As a developer working in a German company the question of translating some domain language items into English comes up here and there. Mostly we fail because the German compound words are so f*** precise that we are unable to find short matching English translations...unfortunately our non-native devs have to learn complex words they can't barely pronounce :D
Most of the time we try to use English for technical identifiers and German for business langugage, leading to lets say "interesting" code, but it works for us.
I think the issue of German compound nouns is seriously overegged. In almost all cases, it’s essentially the same as English, except with some spaces. It’s not like suddenly a short compound word expresses something that couldn’t be in English.
x100 this. You can sort of derive the meaning of a complex word if you grasp one or two parts of it and offer a hacked together English translation, even if it doesn’t map directly. I find that people online who haven’t actually studied German like to meme this often.
The Latin-derived cases from the article, on the other hand, are the truly maddening, and makes you appreciate the simplicity of English grammar by comparison.
This is true, but some German compound words acquire a meaning that doesn't simply derive from their component words. Well-known ones include Kindergarten and Weltschmerz. This is often the case for domain-specific terms (Gestaltpsychologie, Bildungsroman).
I worked on a case management system for a few years that dealt with Norwegian criminal law, and we did the same. Technical terms and conventional parts of method identifiers (like getFoo, setFoo, isFoo and such) were in English while the domain terminology was left in Norwegian. It looks a bit weird when you first encounter it, but honestly it was fine. Especially for a domain with as much emphasis on nuance and as many country specific details as the legal domain anything else would be a terrible idea IMO. Not only would it be really hard to translate many cases, it would probably make the code harder to understand and in some cases even cause misunderstandings.
I work with a lot of Germans and have noticed this. For me to provide the English translation that is the most accurate I have to dig deep. The unabridged English dictionary has plenty of words but I feel slightly guilty providing them with a word which I know is the best fit but which they will probably never encounter anywhere else, and where most English people would just not know this word. The definition is often quite contextual and nuanced, hinting at (for example) the reliability of the thing that is described by it, or the way it is used (or was used) in society (e.g. for good or ill). The "baggage" I suppose.
In my experience, problems is not with German as a language, but with Germans requiring to use their hard language, I live in neighboring country and since like 2010, nobody bothers to learn German anymore, (some small percent still learn, ok) and everyone who I know rather works in different country because of this.
Like Netherlands, still hard language (multiple) but they don't expect you to learn it when working for multi-national company.
I don't know where the idea about the preciseness of German language comes from, especially in anything computer-related. For one, German language famously fails to distinguish between safety and security as well as between an error, a fault and a mistake. Whenever Germans discuss any software matters, they seem to be "code-switching" to English terms themselves.
Compounds have to be translated using multiple words, yes - that's just a few extra white space, it doesn't result in loss of precision.
I hope he will give us an actual example from his work. But meanwhile, here's a classic example:
The Donau is a river. On this river is a steamship (Dampfshiff): Donaudampfschiff
This ship is part of an organisation (Gesellschaft) that manages cruises (Fahrt): Donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaft
The ship has a captain (Kapitän) who has a cap (Mütze): Donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaftskapitänsmütze
On this cap is a button (Knopf): Donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaftskapitänsmützenknopf
You could extend this example: The button is colored with a special paint (Farbe), which is produced in a factory (Fabrik): Donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaftskapitänsmützenknopffarbenfabrik
And the factory has an entry gate (Eingangstor): Donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaftskapitänsmützenknopffarbenfabrikeingangstor
In English, this would be a huge sentence, all in reverse order: The entry gate of the factory that produces the color for the button on the captain's cap of the ship belonging to the cruise organization on the Donau.
The German is a lot more compact, if sometimes hard to parse :-)
It’s not considered prescriptively correct, but often nowadays people just write them with spaces (like in English), especially on phones, because hitting spacebar makes spellcheck/autocorrect kick in.
I don't remember many events from 1996 but my German boss walking into the office excited about the spelling reform of "Schiffahrt" certainly stood out as a memorable event.
