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Comment by mitchty | Hacker News Reader

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.

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Some 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!

Porcupine is the same thing, just using latinate roots rather than native English/Germanic ones.

Ah, yes, that makes perfect sense! So many word roots hiding in plain sight...

Ditto for Hippopotamus (Greek base for River Horse) and the German Nilpferd - Nile Horse.

A 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.

See 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...

Rocklore would be lithology or petrology.

Geology is the study of the earth.

English does this a lot with borrowed words too, like orangutan coming from Malay orang (man) hutan (forest), so man of the forest.

That’s a nice example where English fully compounds the word while German and Dutch, languages where compounding is more usual, use a hyphen (“Orang-oetan”, respectively “Orang-Utan”).

Looking at the various translations on Wikipedia (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orang-Utans#/languages), that could be because they took the word from different languages. For example, Bahasa Indonesia has “Orang Utan”, Bahasa Banjar “Uranghutan”

Then there are also slightly funny ones

-plane / Flugzeug / flight stuff

-lighter / Feuerzeug / fire stuff

-light bulb / Glühbirne / Glow pear

-eyeball / Augapfel / Eye apple

Yes, yes, but to my ear, "zeug" feels closer to "thing" than "stuff" in these examples. That's no less funny.

-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.

Texas German has a less funny word for airplane: Luftschiff.

I think that would be an airship - zeppelin.

A Luftschiff is not an airplane, it's a Zeppelin because it floats in the air like a ship in the water.

Maybe it is in Texas German

Yeah, English is funny language.

- plane - flat surface

- lighter - a lamp

- light bulb - empty bulb

- eyeball - a sport

(Non-native speaker).

Nice lateral thinking!

The 'Zeug' ending you're referencing doesn't just mean stuff - it comes from the verb zeugen (to procreate/beget).

So Flugzeug is really flight begetter (or perhaps flight creator)

And Feuerzeug is fire creator.

Much more sensible!

To 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?

One answer is parsing ambiguities.

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.

Separating 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.

It makes for a different intended, pun, kind of?

I 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!)

mögen = to like

Magen = stomach

The hyphen seems like a very reasonable compromise, at the very least it tells you the space was intentionally omitted and it should be read together as a compound.

Yeah, hyphen seems best. Still wouldn’t solve cases where you need to embed one compound inside another, but otherwise it is good. Maybe languages should just have parantheses though to explicitly indicate the parse tree.

The good news is we are designing languages for humans, not computers, so we can make a big mess of it and still get the message most of the time. If we were designing for computers, we would certainly prefer more data to interpret the intent.

Oh cmon, it’s not as though German doesn’t have adjectives. Maybe we in English just use them more freely because for us they’re not a total pain in the rear to properly decline :)

If they get used together enough, they do become a compound word. Only two-word compounds though, English doesn't really do the three-word/four-word/N-word compounds like German does.

Especially when programming it's quite natural to put words together as variables can't have spaces in their names. No need for any underscores (under_scores?) as some styleguides propose, as long as it's a single noun just treat it as a single word.

Eh, 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

The 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.

Yup. 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.

Those 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)!

Many 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.

> 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.

My 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.

And 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.

btw: "Surfen" is a lot more common than "Wellenreiten" in Germany.

Yes, just ask any of the friendly and very patient surfers waiting their turn for the standing waves in Munich's Eisbach.

I 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.

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