The Awful German Language (1880)
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faculty.georgetown.edu
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.
Something that catches a lot of English as second language people out is the correct time to use the gerund form (i.e., the '-ing' form). For instance,
(1) I am walking to the shops.
is clear -- it is occurring in that moment. But what about the subtle difference between (2a) and (2b)?
(2a) I live in Berlin.
(2b) I'm living in Berlin.
To me -- a native English speaker -- (2b) implies that the speaker generally lives elsewhere, while (2a) doesn't. But they're both technically correct if the speaker is, at that moment, a resident of Berlin.
There are more examples I could give. Teaching these sorts of subtleties, though, and mastering them can be very difficult.
A final example that I really like, and one that my syntax lecturer used to use a lot:
(3) She would have had to have been being watched.
Seven (or maybe six, depending on how you view 'watched') verbs in a row! Native English speakers grasp this really intuitively, but non-native speakers may have trouble parsing these into a coherent picture. To illustrate this -- try and gloss this sentence another way while conveying the meaning. If you speak another language, try and translate it! English verbs are hard.
Regarding your example with the gerund, yes it is subtle, but similar subtleties exist in German, e.g. The difference between perfect and simple past (also exist in English), which many native speakers in both English and German get wrong as well.
An interesting anecdote (which might be related) is, that in my experience having gone to high-school in the US for a year and having done language courses with Australian teachers, that there seems to be much less education on the grammar of the language than in Germany. I often knew the "theory" of English grammar much better than the native speakers (doesn't mean I was better at applying it though).
All that said, mastering English is still difficult, just not due to the grammar. Spelling is one thing, but also the vocabulary is huge. Supposedly Shakespeares vocabulary was 60000 words, the equivalent German poet Goethes was less than 40000.
You're pretty much expected to have the grammar down by high school, where the focus shifts to composition (essay courses, etc.)
This was my experience growing up here anyways. The last time I had a test question ask me to circle the past participle was middle school (and the SAT).
I didn't know terms like that in England in the 2000s, though I picked them up from learning other foreign languages later.
I have heard university professors complain that they can say, simply, "rephrase the paper into the active voice" to a student from <anywhere else>, but many British students don't know what that means.
England now teaches more grammar, but it is not much use generalizing from individual experiences of a particular state/country in a particular decade.
YMMV; curricula are highly local.
Well, now I want to see how this sentence would be translated into all the other major languages! I immediately understand the meaning, but can see why it might be hard for a non native speaker to understand. Are their other languages that can say the same thing as concisely?
Google Translate must absolutely butcher this sentence. I just tried Spanish. “Habría tenido que haber estado vigilada.” I know Spanish well enough to know that is hilariously incorrect, but not well enough to know the correct translation.
“Tendrían que haber estado mirándola.”
“Vigilado” is a much stronger word and to me it would be much more like “guarded”
Ive studied Chinese before and a translation eludes me.
If anybody can help, my guess the trick is in : “ 本来就” of 她本来就必须被监视
For example, in Hebrew, I would translate the sentence as חייב להיות שמישהו היה צופה בה, which literally translates as "it must be that someone was watching her". Trying a more literal take, היא הייתה חייבת להיות צפויה, not only (by sheer necessity) injects the infinitive tense into the middle of the sentence, but also would just cause a native speaker to ask you in English, "why don't you tell me in English what you're really trying to say?"
I both admire and pity translators who work for organizations such as the U.N. as they have to translate documents such as treaties and do so with great precision.
However, I suppose my major concern with translations is how sloppy some actually are—that is that errors in translation are not limited by structural limitations caused by differences in the languages as in your example but rather by sheer carelessness. Frankly, I'm fed up with seeing bad translation of subtitles from German into English. I'd be more than happy if I had a dollar for every time I've seen the verbs glauben (to believe) and wissen (to know) interchanged with one another during translation.
Clearly, to know something is very different to believe something but unfortunately it seems that significant numbers of translators find such precision unnecessary.
I would translate it as "debería haber estado vigilada". DeepL translate it as "tendría que haber sido vigilada". Both are much easier to understand.
It's a sentence that would typically be spoken rather than written, but it's only a step beyond "you would have had to have been there", which has genuine occurrences in Google Search.
https://www.google.com/search?q=%22You+would+have+had+to+hav...
Anyways, the translation would be: तिला पाहिलं गेलं असतं
Sie hätte unter Beobachtung gewesen sein müssen.