Context, maybe just for others: Schiff is ship and Fahrt is ride, so eine Schifffahrt is a cruise (and without the article, it is also the term for seafaring in general). Anyway, you can see that Schiff ends with two Fs and Fahrt starts with one, so if you put them together to form a compound word, you get three Fs in a row, Schifffahrt. In pre-reform German spelling, this was deemed excessive, so one would write Schiffahrt, instead. The German spelling reform in the mid-90s changed this, so now you do the logical thing. (Whether the old way really was confusing and which way is more aesthetic are separate questions.)
This is not an accurate or precise example. You surely know you are misleading people.
German does not simply just concatenate words ad infinitum across logical classification, a concatenated, compound word is generally logically limited by classification. The concatenation generally only tends to be used in relevant (operative word being “relevant”), increasing smaller/lower logical classification. You generally will not rise and fall in that classification, let alone jump horizontally as you concatenate. It is really just a logic tree, you don’t all the sudden jump trunks or branches. It has to be a logically precise unit.
You’re essentially just saying ManBearPig. It’s not an actual thing.
So the entry gate of the factory that produces paint that happens to maybe also be used on the button of the cap of the captain of the ship on the Danube and is also part of a union, is not…
This is not necessary. Practiced German speakers generally do not struggle with splitting words into their components because syllables follow relatively predictable patterns. You will run into ambiguities from time to time, of course, but the same applies to tons of other features of natural languages as well. (Do you want to outlaw homophones in English?)
Anyway, there is also a perfectly acceptable and established way of making German words easier to parse if need be: hyphens. So Hyphen-Case instead of PascalCase.
When I was learning to read German, for the longest time I thought the word “letztendlich” was “letz-tendlich” (which is meaningless but at least theoretically pronounceable) rather than “letzt-endlich” (which is what it actually is).
I’m sure a native German speaker wouldn’t make the same mistake, though.
Swedish works the same (unsurprisingly), but note that programming languages also kind of do that. If you had to use a word like that in Java you would just mash all the words together in CamelCase and it would be pretty much the same as using the long German word (and almost exactly as difficult to read) even if technically it moved from being a single word to being a long list of words. It can still be a single identifier without spaces even if you translate to a language where it can not be a single word.
It really is one "new" word consisting of a bunch of words spelled without spaces. It is a compound, where every word adds additinal information to the last component. An easier example is sth like "Altbauwohnung" which would be an apartment (Wohnung) in an old (alt) building (Bau) where "Altbau" is also a compound.
This way of compunding enables you to build new words everyone can understand the first time they encounter them, but also to build those stupidly long words.
What is your definition of “word”? This is not at all a simple question in linguistics. By the way, it can’t just be “written without spaces”, as languages with no writing system at all, and languages whose writing system has no spaces (like Chinese), still have various concepts of “word”.
It is one word in German. It has one article, Germans talk about it as about a single word and treat it as a single word for grammar purposes. You can use it as a single noun in any sentence.
But it also odd example for this, because it is long as hell anyway already and additional spacing that English equivalent would require is just opportunity to wrap. It is just harder to read, but English equivalent would be easier to layout.
An example from my work: in Norwegian criminal law, the prosecutor can in some cases hand out what is called a «påtaleunnlatelse», which means something like «decision to not prosecute». This is a legal punishment in the sense that it goes on your criminal record, but no punishment beyond that is handed out. Basically, the prosecutor’s office can note down «we are convinced we can prove this was done, but have decided not to prosecute».
A special kind of this is the «prosessøkonomisk (process economical) påtaleunnlatelse» where in a large and complex case with many serious offences, some less serious can be non-prosecuted in this way to not spend eternity in the courtroom.
So these are kind of fun to compare. At the high level they clearly all have the same purpose: in some cases it's socially useful to have the punishment for a crime simply be a statement of "person X did this thing". But the details vary a bit:
- It seems the Australian section 10 is handed out by the court, where the English and Norwegian options dispense with a trial entirely. It also looks like a Section 10 doesn't go in a person's criminal record, unlike the other two.
