Comment by pmoriarty | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pmoriarty | Hacker News Reader

Unsurprisingly, there are many articles published about "The Awful English Language", such as: [1], [2], [3]

Some examples from [2]:

Let's face it -- English is a crazy language. Besides the above, there is no egg in eggplant, nor ham in hamburger; neither apple nor pine in pineapple. English muffins weren't invented in England or French fries in France. Sweetmeats are candies while sweetbreads, which aren't sweet, are meat.

We tend to take English for granted. But if we explore its paradoxes, we find that quicksand can work slowly, boxing rings are square and a guinea pig is neither from Guinea nor is it a pig. And why is it that writers write but fingers don't fing, grocers don't groce and hammers don't ham?

If the plural of tooth is teeth, why isn't the plural of booth beeth? One goose, two geese. So one moose, two meese? One index, two indices? Doesn't it seem crazy that you can make amends but not one amend? If you have a bunch of odds and ends and get rid of all but one of them, what do you call it? If teachers taught, why didn't preachers praught? If a vegetarian eats vegetables, what does a humanitarian eat?

[1] - https://www.angelo.edu/faculty/kboudrea/cheap/cheap3_english...

[2] - https://neth.de/Interact/Sprachspiele/homowords.html

[3] - https://ronaldyatesbooks.com/2017/03/the-awful-english-langu...

Hamburger is "from Hamburg", not "made from ham", and is borrowed from German. "Frankfurter" (from Frankfurt) and "Wiener" (from Vienna, Wien, in German) have the same etymology.

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.

> But, blessedly, English does have the simplest grammar of probably any European language.

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.)

Which European languages don't have compound verb tenses? All of the four I'm reasonably familiar with do. Germanic languages lean on them more than Romance languages (which have a wider breadth of non-complex tenses), but the concept isn't unfamiliar. Again, aside from the gerund, there's an almost one-to-one mapping in usage between English and German tenses. I don't speak any other Germanic languages than those two, but I'd assume that to be more broadly true in that family.

I have the impression that English compound tenses and their nuances are harder than other European languages', although other languages definitely do have them.

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.

"complex case structures" are a useful tool in most languages (German to a lesser extent). They allow you to reshuffle the words in a sentence e.g. "the boat carries the car" without disrupting its meaning.

> I've occasionally heard that Swedish is the closest in simplicity

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.

> Sweetmeats are candies while sweetbreads, which aren't sweet, are meat.

My favourite one, which I had the er pleasure of trying to explain to a vegetarian unfamiliar with mince pies; which might also be British English-specific is:

- mince is meat

  * but mince *pies* contain no meat

- mincemeat is not meat

  * and is the key ingredient in mince pies

- minced meat is meat

  * and =mince

  * and could be used in the making of a pie

  * which would be extremely different from a mince pie

Mincemeat used to contain beef. Now, typically, it doesn't, although I recall having mince pie with beef and brandy in Swindon in another life.

So maybe this is not good example of English being like a Mark Twain's German schizo language. Gastro-culture changed on it and the folks at Merriem-Webster didn't get the email, that's all.

Are you sure that is it? Meat[1] used to mean food in general. In Swedish, the cognate would be “mat”, and that still means meat, much like hund (hound) means dog, and djyr (deer) means animal. I rather thought that meat in mincemeat was from “minced [sweet]meat”. Or, just “minced food”.

[1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/meat#English

Mincemeat is (was) a way to preserve meat using sour, salty, alcoholic preserves and sweet flavoring.

Um, no. It's a nice folk etymology, though.

Are you saying mince pies didn't traditionally contain meat? Recipes up to the late 19th century include meat, and even today I can find some that do, although very rare - usually beef suet is the only remaining animal ingredient.

Mince pies are definitely a thing in New Zealand (and Australia to some extent).

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.

Mince & cheese with a can of V. Lunch of tradies all over this part of the world.

Anything in America called a "mincemeat pie" is a million miles removed from this; it's going to be something syrupy and a little bit lumpy with cloves and dried fruits. Mince to us is "ground beef"; if you asked for a pound of mince at the supermarket, you'd be directed to the aisle with the Mentos.

I'm Australian, and no one I know (from here or from NZ) calls what you're talking about a "mince pie", they call it a "meat 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.

Minced meat pies are so ubiquitous in Australia that we usually just say "pie". "Mince" is nearly always assumed to be animal meat.

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.

No, I'm saying that "mincemeat" has nothing to do with meat preservation. Mince pies certainly exist (though in my neck of the woods, it's more likely to be a tourtierre).

It continues to optionally (and traditionally it would certainly have/been very much more common to) contain suet.

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.]

It's more pertinent that meat used to mean any food, and has since been narrowed to what used to be called flesh.

Here in New Zealand, a Mince Pie is a pie containing mince meat. The type of mince pie you're talking about is called a Christmas Mince Pie or a Fruit Mince Pie.

We 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").

If you look at an eggplant in its early stages, you will understand the name.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6v9hvK3rdxA

So nope, not "an" eggplant, some eggplants, and those only may look like eggs in their early stages. They may also look like plums. Do we call the purple eggplants plumplants because they resemble plums at some indeterminate stage in their growth?

..do you not?