Still a sentence with 4 verbs though.
E: Interestingly enough, google translate is just plain wrong in a predictable way:
Sie hätte beobachtet werden müssen.
Which implies that she should have been watched.
その場合、彼女は監視されていたはずであろう。
As a reply to the question, “what’s the most expensive car on the market?”
1) “I’m guessing it’s some German supercar.”
2) “I would guess it’s some German supercar.”
3) “I guess it’s some German supercar.”
As a native speaker, the first two both sound correct to me, and essentially equivalent. The third sounds a little weird, even though it’s grammatically the simplest. I can’t put my finger on exactly why.
Usually it's an error to add -ing to a mental process (Are you knowing the answer?, I'm believing in a deity, etc.). (We can choose to construe a mental process as a material one - it's not a lexical rule about those verbs, but a grammatical means we have access to, e.g. I'm lovin' it, I'm thinking about you contrue them as an activity rather than a mental state.) But perhaps the reason why replacing "guessing" with "guess" changes the meaning so much is because "I guess" is already taken. It should modify the meaning as "I think x" => "I'm thinking x" does, but saying "I guess" sounds like a way of hedging information from a 3rd party.
In danish the word "Ligeglad" is the state of mind for 3).
Admittedly both are subtle and somewhat confusing to non-native speakers.
"Fred, riding a big elephant, burst into the arena" substitutes "pink" for a more common name and adds the article and a prepositional phrase and... some grammar that I can't put into words right now and makes it a full sentence.
I guess what I'm trying to get across is that without the adjective order being in line, it's hard to work out the sentence structure which is extremely reliant on word order in lieu of inflection.
In my native dialect, statements including "had to have been being" are rather common. My friends, family, co-workers, etc. use them regularly. In fact, I recall saying "he'd have had to have been being reckless" just earlier today. All five of the other people present- both immediate family and non-relatives from this area- knew precisely what was meant. In other words, that intimidating clump of verbs passed unremarked.
Further, to andensande's point, one might be inclined to replace that god-awful monstrosity with something like "he must've been reckless." To do so would be to wipe out some subtleties of meaning from the original. A replacement like "he must've been acting recklessly at the time" feels like the same general meaning to me, but it also sounds stuffy and snobbish in tone (for all that it's probably a much more effective construction).
All things considered, every language that I've ever dealt with in any capacity has had its share of peculiarities. In hindsight, however, I don't recall Arabic, Zulu, or even Gallo-Lati... er, I mean French... having quite as few peculiarities as my sponge-like mother tongue.
"to be ing", "was ing", and "will be *ing" if I remember correctly, are actually thought to be an early borrowing of celtic grammar. Not much celtic anything was adopted into English, but there's a possibility that this sentence structure may be one of the few contributions of the celtic languages that were displaced by germanic Anglo-Saxon languages that eventually formed English.
(1) She would have had to have been observed.
is that it misses out the gerund form preceding 'observed', which alters the meaning slightly in my opinion. It's difficult to get at precisely but I feel like the original sentence has a feeling of time-boundedness around when she was observed which you don't get without that gerund. I think?
The original with "been being watched" feels like something the detective says when he first discovers the fact about watching. It has an exclamative aspect to it. There's a present sense of realization, mixed with the past sense of when the watching had taken place.
"She would have had to have been observed." is something like a lawyers distillation of what happened later for the court.
That being said, I have trouble to parse the original english sentence so I may be missing subtleties.
Re rewtriting (3) though: does not the following suffice? "She must have been being watched".
I can imagine an argument that "She would have had to have" is not equivalent to "She must have" on grounds that the "have had" might suggest additionally that the past-ongoing-watching no longer occurs. I don't really think this flies, though, since the natural reading of "been being watched" already suggests to me that the watching was relegated to the past ("been" being interpreted as only connoting the past, not the "inclusive-or"-type interpretation "previously and perhaps presently"; much as "or" itself is - to my chagrin! - generally interpreted exclusively in standard parlance).
I couldn't think of how to simplify the "been being" though; that is a tough nut.
OK, now I feel like I don't know English. Is this proper English? What does it mean? How is it different from "She would have had to have been watched"? Is the meaning clear to people? I'm scratching my head...
Did you mean "She would have had to have felt like she's being watched"?
Essentially it means “it must have been the case that, at the moment we’re speaking of, someone was watching her.”