- It looks like the English caution requires an admission of guilt, while the Norwegian option is at the prosecutor's discretion within the rules of applicability of the procedure. Of course someone not demanding a trial when given this can be seen as an _implicit_ admission of guilt, but the legal nuance can probably be important.
- The English and Norwegian procedures are nominally also different in who makes the decision: the English procedure is handled by the police, while in Norway it's the prosecutor's office. But this is more a theoretical than practical difference I think, because the Norwegian prosecutor's office is organized differently than the English Crown Prosecution Service: here, the lowest levels of prosecutors are integrated into the police services they work with, so in practice I think it works out much the same.
Another example, not involving compound nouns: Norwegian criminal process distinguishes two levels of suspicion. The first level «mistenkt» (suspect) is basically the investigation noting down in their log «we think this guy might have done it», but the second level «siktet» (literally aimed at, no idea how to translate to English or even if an equivalent term exists) is a formal decision made by the prosecutor’s office. And importantly, the use of «tvangsmidler» (coercive instruments, like arrest, search, seizure and so on) requires there to be a siktelse and this status also triggers legal rights for the accused like the right to a defence attorney.
There are similar distinctions in American law, e.g. with the police's right to tarry you. A short stop by the police can be conducted for 'reasonable articulable suspicion' of committing a crime, such as seeing you make a rash judgment in driving, while a longer stop or an arrest requires 'probable cause' such as smelling marijuana in your car after the initial stop.
The issue is not so much one of language but of habit and usage. That's why in that sense it is important for scientific and technical domains to be taught and practiced in your own language. This allows terms to evolve and be used habitually in the language.
As someone who studied German at school and has made serious attempts to learn Finnish and Czech, I have feelings about this. Obviously Twain was being humourous. But I took three years of German two decades ago, and to this day it is easier than Czech (I'm embarrassed to say, as I've lived here and tried to learn on and off for the last six years). I'm exaggerating only a bit.
The main difficulty with most Slavic languages are the grammatical cases/declensions/etc. German does have conjugations, but they have less forms and there are easily noticeable patterns (at least compared to something like Slovene: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slovene_verbs#Full_conjugation...). The words might seem scary, but actually require less thinking to use in sentences.
I absolutely love German, it is one of my favourite languages, there's such beauty in it. I am not a native speaker, but enjoy studying it. I am a native Afrikaans speaker and I see so many similarities between the two, which I find intriguing.
Well, if it comes to that. German is not _really_ a single language. It’s a dialect continuum consisting of sometimes barely mutually intelligible variants. And yes, if you continue following that continuum, you get to the languages you mention.
A language is a dialect with an army and a fleet. As they used to say.
A bit of relevant context: the quote is from Yiddish, which is primarily Germanic with significant admixture from Hebrew, Aramaic, and Slavic languages.
(One of my current favorite party tricks is speaking Yiddish to German speakers, and cranking up the other aspects to see where the intelligibility breaks down.)
I took a trip to Germany with my Dad, who grew up with Yiddish-speaking parents, and it was amazing to watch people's eyeballs pop out as they began to understand him and then realize what they were hearing.
And the continuum has two big groups: High and Low German (High and Low here being z-coordinates, High German dialects because they come from the more mountainous Southern areas and Low German from the lower-lying Northern parts). Modern day Standard German is a High German variant, whereas Dutch (and thus Afrikaans) are Low German.
A Dutch speaker read Afrikaans without too much effort; understanding spoken Afrikaans is a bit harder, but depending on the person it can be fine.
A Dutch speaker can't read or understand German. Some words are similar, but the same can be said about English. There are a number of differences in the grammar and alphabet.
Of course they're related languages; because I can speak English, German, and Dutch I can kind of read Swedish or Danish on account of being Germanic as well. But that doesn't make a "dialect with pretensions". We might as well say that all current Germanic languages are some sort of "dialect with pretensions" of some old Germanic language. But that doesn't really mean anything.