In Britain (and most Western European languages), we call them aubergines. The origin is the "Sanskrit word vātin-gāna denoted 'the class (that removes) the wind-disorder (windy humour)': that is, vātin-gāna came to be the name for eggplants because they were thought to cure flatulence"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eggplant#Aubergine-type_names

I'm sure someone in the US makes and sells salads of eggplant, zucchini, and arugula just to see if they can induce an involuntary twitch in Britons.

Your forgot the protein, which is shrimp, and the cilantro garnish. Serve with a side of fries.

Dessert is jell-o with a crushed cookie and granola topping.

Yes, I'll bring it back to the apartment in the elevator after I'm done pushing the stroller along the sidewalk, avoiding the trucks.

More importantly, they were historically egg-shaped and (off-)white; the large and phallic purple variant that now dominates is the result of selective breeding over centuries.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eggplant#/media/File:Eggplant_...

Thanks for that, I had no idea!

That was one weird word when I learned it in Korea, because Asian eggplants look nothing like eggs. They look more like zucchinis.

At least the US variant looks like giant purple eggs, if you squint a bit.

Of course there's no ham in hamburger - it's a hamburger steak sandwich, where "hamburger" means "of Hamburg" or "Hamburg style". The generic "burger" is a back-formation from hamburger and is the thing that makes no sense.

It's a coincidence that the word "Hamburger" contains the English word "ham". But it's an odd coincidence:

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 have to admit still being confused about sweetmeats. If a Brit uses the word, are they talking about a specific type of candy, made in a specific way, from a specific type of shop? Does it need to be baked? Or have flour? Or does a Snickers bar count as a sweetmeat? Or a gumdrop? Hard candy? Or is it more like something from a bakery? Indian sweetmeats also seems to be a thing (from an image search right now). What's the difference, if any? Is any of this related to Turkish Delights?

I don't understand the connotation of the word, as much as the meaning of it.

As a Brit, I've never heard of sweetmeats. Is it not an American thing?

Americans have an odd view of the UK that merges both historical periods and regions. We are just likely to consider something we read in a Jane Austin novel British (which it might indeed have been ... 1-200 years ago!) as more recent media like the film Notting Hill.

My understanding is that sweetmeat is just an older word for candy, sweets or confections, archaic to both the UK and US english.

If a Brit (like me) uses the word, we're probably dressed up in old-fashioned clothes and trying to sound authentic while serving cakes to the LARP group. Or running a traditional restaurant/café[1].

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...

Quicksand is quick in that it seems to be living. See also quicksilver, another name for mercury.

Fun fact: the words "quick" and "zoo" have the same indo-european root.

>boxing rings are square

They used to be round!

But now they are box-shaped!

and books, e.g. "Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue"

McWhorter's an amazing author. Highly recommend getting any of his audiobooks.

> One index, two indices?

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.

You're right to use "indices".

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.

It's not a native English plural, it's Latin straight from the nominative plural <indicēs>. You will find that <indexes> is far more common in English. The supposedly "correct" plural, <indices>, is something that has to be learned through education, typically.

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 is this way because it doesn't really exist.

English started as old German. Then vowels shifted. Then the Normans arrived and added a lot of French words on top. When German grammar proved too hard for them that was simplified too.

On top of all that is a bunch of Latin and Greek added when England lead the scientific and industrial revolutions (in part because English couldn't logically supply words for new things). These kept their own rules grammatically. Or they didn't, pretty much randomly.

None of these jobs were ever "finished", so nouns in English don't have genders (like they would in German) but actually some do still (mainly pronouns) and some words right next to each other come from different languages (Cow is German, Beef is French hence they sound nothing alike).

Since England has not been conqoured or undergone unification since before all this started (except for the Norman conquests which were part of this) nothing has every been standardised. This is why spelling English words is all but impossible (German words are spelt almost exactly as they sound, English words almost never as they sound, you just have to memorise them, ALL of them).

Compare this to German or French with logical spelling, strict, consistency in grammar and single root languages.

English really is awful and quite an unusual language.

English did not start off as "old German", that's factually incorrect. It started off as Old English aka Anglo-Saxon, that is the languages of the Saxons, Angles, and Jutes which emmigrated from the north sea and areas which are now in the Netherlands, Denmark and Schleswig Holstein. Not the same as "old German" which would be Old High Franconian, an entirely different branch of the Germanic family.

German and English have almost 2000 years of separation. More than Italian and French and Spanish.

But yes Old Norman (and Old Norse) modified the language extensively.

So what did Old English and "Old High Franconian" (Old High German?) start off in common as, if not "Old German"? Linguists would call it Proto-Germanic though. The parent poster isn't factually incorrect though.

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.

Sure, but the common ancestor was never called "Old German" or "German"; and not only linguists, but the speakers themselves would never have called themselves Germans. They had various ethnonyms, but not that one.

"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)

I had to go back to the original parent's post to make sense of your reply. I found the parent's post to be an accurate, tongue-in-cheek description of the evolution of the English language. It clearly wasn't written by a native speaker and makes more sense if you substitute "German"[1] with "Germanic". I can see why an English native speaker might take offense. I am a native speaker also but I don't take offense. English serves as a pretty awful lingua franca which has cursed most of the world with struggling to make sense of its inconsistencies, but there's nothing to be done about that now.

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.

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