Your sentence is slightly different, in that it implies that, in general, someone was watching her during the timeframe we’re talking about, but not necessarily in the exact instant we’re talking about. Also, like the example above, your version could mean she’s someone who in general is watched (like the person who generally lives in Berlin), as opposed to someone being watched right during the instant we’re talking about.
Complicated!
Another native English speaker here. This would be how I would parse "She had to have been being watched," but I think it's not quite the full picture in this sentence's case. It's important to note that the "would" adds the implication that this conclusion is being drawn based upon some other (possibly unspoken) observation or proposition.
I would say the meaning is probably closer to "In order for some unspoken condition to be true, it must also be true that, during the moment of time in the past about which we are speaking, someone was watching her."
Ugh, I have to admit it seems technically "correct" after all :-) but with such a painful (and uncommon) sentence structure that it makes you question if it's right...
There are subtleties involved, but the most basic use case is that the former refers to an action that took place before some point in the past (to which the sentence refers), while the latter refers to an action that was still happening at that past point.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uses_of_English_verb_forms#Pas...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uses_of_English_verb_forms#Pas...
"She would have had to have been watched" means she would have had to have been watched at that moment (e.g. because someone was watching the area where she did whatever it was), whereas "being watched" implies that the watching was ongoing and therefore that someone was continuously watching her at the time.
It's a very contorted phrase. I struggle to think of a context in which it makes sense. I honestly don't know what it's supposed to mean. It's a mixture of subjunctive mood and passive voice, both of which detract from clarity.
You can make unclear grammatical constructions in any language. If your aim is clarity, and not obfuscation, then you just eliminate tangled grammar such as this example.
I will attempt to offer a re-phrasing with added context, though:
"The only way that anyone could have known X about her, would be if she were being observed."
(Many english speakers would substitute "was" for "were", because the subjunctive mood is rarely taught to schoolchildren in the UK. That is to say, colloquial english is generally pretty sloppy.)
If a native english speaker like me struggles with an english phrase, there's something wrong with that phrase. If I find myself constructing a phrase like that, my first instinct is that my thoughts must be unclear, because my words are unclear. I'd consider thinking again, and perhaps even re-writing an entire paragraph, just to avoid a phrase like that.
The subjunctive in German is routine and explicit. Indeed, the word "were" in my re-phrasing is pronounced in parts of northeast of england to rhyme with "bear", because it comes from the germanic subjunctive "wäre". But in general, subjunctives in English are concealed - we don't use subjunctive forms of verbs much, the listener is supposed to infer subjunctive mood from the presence of words like "if" and "would".
Twain is winding us up; after all, he was a satirist. The German language is pretty regular, compared with English. It's quite easy to learn. English must be a nightmare to learn, as a foreigner.
It doesn't sound natural to me at all; it sounds incredibly awkward to me. In a situation like that, I think people would say something like "someone would've been watching her at that moment".
(And I meant to write "would've"; the "would've had have been" was just a typo...)
But you're not; you're talking about having been being watched, something that was an ongoing process at the time (past progressive).
> And whether it's sinister or not is pretty beside the point.
People choose their phrasing because they want to convey particular connotations. So you can't just say "this is a simpler way to say the same thing" if it carries different connotations.
> I'm saying that phrasing is pretty darn unnatural English, sinister or not.
All I can say is it sounds perfectly natural to me, as a native (British/Irish) English speaker.
Of course you do. Consider "Do you ever feel like you're being watched?" versus "Do you ever feel like someone's watching you?" Both those sentences are natural English and in a certain sense they "mean the same"; nonetheless they convey a quite different feeling, and neither is a replacement for the other.
> Of course you do. Consider "Do you ever feel like you're being watched?" versus "Do you ever feel like someone's watching you?"
I was talking about in that example. I was not making a claim about every arbitrary sentence containing the phrase "being watched".
Understand that if you add enough contortions and make a sentence jarring enough, you won't get anything across without additional context. (To a human I mean. I guess I have to add that caveat because other you'll post another rebuttal about how a sufficiently strong AI would parse it just fine.)
For context, I was born and raised in Northern NJ with Jamaican parents, and have lived in Michigan for the past 10 years. I have never heard anyone use grammar like this.
I assure you the feeling is mutual :/. It really does sound perfectly normal to me. I can easily imagine e.g. Jonathan Creek saying exactly that.
Wow, whoever concocted that mind-twister? That's the sort of problem we students would have given our formal logic lecturer to analyze and draw up into truth tables.