I can speak English and German which makes me able to somewhat understand written Dutch (especially if I know the context), but no chance when it's spoken.
As a German, I enjoy reading the Dutch text on supermarket products and manuals, it is a source of great fun in my family :) Children especially love it. Dutch just has so many words that sound extremely cute and funny to Germans:
"Sleep well" -> "Slaap lekker", in German "Schlaf lecker" = "Sleep tasty".
"Nuttig" -> "Useful", in German "nuttig" means "slutty"
"Huren" -> "to rent", in German "huren" means "to whore".
It’s the same for me, a Brit, reading screenshots my Dutch mates send me from say TikTok or whatever localized to Netherlands one that tickles me is ‘reacties’ underneath instagram posts!
Yep. I find it easier to understand German verbally than Dutch. I struggle when Dutch people speak to me, the way they pronounce words are hard on my ears. German feels softer.
Native Dutch speaker here. I find German softer on the ears too.
Except for Dutch in the South (Belgians and South NL), that's soft on my ears too. But not my accent, we are descendants of monsters. Why otherwise would we pronounce the G the way that we do?
Well, it's not a coincidence that the English word for the language of the Netherlands is the same the German state calls itself: "dutch" / "Deutsch".
A people and their language predated the concept of nation-states, but when the latter arrived obviously (geo-)political interests started to blur the facts.
So if you conflate the German state with Germans (I'd challenge that and view the German state as a continuation of the Prussian state), and you don't like the interests of the German state, it is predictable where you'll land on this issue.
Because of this, even if their national anthem does so, calling the Dutch Germans would infuriate them and rightly so, because it would imply justification to some for things like those happening between Russia and Ukraine right now.
I think in the end it is also a matter of "national" self-confidence. While Luxemburgish is virtually indistinguishable to the German ear from say the dialect of Cologne, Swiss-German is hardly understandable for anyone outside of Switzerland. Yet, the Swiss don't have an urge to re-label their dialect as a separate language. And the urge of the Dutch to re-lable themselves is lesser than that of Luxemburg because seemingly no one questions their identity.
All national identities are to a large extent constructed (or less charitably: made up). So the 21st-century idea that Germans are people with a passport from the Federal Republic of Germany is not really any more or less valid than the 19th-century idea that Germans are a cultural group spanning various states including Austria (and maybe even including the Netherlands).
I am a native speaker. And I find German to be a very ugly language. Pronounciation wise. Compared to French or English. It sounds like someone is constantly having a quarrel with you.
German has harsh sound. But in terms of quarrelling, I find that Korean sounds like someone is complaining all the time. But then again I have never learned Korean, so my impression would surely change.
Weaknesses can become strengths. Sometimes you want to have a quarrel. When French people quarrel they must rely on changes on pitch, cadence and volume because otherwise it sounds like they are ordering baguettes at the boulanger.
I think German poetry can be very elegant and English poems feel dull in comparison. At the same time, the plainness of English makes it much better suited for songs. Lyrical German quickly sounds pretentious.
One of the things that helped me improve German was Poetry Slam contests, they are still quite popular over here in many regions, you get poetry coupled with another German property, plenty enough sarcasm.
I can certainly confirm that learning German grammar as an adult is...challenging. Even though I am now fluent, learning as an adult means that you will always make mistakes on the gender of nouns. There are effectively four genders (male/neuter/female/plural), plus four cases (nominative/accusative/dative/genetive), so you have a 4x4 table giving you a choice of 16 articles that can appear in from of a noun. Only, the 16 articles are not unique: the table contains lots of duplicates in unexpected places.
Of course, most Western languages have gendered nouns - English is pretty unique in that respect. That likely comes from English being born as a pidgin of French and German.
Verbs in German are valuable things. You collect them, hold on to them as long as you can, and then - at the end of the sentence - they all come tumbling out. The order of the nouns at the end of the sentence differs by region. In purest German, they come out in reverse order, giving you a nice, context-free grammar. In Swiss dialects, they come out in the order they were conceived, meaning that the grammar is technically context sensitive. In Austrian dialects, the order can be a mix.
