pronounce". Why not "pronunce" or "pronounciation"?

vsl 8y ago

> I've never understood the need for noun genders and I scratch my head at a society that makes its members memorize such useless information. I’ve never understood the need to pronounce completely differently from writing - and irregularly, too - as you guys do in English. Or throwing the the everywhere, or having a gazillion of bizarre tenses. English is simpler in some ways, terribly overcomplicated in others.

xster 8y ago

English is written how it was pronounced https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift We just changed how we pronounced