That expression likely exceeds the complexity of an infamous expression (known for its complexity) that was given to us students to analyze, it being 'there is a chance of a possible maybe'.
It hurts my brain just thinking about it, perhaps I'll do so later. ;-)
“Someone must have been watching her.”
I’m making some assumptions about the context of the sentence—but as long as you told me what the context was, I’m sure I could come up with an equally simple replacement.
Personally, I found the original sentence quite hard to parse, despite being a native speaker. It’s not good writing and a good editor would replace it.
Russian grammar and vocab plus the different alphabet were incredibly intimidating, but the different declensions became familiar very quickly. I was familiar with conjugation from Spanish, so that was just a bit of memorization. I like how clear the alphabet and spelling are. Once you learn how to sound things out, you're good to go besides very few exceptions. Everything is very regular, there's just a lot of tenses and moods to get acquainted with. Perfective and imperfective verbs are still something I have to learn on a word-by-word basis.
German grammar was easy except for the different cases. I'd already been exposed to cases with Russian, so I don't know why it's so much harder for me in German. Maybe because I expected it to be closer to English. It's weird the way I can listen to a sentence in German and it feels like I know what they're saying, but if I try to translate it, I don't have a clue.
I don't think you can really class languages by difficulty. You just have to immerse yourself in each. Even in those with recent spelling and grammar revisions, getting the ear for it and using it is the key.
In the first day of Koine Greek class, the instructor asked who had programming experience. She made a point of stressing, as she would again, that unlike computer languages, human languages show no signs of design, and not to spend any time looking for it. It was good advice.
As a native English speaker, this is definitely a big plus. I've had German friends who've regularly expressed frustration that there's often no real rhyme or reason or pattern to either English spelling or pronunciation; you just have to memorize it. (Though I could largely say the same of German and French noun genders, even if there are some patterns that are somewhat [but not entirely] consistent.)
Meanwhile, spelling and pronunciation in German seems to be pretty bijective. If you know how an unfamiliar word is pronounced, you can generally accurately know how it's spelled, and if you how an unfamiliar word is spelled, you can generally accurately know how it's pronounced.
PHP is a programming language, and it shows every sign of having been designed to the same level of detail as English.
This is the point I came to with German and was at a level where I could start speaking it (poorly but enough to be understood) all the time with native speakers. I read up on some things from time to time but mostly ignore a lot of the theory as a child would and just refuse to switch to English as much as possible. It's probably slower this way but it's been one of the few ways I've actually been able to be consistent with practice.
I was always an average foreign language student, until I started to learn German living in Berlin and to speak English at work.
Now I'm fluent in both languages. I forgot most of the German rules I learned during my first months in Berlin taking crash courses. I just know sentence structures because I heard them and used them so often. Like a child, really.
In German class, away from that bordertown, outside where the dialect is common, I never paid attentention. Teachers would require me te learn tables filled with exceptions, weird strings of words (mit nach bei..) etc. I simply refused. I often didn't bother to go to class.
Just using the Fingerspitzengefühl that comes with the part-German dialect, was adequate. 7/10 on my exams. So certainly not fluent or even good. At the diploma-handout, the German teacher told me she did not want to, but was required to give me that grade (why a teacher would disclose this to an 18/yo is beyond me, though. There certainly was spite).
Point is: even sideloading a language from a young age helps learn it. At least for n=1.
Oh how absolutely true this statement is. As an adult, I find myself deconstructing and atomizing every aspect of the language I'm learning and then reconstructing it bit by bit into English. Not only does this approach slow one's progress down to a crawl but also it limits one's fluency even after one has some basic understanding of the language. [Incidentally, I found this to be more of a problem with French than with German even though I was taught French at a much younger age.]
From my observations, I have noticed that I'm not alone in having adopted this approach, especially so for some of us with a technical bent. It seems to me that we adopt the same analytical approach to learning a language as we do to when learning a technical skill or analyzing some physical phenomenon. Clearly this is the wrong when it comes to learning languages but it's a very difficult habit break. In a similar vein, I recall getting somewhat annoyed when trying to learn Morse code and making no progress. Whilst I was told never to analyze the individual dots and dashes of characters but nevertheless I still did and it was not until I broke this habit (with some difficulty mind you) and that I listened only to the rhythm of the sound of each character that I started to make progress.