Of course, every language has its quirks. French, for example, puts extra letters on the ends of words that you are not supposed to pronounce. Well, unless the right two words are next to each other, in which case, you pronounce the letters after all.
English, meanwhile, gives learners fits, because the pronunciation has nothing whatsoever to do with spelling. Consider the letters "gh" in this sentence (thanks ChatGPT): "Though the tough man gave a sigh and a laugh at the ghost, he had a hiccough and coughed through the night by the slough, hoping to get enough rest."
I totally agree that learning German grammar as an adult is… demoralizing. Knowing, and accepting, that you will make a mistake every time that you open your mouth, hurts.
Also, the increase in possible permutations (and opportunities for mistakes) when you add adjective conjugations to the mix is daunting.
I know what you’re getting at when you say that English is a pidgin of German and French, but that’s kind of a distorted version of the truth.
First of all, it is not German, but Old English, which is not particularly more similar to German than it is to any other Germanic language e.g. Icelandic.
Second, the idea that middle/modern English began as a pidgin is a very fringe view in linguistics; the vast majority of people who have studied the question would instead say that it indeed has a huge amount of French (or more precisely, Norman) influence, but not to the extent that we can say it went through a pidgin/creolization process.
As a native German speaker, I think it's fair to say that German is a comparatively poorly designed* language. It has too many needless concepts. I envy Chinese and Japanese; I feel like these languages have got it almost right. If they eliminated measure words, they'd probably be as perfect as a language can reasonably be.
* I know languages aren't "designed" for the most part, but I find it helpful to compare them as if they were.
Also, English has the 5 vowels of the Latin script representing some 25 vowels sounds, to the point that consonants can turn into vowels with no rhyme or reason. The best way to learn that English is nonsense is to live in Britain and learn local city and village names. They all have made up pronunciation rules, evolved over the centuries, sure, but they forgot to update the bloody name on the map to match the sounds.
As a descendant of the Romans, I can only shake my head at such barbarism.
That depends on how one defines «properly». Finnish, with its nearly 20 noun cases and vowel harmony, has made a spellchecker a computationally unsolvable problem.
>You collect them, hold on to them as long as you can, and then - at the end of the sentence - they all come tumbling out.
as a German native I felt oddly at home with Japanese because funnily enough building seemingly endless verbs at the end of sentences felt very natural. Despite the fact that German, most of the time, is an ordinary SVO language. It's one of the mistakes English natives who just learn German make, that only made sense for me after I thought how odd that structure is.
I've also heard live TV translators really hate this about German because it's annoying, depending on the context, to have to wait to the end of a sentence to translate the whole thing.
Or the tale about a speaker, being translated into German. He tells a joke, the English speakers laugh. He says "ok, and seriously now...", the German speakers finally hear the verb and start to laugh.
"Verbs in German are valuable things. You collect them, hold on to them as long as you can, and then - at the end of the sentence - they all come tumbling out."
Franz Kafka put this property to good use and sometimes keeps the reader in suspense for half a page or more until the sentence falls in place.
Swedish had some of this until the second world war, since then we've made it into an english-like pidgin.
> Of course, every language has its quirks. French, for example, puts extra letters on the ends of words that you are not supposed to pronounce. Well, unless the right two words are next to each other, in which case, you pronounce the letters after all.
A lot of this is to due with latin, which pronounciation evolved over time to give modern French but which origin is still kept in spelling. So it's not that the language "puts extra letters" it's that it kept old spelling when the pronunciation change.
An example: 'est' (to be, third person singular) is very obviously verbatim latin spelling but pronunciation has shifted so that the 't' is not pronounced (and arguably the 's' could go, too).
Sometimes there are useful "rules" about how spelling and pronunciations evolved, which can be useful for English speakers writing in French, too, to remember your accents:
There have been some minor French spelling reforms over the years but French people are affectionately proud of their language with all its quirks, and changing the spelling of basic vocabulary like “est” would be a bridge too far for them.
