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Comment by reitanqild | Hacker News Reader

We should be happy: For all its warts (horrible, horrible spelling) English is an order of manitude saner than German and a few other European languages. Imagine if you had to keep track of which (for all intents and purposes more or less randomly assigned) genders any thing had. Imagine if a/an had 12- 44 different forms instead of two and was dependent on the position, movement, a randomly assigned "gender" as well as ownership of the object in question. This is what German and a few other languages are like. Utterly stupid but it would sound ridiculous if we dropped it now. Just saying.

(Source: native speaker of one of those.)

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How is that harder then keeping track of the billion didn't vowel sounds and 4 ways to represent it? Or the lack of any sort of rule, as every single one of them has exceptions. Or the fact that depending on where you live depends on how you spell and say words which mean the exact same thing. Or the whole Your vs You're or its vs it's. Or the way it spells words which make absolutely no sense. Or the fact that half our words are German and the other half are French.

I know 3 languages, German and French are both easier then English. And English is my mother tongue.

Trolling or serious?

How can you be a native speaker and not understand Your vs You're or its vs it's?

> Or the fact that half our words are German and the other half are French.

Quite a few of the basic ones come from old Nordic I think. : )

How did you really learn all the German (and French I guess) genders?

I guess you either grew up in a multilingual home and as such doesn't represent the majority of us or you are incredibly gifted or just trolling.

I don't mean that I don't understand it, of course I do. I'm basing this on the difficulty of the language. Not what I know/don't know.

Learning genders is easy. It's just a memory game. And most people now and days don't really care if you mess it up.

English is mostly old Germanic.

I didn't figure out its vs it's until this past year, and I'm 27. It just didn't seem particularly important to bother with...

Out of the 50 most used English words, all but one are from Anglo-Saxon. Out of the top 200, all but 13 are from Anglo-Saxon. On the other hand, out of the entirety of the English vocabulary, only a small portion of them are Anglo-Saxon. English has a Germanic core but has borrowed happily from other Indo-European languages.

I hope I'm representing these numbers right. Been listening to the History of English podcast [1] which, if you like this stuff, is absolutely fascinating. The first episode is worth listening to just to hear Old and Middle English spoken.

1. http://historyofenglishpodcast.com/

> It just didn't seem particularly important to bother with...

That's on you.

Never said otherwise. You this hard on everyone or just fellow UTD alumni? ;)

Had I known you were a woosher, I'd have been harder :)

German and French are both easier then English.

I don't know about German but French? easier than English? Come on!

Everybody says German is so hard. My mother tongue is neither German nor English, but I've been mistaken for a native speaker of the latter at times. I don't think the GP realizes how much effort goes into perfecting English pronunciation, everything is so arbitrary what with words coming from Celtic, German and French/Latin origins. A written vowel means practically nothing in English, and if it's not the stress you might as well have written a schwa.

Memorizing genders in German is very easy with a mnemomic method. Learning it has frankly been a walk in the park, everything is orderly and put together in discernible components.

I've often heard the phrase 'English borrowed' in relation to words obtained from other languages.

English needs to /steal/ and should have stolen in all such cases. Sure, take how the thing is said and even the meaning, but strictly adhere to a single simple set of rules without exceptions for encoding that verbal language to written form and for decoding it back to speech.

> For all its warts...

Each language has its warts. But kids learn them all in nearly the same time. There are better criteria: I like Future II and composites in German, in English almost every noun can be turned into a verb, French is full of nice sounding idioms. Some languages lack future or conjunctive at all, in others the verb conjugates with the speaker's confidence. The richness of colors is another topic. The list is endless, all the thousands of natural languages have a different expressiveness. The trends towards English kills a lot of the total human cultural expressiveness. I wish my brain had a greater window of learning them without effort, so I could easily choose an appropriate language fitting any given context.

Hehe, I managed to insult both fans of English as well as fans of German. That wasn't my intention, but hey, since quite a few of you seems to disagree; -come on, give me a few good technical (not historical or doesn't sound/look right) reasons why:

- English can't have one way to write f sounds instead of f(ish)/ph(oto)/(rou)gh. (I'm quite aware of the history, I'm pointing out that the resulting rules are uneccessarily stupid.)

- German and a few others need to give different genders to knives, forks and spoons as well as anything else. Why does anything except living creatures need to carry a gender? Why does ein/eine/einer/ein need to change depending on different rules except as a dead giveaway that you are not a native speaker? ;-) (Yes, as a speaker of one of those languages I'm quite aware that it just doesn't sound right without.)

On the other hand german pronunciation is mostly predictable (compared to english and french at least) and the only thing that's really tricky to learn in your list is gender. For the rest, the german case system is really not that hard (especially compared to languages like russian, arabic and many others). I doubt you have 44 forms for "a" in german, although I haven't counted them lately...

Quite frankly I don't think language difficulty is the key here, otherwise we'd be having this conversation in spanish. I'm a native french speaker and I think the only reason english is easier to learn than german for us is that english is basically everywhere around us.

Speaking of language weirdness, as a person with little knowledge of anything but English, can anybody answer if there's any commonality between the genders assigned to inanimate objects in different gendered languages? Presumably there's some language branching through history that determines what gender, say, a chair is in various languages. How far back does that go, and do languages of different families commonly have wildly different genders for things?

It seems to waryMaking nitrogen tri-iodide in high-school had a much better payoff wildly between languages. At least between Nordic languages and German.

Uhh, did you accidentally paste part of another post or something in the middle of that?

> For all its warts (horrible, horrible spelling) English is

English is not my native language but I love its spelling and I think it's ideal. I'm not referring to saxon words, though, but the majority that comes from Latin, Greek and French.

I'm also glad English has no Academy prescribing its usage; lack of genders is super nice; easy article rules another plus; if we could get rid of the preposition madness it would be perfect (i.e. in/on/at are not uniformly applied as inside/on-top-of/at-point-of).

English isn't a nice language:

The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and riffle their pockets for new vocabulary.

- James Nicoll

New words & phrases get adopted by common usage. Old unused words & phrases get discarded like used condoms.

I'm well aware of that quote, having learned of it a few years ago, which filled me with joy.

If you think a better language is one that holds on to its words unchangingly, and harshly judges and beats up new words, then you have free choice between the languages that came from Latin, especially the last flower of Latium.

I have abandoned that netherworld of arrogance to bask in the uncertainty of a language that admits to not knowing what words we might need in the future, and that isn't afraid to follow them down alleys to capture them. That seems to me more in line with intellectual honesty, always learning, revising mistakes.

As for the Latium flowers, the groupthink is that they should be preserved, whereas for English it is that it should continue to evolve. I've picked my favorite. :)

English spelling is just horrible bearuacracy (no, I didn't bother looking that word up).

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