Obviously, learning a language is a much more difficult exercise than learning Morse code but the same rules apply in both instances. I recall several decades ago attending a lecture by Noam Chomsky and he made a comment that I have never forgotten as it resonated with me then and ever since. That was that he—a world renown linguist—had difficulty in learning languages—and he cited words to the effect 'that a new language can waft down the corridors of MIT and that most of his colleagues catch it with ease as it passes by—except for him'.
Even at the time of the lecture, I could not help but think that he like me dissects and atomizes a language in ways his colleagues have learned not to do (but perhaps when you're a linguist that approach may be useful—after all, Chomsky is very famous and his colleagues are seemingly very much less so).
Not really. Language as a system is pretty well understood. What appears to be exceptions or non-sense when learning a language often have a simple explanation when looking at the evolution of the said language.
I wish they would pound that forcefully into the grammarians torturing children in school.
I look at the grammar they teach, and I think someone got paid to make stuff up.
Except Esperanto, surely ;)
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.
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).
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.
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.
At least genders are conceptually easy: given a word, you have one gender. (Though I'm sure there are complications.)
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.
Holzscheit, Lenkdrachen, ... ;)
Look at this speech he gave in Vienna (apparently completely fluent in German).
https://resources.german.lsa.umich.edu/wp-content/uploads/20...
"I am indeed the truest friend of the German language - and not only now, but from long since - yes, before twenty years already. And never have I the desire had the noble language to hurt; to the contrary, only wished she to improve - I would her only reform. [...] After all these reforms established be will, will the German language the noblest and the prettiest on the world be."
It would be very strange if he learned this language for his whole life and would despise it. But Mark Twain wouldn't be himself if he couldn't mock a thing he loved.
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.
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).
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): camión (truck) sillón (sofa) león (lion) escritor (male writer)
You don't even need the article to guess which one is which one.
- Female forms of occupations and roles, such as la modelo and la testigo
- Shortened forms such as la foto
- La mano
- La líbido
- La nao
- La virago
It's generally the case in French too, but there are cases for which people don't agree. A recent example is a nation-wide disagreement on whether to say "le" or "la" Covid.
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?
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.
> 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.
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
det huset - that house
en grå mus - a grey mouse
ett grått hus - a grey house
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...
All languages have the sort of contradictions that are pointing out there, and English isn't especially bad (in fact, most of the examples there are directly inherited from German). Most of the difficult things in English come from it being a Germanic language with a bunch of French bolted onto it. That's why its spelling is so atrocious and there are a lot of duplicated words with very similar meanings in common use.
But, blessedly, English does have the simplest grammar of probably any European language. (I've occasionally heard that Swedish is the closest in simplicity, also being a Germanic language that's dropped most of the complexity, but isn't quite as inundated with loanwords.) Aside from a couple of concepts (the gerund, specifically, which isn't common in some European language families), most grammatical structures in English have direct equivalents in all other European languages.
However, going the other way is difficult: most European languages have formal and informal voices, gendered nouns, some have irregular plurals (German, notably), subtler and more verb tenses (Romance languages), and complex case structures (German and even worse, Slavic languages). If you're a native English speaker that doesn't know what cases are, for example the word for "the" in German changes based on which of the three genders the noun is and how it's used. It could be "die", "der", "das", "den", "dem" or "des", and the endings of words that need to be in agreement with it change as well.
The main reason English became the modern lingua franca is the British Empire, but it does help that it's also a very easy language.
Speaking English and Swedish fluently, I'd say Swedish (and Danish/Norwegian) is simpler grammatically, as it just has the one conjugation per tense regardless of the personal pronoun: I are, you are, we are (är). I were, she were, you were, we were (var). This is why you'll hear Swedes/Scandinavians make typical mistakes like "we was".
As an aside, it also seems to me like Swedish culture is more monolithic/conformist and contains a small set of really common idioms and phrases that get you a long way towards being conversational. It shares that aspect with Dutch as spoken in the Netherlands, as opposed to Dutch in Belgium.
> English became the modern lingua franca
As a second language speaker, I can't help but think poor English is the lingua franca. Not to mention lots of couleur locale in the form of accents.
The deceptive thing, though, is compound tenses and phrasal verbs; in both cases you express a meaning with multiple words that couldn't have been predicted from the meanings of the constituent words alone. These are both pervasive in English and both very tricky for learners, but they often don't feel like "grammar" because they're not inflectional. (Well, phrasal verbs are more like lexicon.)