Hmm, French definitely has ornamental noun paradigms affecting articles and adjectives, exceptions to every single rule and things like that. But it lakes the cases that German add on top of this. Syntax is not as funny with verb at second position, or end of the phrase, separable verbs, and so on.
French of course also have many original grammatical torture instruments. You might think that as a bastard child between Latin and the Germanic Frank tribe dialects it’s no wonder, though elimination of noun declension is rather surprising from this perspective. The truth is that all languages out there have their own dungeon with many traps and treacheries included.
Fortune, nun ni ĉiuj parolas Esperanton. Kaj ne forgesas la akuzativo nin. :D
> French of course also have many original grammatical torture instruments.
For me it was when I had to realize that for the French, every number larger than what they can count with their fingers becomes a small algebra problem. quatre-vingt-dix-neuf ... four times twenty plus ten plus nine makes 99.
Yeah, you can take an other locale and use "nonante neuf" instead. People generally take "quatre-vingt-dix" as a single token, they don't actually think about it in a compound perspective. Just like onze, douze, treize, quatorze, quinze, seize, where -ze stands for ten, so it's "n + 10". But in this case it's not synchronically as obvious as this composition is analyzed from morphological point of view, -ze in itself is not attached to any autonomous token in French. If anything French will rather lead to analyze numbers in terms of "k*10+n" instead, unlike German.
Well if you like that, you'd love Danish numbers, where 99 is nine and half (before) five times twenty, or »nioghalvfemsindstyve« (or more commonly shorten to »nioghalvfems«).
I recently got curious about the roots of this, and it turns out it’s from Celtic languages. All the Celtic languages count in base 20, and they were widespread across continental Europe before the Romans introduced Latin to their conquests and then the Germanic tribes brought the Germanic languages in.
Celtic remained a strong influence around modern France, Belgium, the Netherlands so we end up with French counting partially in 20s, even though continental Celtic languages are extinct (Breton, spoken in north west France is an insular Celtic language, more closely related to Celtic as spoken in the British isles and Ireland.)
I don’t know how Danish got base 20 counting though. Must have more reading to do.
Swiss French seems to have regularized some of this in a sensible way? Indian English does much the same with some things; not strictly “correct” English, to the extent those words don’t exist in British or American English, but I can’t argue that it doesn’t make more sense or isn’t more consistent so I never argue the case. I generally view those regularizing pressures from non-native sources as a positive thing for languages.
He actually learned German well enough to have appreciative audiences in Germany, but he also knows how to make amazing comedic essays on many topics. He did plenty about US-specific topics, and about French too, not just about German.
Which gives us Hitler memes where they audibly says German words that are very similar to their English counterparts, but the /funny/ subtitles is just a Beavis and Butthead level joke.
As someone who's learned a few (natural) languages over the years, German remains the only one that just instills me with a sense of dread, or maybe some sort of internal animosity. Russian? Sure. French? Yeah. English? Obviously. Japanese? Still in the kanji mines but making progress. Spanish? Sweet.
But German is a blood-and-tears uphill battle for me and I just can't get over it. It's really fascinating on some level.
I am a native German and had Russian as a second foreign language. Try applying Russian Grammar rules to German, you will find they are almost identical.
Verb prefix system is the same. Noun conjugation even uses the same prepositions to decide the case. Compound words are slighly different, instead of a tram-station you would use tramlike station.
Consider that the text is, in fact, from the 19th century.
Also, 'Weib' is not rude in every context. "Wein, Weib und Gesang" is not diminutive towards women, but in fact appreciative (as in 'necessary for having a good time'). We have Weiberfassnacht. And then there are the dialects, in which "Weib" often is indicative of a homely, loving relationship (-> bairisch, Swabian). Context matters.
You are applying logic and common sense from this century, to words of other centuries. This doesn't work, and never will. I think this is important, because a lot of people do this and nothing good comes out of it.
Yes, perhaps you are right. But then, look at who responded to my comment - all usernames suggest male companions. We are also now, not back then. Nothing prevents us from rethinking things from time to time.
Yes, sexism is not a new thing from today, and such sentences are witnesses of this. We might be interpreting stuff from the past with today's eyes, true, but that doesn't make the interpretation wrong. There are a lot of things we know now and didn't before. It's even totally possible we have reading keys that might have been unavailable back then.
We should not interpret stuff out of context though, but here I'm not sure taking the context in account would not make the point even stronger. I would be quite surprised about any context changing things for this particular phrase (but happy to be surprised...)
Are you claiming it was appreciative of women back then? It was expression about loud wild partying, the sort of that is annoying to everyone living on the same street as your beer pub is. The women who were present were not appreciated, they were look down at sort of tramps. A well behaved woman was not supposed to be present.
When you are casting it as appreciative of women because they are necessary for fun, you are applying modern idea that women present at a wild party says something positive about that woman. Back then, it suggested easy sexual availability and that was seen as a bad thing.
Edit: also in general, when people in the past were crass, other people in the past were offended over it. Even women themselves who accepted their role as god given would frequently get offended over hearing what they considered crass language. When women were supposed to be guardians of morality (and Germany had such periods), they would openly take issue with such statement. Because it was their expected role to be offended and to gently positively impact men (in a way that does not actually interfere with what he does).
Not sure about the reduction, but "Wine, women and song" somewhat assumes the point of view from an heterosexual male and could feel offensive just for this.
"Wine, man and song" would sound weird, but it should not sound weirder than the "women" version. That's because we are all used to the male pov assumption and that's the core of the issue.
And of course, to add insult to injury, the phrase will feel like the reduction the grand parent describes to many.
So I think we'd be better off dropping those old phrases in favor of things like your version, which doesn't have these issues.
Note: not a German nor an English native speaker so I might be missing some cultural subtlety that could make my POV a bit wrong and disconnected from reality.
The example with the rain is wrong.
It's either the proper "wegen des Regens" (Genitiv), or the new idiom "wegen dem Regen" (Dativ).
"wegen den Regen" means something slightly different (more like: "because of _multiple_ rainfalls")
There's a whole book by Bastian Sick (famous German author) named "Der Dativ ist dem Genitiv sein Tod." -- the title about the Dativ being the death of the Genetiv is playing with that idiom.
As much as I like Twain, the English language is one of the hardest European languages, when it comes to pronunciation (contrary to Italian, which sticks to a few simple rules). So, you're welcome, choose your poison.
I would argue (as a native speaker) that "wegen den Regen" is also possible and basically is equivalent to "wegen den Regenfällen".
Of course I am biased but I actually believe that there is no other language that is so elegantly conducive to precise thinking. And above confusing example is actually illustrating this. If thinking is a bit like moving around on a high-dimensional mental manifold then language is an imperfect projection onto a mostly serialized data structure but with referencing (maybe 1.x dimensional). (If you project something from n dimensions onto less than n dimensions you always lose information)
And with German you can explore this mental manifold in a depth and strictness like with no other language. Like entering a meta debug mode where you can form a sentence creating an implicit reprojection into the space where the manifold resides and then muse about how this makes sense.
I often find myself doing that and playing around with "understanding" a sentence in different ways. A simple example would be that you can take almost any German sentence and by stressing a different word the meaning subtly changes. An analogy could be those pictures where you see something and after looking long enough at it it looks different. For example a sketch of a 3D box which you can flip. At some point you can do this intentionally by applying an invisible switch. Same feeling with German statements.
But German has also some short comings especially in the emotional department. For example there are no good translations for "smile" and "to look forward to". Another language I dabbled in is Thai which is pretty much the total opposite of German - very fascinating and refreshing.
> "wegen den Regen" means something slightly different (more like: "because of _multiple_ rainfalls")
That's your natural feel of language, and you are deriving from casual use of Dativ plural ... but in these situations, Genitiv would be correct again (wegen DER Regen, but more clearly: wegen der Regenfälle, as Regen is uncountable (unlike, for example, Sturm/Stürme)).