I eat breakfast
I am eating breakfast
I ate breakfast
I was eating breakfast
I have eaten breakfast
I have been eating breakfast
I had eaten breakfast
I had been eating breakfast
I would eat breakfast
I would be eating breakfast
I would have eaten breakfast
I would have been eating breakfast
I will eat breakfast
I am going to eat breakfast
I will be eating breakfast
I am going to be eating breakfast
I will have eaten breakfast
I am going to have eaten breakfast
I can't think of another European language that would idiomatically use (or maybe even require) quite this range of constructions.
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
* and is the key ingredient in mince pies
* and =mince
* and could be used in the making of a pie
* which would be extremely different from a mince pieWe also have chips (the type you might have with a hamburger), and chips (the type you might eat cold from a bag). If you need to clarify which one you mean, for some reason "potato chips" exclusively means the latter (for the other type you might say "hot chips").
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.
They come in all sorts of varieties - plain mince, mince and cheese (yum), steak and cheese, mince and potato, and then some exotic varieties like butter chicken pie.
They're typically cheap and made from bad quality ingredients, but you can get very good quality mince pies if you know where to go.
If you're a hungry teenager and you need a snack - nothing beats a mince pie.
A mince pie is the sweet fruit tart that is essentially only stocked at Christmas time.
Meat pies are all over the place, and are popular enough that a former premier referred to them as Australia's national dish.
The fruity kind of pies that only appear at Christmas time are called "mince pies", but we should really find another name for them because it's a constant source of disappointment when you expect savoury goodness and are presented with a sugary lump.
If it ever contained anything one could in good faith call 'meat' (by modern definition, at least), it's news to me. [Edit below]
(The brandy however is borderline essential! Certainly a mince pie ought to be served wirh brandy butter.)
That said.. I don't think it's relevant how the quirks came to be, as in, it's no less interesting if it's easily explained away as 'oh well that used to make sense', because it's still funny/ambiguous/confusing when you take a step back and take everything at face value.
[Edit: you are absolutely right: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mincemeat - it was essentially preservation by naturally sourced citric acid and sugars. News to me indeed! I stand by above though.]
Thanks for that, I had no idea!
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?
Dessert is jell-o with a crushed cookie and granola topping.
At least the US variant looks like giant purple eggs, if you squint a bit.
After some brief research, it seems that both the English word "ham" and the name of the town of Hamburg have their origin in the Old High German word "hamma" which means "hollow or bend of the knee".
In the case of ham, it refers to part of the leg of an animal. In the case of Hamburg, it got its name from Hammaburg, which was the original fortification where the town was founded. In this case, "hamma" refers to some kind of feature of the piece of land, which was on a bend of the river.
I don't understand the connotation of the word, as much as the meaning of it.
I couldn't give a good definition without referring to a dictionary.
Indian English retains several archaic terms, little used since the early 20th century. An Indian probably can give a good definition.
[1] https://theoriginalmaidsofhonour.co.uk/collections/types?q=S...
My understanding is that sweetmeat is just an older word for candy, sweets or confections, archaic to both the UK and US english.
They used to be round!
Huh, I do use indices for 2+ index. I guess I’ve been wrong. I’m surprised nobody has ever said anything in my nearly 50 years.
The example is just provided to show how inconsistent plurals are in English. 90% of the time you just slap an "s" on the end of a word, but there's a crazy amount of exceptions to that rule.
There are a lot of Latin/Greek terms (typically scientific) whose plurals must be similarly learned because otherwise native English speakers will use the simple plural -s suffix with no concern whatsoever.
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.
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.
And interestingly, there's a significant body of research showing mutual intelligibility between Old English and Old Norse, which are less similar than than Old English and Old High German.
Old English texts have been found in (modern day) central and southern Germany (e.g.: Fulda), which implies that they were reading them there. This would be from the 7th to 10th century timeframe, IIRC.
"Saxon" is probably the word that the could have settled on. But that's not really an ancestor of modern high German, more the low German speaking dialects in the north west (Niedersächsisch).
I don't think this is being pedantic, frankly. And it's horrible to say English "doesn't really exist"; English is a beautiful language with a long history as old as (in fact in some ways older than) German. (FWIW I'm a native English speaker but my father's family is German, so while I'm not fluent in German I do have education and personal exposure to both languages. I've also studied a bit of Anglo-Saxon. Enough to see just how different it was from old Frankish spoken by the early "Germans" in the same time period)
Also keep in mind the topic of this discussion, which is a humorous diatribe against the modern German language (written in beautiful, flowing English by one of its best writers to have ever lived). A native German speaker could quite easily take offense at it. I happen to have struggled through obtaining German fluency in my college years and while I wouldn't agree with everything that Twain wrote, I find his piece hilarious.
[1]: "German" being an originally Roman Latin term for a group of related peoples speaking, what amounts to closely related dialects rather than separate languages. The definition of "language" is also really indistinct. It really comes down to mutual intelligibility than anything else, see Norwegian, Danish, Swedish (separate "languages" but mutually intelligible). You're certainly aware that the modern Germans call themselves and their language "Deutsch" -- an old word for "people" and that was the case in English in the past, see the "Pennsylvania Dutch" who most certainly don't come from the Netherlands or speak modern Dutch. Old English had liberal use of the term "þéod" (people) which is cognate to "Deutsch"/"Dutch". The country of "Germany" has only really existed since 1871.
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.
> 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 , Zögling, takes masculine ]
-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)
Which is even more fun as -ling is generally seen as more objectifying than -chen, even though -chen is neutral and -ling is male.
The key misunderstanding here is of course that 'Genus' is not necessarily 'Sexus'.
This is logical: "Mädchen" is a diminutive (as the prefix -chen shows). Diminutives are always neuter.
"Mäd[g]dchen" thus simply means "little maid [Magd: maid]".
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.
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).
"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.
This is not unique to English, but I do think that English is more eclectic than most other languages.
That doesn't mean some phonemes aren't hard to pronounce for the uninitiated, nor does it exclude accents and dilects and the everyday contraptions of the language.
I don't believe Mark Twain's Appendix D is vicious nor a rant. In fact, it is a brilliant piece of humorous writing in its own right and I would give a great deal to be able to write and communicate as well as that. Furthermore, having worked in both Austria and Germany I've known several native German speakers who are fluent in English and who laughed themselves almost hoarse after I brought it to their attention. They weren't a bit offended by it, they then pointed to the many peculiar idiosyncrasies of English and said that in any competition for same then English would likely be the winner. (BTW, you'll even find native German speakers reading The Awful German Language on Project Gutenberg.)
Moreover, I learned more about the German language from Twain's writing than I ever did from the equivalent number of words in any German language textbook written in English. Clearly, I cannot do justice in the space or time available but let me mention a few instances.
"These things are called "separable verbs." The German grammar is blistered all over with separable verbs; and the wider the two portions of one of them are spread apart, the better the author of the crime is pleased with his performance."
The 'REISTE AB'/'departed' example that Twain quotes is both humorous and very memorable: "The trunks being now ready, he DE- after kissing his mother <...> <...> ...more dearly than life itself, PARTED." After reading this it's almost impossible for someone who is learning the language to ever let separable verbs pass them by without noticing them.
"These things are not words, they are alphabetical processions."
Of course, they are. And as Twain points out they also possess 'perspective'—and many native German speakers would agree with this assessment, in fact some are quite bemused by the fact that their language has the world's longest words.
"<...> Of course when one of these grand mountain ranges goes stretching across the printed page, it adorns and ennobles that literary landscape—but at the same time it is a great distress to the new student, for it blocks up his way; he cannot crawl under it, or climb over it, or tunnel through it. So he resorts to the dictionary for help, but there is no help there."
Not only is this wonderfully descriptive prose but it's in fact true. To prove the point, here are a few more that are not included in Twain's text:
Rechtsschutzversicherungsgesellschaften
Donaudampfschiffahrtsgesellschaftskapitän
Betäubungsmittelverschreibungsverordnung
Bezirksschornsteinfegermeister
Donaudampfschiffahrtselektrizitätenhauptbetriebswerkbauunterbeamtengesellschaft
Whew, that's 79 or 80 letters depending on which spelling one uses.
"One cannot overestimate the usefulness of SCHLAG and ZUG."
That's very true, and so are very useful (and somewhat tiny) words such as zu, bis and nach — that is, once one gets to understand their German nuances (initially their usage can be confusing—at least I found them to be so given that to, till and until in English are used in a somewhat less prescriptive way.
"The Germans do not seem to be afraid to repeat a word when it is the right one. They repeat it several times, if they choose."
Until I read this passage, it was never evident to me that we native English speakers actually go out of our way to avoid word repetition.
"In the daybeforeyesterdayshortlyaftereleveno'clock Night, the inthistownstandingtavern called 'The Wagoner' was downburnt. When the fire to the onthedownburninghouseresting Stork's Nest reached, flew the parent Storks away. But when the bytheraging, firesurrounded Nest ITSELF caught Fire, straightway plunged the quickreturning Mother-Stork into the Flames and died, her Wings over her young ones outspread."
Even the cumbersome German construction is not able to take the pathos out of that picture--indeed, it somehow seems to strengthen it. This item is dated away back yonder months ago. I could have used it sooner, but I was waiting to hear from the Father-stork. I am still waiting.
There are some German words which are singularly and powerfully effective. For instance, those which describe lowly, peaceful, and affectionate home life; those which deal with love, in any and all forms, from mere kindly feeling and honest good will toward the passing stranger, clear up to courtship; those which deal with outdoor Nature, in its softest and loveliest aspects—with meadows and forests, and birds and flowers, the fragrance and sunshine of summer, and the moonlight of peaceful winter nights; in a word, those which deal with any and all forms of rest, repose, and peace; those also which deal with the creatures and marvels of fairyland; and lastly and chiefly, in those words which express pathos, is the language surpassingly rich and affective. There are German songs which can make a stranger to the language cry. That shows that the sound of the words is correct—it interprets the meanings with truth and with exactness; and so the ear is informed, and through the ear, the heart."
With these wonderfully perceptive words, Twain not only shows us what a master he is at conveying his message but also that he is an acute observer of human nature. It is also indicative that his knowledge and fluency of German is higher than one may gather at first glance. Here, I can attest to the validity of what Twain says in respect of these German words. For instance, Schubert's remarkable song cycles Die schöne Müllerin (The Fair Maid of the Mill) and Die Winterreise ([the] Winter Journey) often reduce me to tears. Also, I find the pathos and heartfelt meaning of these words abundantly evident whenever I wander though a German Friedhof (cemetery). These powerful and yet unusually simple German words stare back from nearly every Grabstein if so as to remind one of one's own mortality.
Spanish is my mother language, and actually it's the opposite way: given a written word, there is only one obvious way to read it (except for loanwords and a few words that keep old spellings like "México"), but given a spoken word, it may be written in two different ways (e.g. vaca/baca, kilo/quilo), or it may have a silent H ("ahí hay un hombre que dice ay"). The orthography is not fully phonetic, but you are right it's infinitely easier than English.
If you want to find languages with an almost perfect phonetic spelling, look at Eastern/Northern European languages with an ortography created in the late 19th or early 20th century.
Low-barrow? Luf-baruff? I certainly had to look it up.
It is about 20km north of Leicester, which I think is the largest city with a -cester ending, commonly mispronounced by foreigners.
Hardly anyone enunciates the 'x' in a word like 'sixth'. I say 'sikth' (and I fancy myself a fairly eloquent speaker). It's got too many consonant sounds; the human tongue just isn't agile enough for a word like that. You might get it properly-enunciated by a university don, or certain kinds of very pernickety radio presenters.
YMMV
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
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 β to substitute 'daβ' instead of 'daß', etc. We tend to forget living in the digital publishing age how limiting mechanical workflows can be.
This β <-> ß confusion endured into the digital age.
For example code page 850 has a character called "Sharp s Small" but it is placed among Greek characters. And several fonts didn't display an ß but a β https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_page_437#cite_ref-21
In this case, the double use was probably intentional (to save space in the limited character set range) but still confusing to the reader when they encountered the wrong glyph.
https://historyofenglishpodcast.com/2016/12/07/episode-87-th...
Though and tough aren't a problem though, "thinking" in the middle of a sentence is real tough though.
2. Let out all the air out until your tongue separates said teeth
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.
"Weg" <- how do you pronounce this?
"Geh weg" (go away) "Der Weg ist da drüben!" (the path is over there)
You missed "Gehweg" (sidewalk) though. :^)
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.)
But German pronunciation is 80% simple and regular at least whereas English is more like 80% complicated and irregular.
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.
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)
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 "Fischverkäuferin" 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.
The English word 'man' used to mean 'person'. A female person became a 'wife-man', i.e. a woman. So the word 'mankind', for example, doesn't (or didn't) imply that female humans don't exist.
Quite literally translated. "Weib" in German is more close to "broad" in English, it's often but not necessarily derogatory.
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)
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.
Thanks for the link change.