Your example is vernacular German as spoken on the road, but grammatically, it is incorrect.
Just had some menonites come to my place to buy something last evening, and they confer amongst themselves in "low" german, which to my ear is much nicer sounding than the other variety.
I also like the sound of Swiss speaking "swiser dutch", which has a bit of sing song whistly lilt, and is apparently incomprehensable to anyone who wasn't raised with it.
A Canadian/german farmer down the road, did make much of his income translating german to english, mostly for technical manuals of equipment, but that work hss devolved into proof reading the automated translations, the whole translation industry having quietly been taken over.
Though another recent experience in a high end, high volume cabinetry shop full of exotic german equipment, revealed that technical support is done from germany, and requires muliti lingual tech support people to do voice calls.....down time on
a million dollar "saw" running at .1mm accuracy, bieng painfull
The compositional powers of German, Dutch and plenty of other languages are really amazing. People invent words on the fly and promptly forget immediately after and the listener just understands what has been said. In my Dutch native language, we had the word "pausbaar" (which means something like "in possession of the necessary properties to become pope) coming up recently.
Reading the article I guess Mark Twain never had a knowledgeable teacher.
Is there anything hacker news readers would like to know about the German language?
Why do nouns have "random" articles attached to them? In latin languages like Portuguese the ending of the word tells you which article (masculine or feminine) to use, but in German only "die" has some rules. This is my biggest griped with the language and it's major flaw, when you pair that with adjective declensions and other sort of structures that rely on KNOWING which article to use.
The gender of a noun is just a noun class. But because Germanic languages lie more toward the analytic end of the morphological typology continuum (whereas Romance languages lie more toward the synthetical end) the information is latent - or rather, the task of conveying that information is left to other words (the articles).
Just imagine if someone studied Portuguese but learned vocabulary like this, never bothering with the ending vowel:
'gat-'
'cas-'
'bolach-'
Similarly, 'die' should be considered an inherent part of 'Frau'. So don't learn just 'Frau', learn 'die Frau'. The article 'Die' is just as "random" as '-o' or '-a' is in Portuguese. (I'll skip the part where you can have a form of the word in both classes: gata/gato.) People like to try and find "rules" they can remember instead, but it's a pointless endeavor. Language is a Calvinball game.
To make a weird tech analogy: Romance nouns are like laptops, with a touchpad built in. Germanic nouns are like desktops, you have to remember to carry a mouse* along.
It is interesting that after two world wars the stereotype of German was that of a hard and harsh language. I think Twain earlier take is more correct.
German is indeed a harsh language, filled with glottal stops and harsh consonants. The publicity doesn't help either, but it's mainly the phonemes.
Try to swear loudly and angrily in French, and try it in German. In German like you're cursing the world out of existence, in French it is like wiping your ass with silk.
One of grading criteria for German B2 exam (mid-level in European framework) is Sprachgefühl, a feeling of (a feel for?) language. As mentioned earlier, if studying as an adult, you will probably keep making mistakes, but a lot just comes from being inside the German bubble.
slightly offtopic: I would be delighted if Tucholsky had written something hilarious along those lines. But he didn't as far as I know, he focused more on the German language himself.
Despite the offended Germans here, it is important to realize that Twain learned German well enough to perform (in German) in Germany, and was actually better known as basically the 19th-century version of a stand-up comic in America and Europe in his lifetime rather than the novelist he is remembered for now.
To add to this, I think Germans are usually the most chill about making fun of their own language. Well, I guess except English because it became so international.
As a developer working in a German company the question of translating some domain language items into English comes up here and there. Mostly we fail because the German compound words are so f*** precise that we are unable to find short matching English translations...unfortunately our non-native devs have to learn complex words they can't barely pronounce :D
Most of the time we try to use English for technical identifiers and German for business langugage, leading to lets say "interesting" code, but it works for us.
I think the issue of German compound nouns is seriously overegged. In almost all cases, it’s essentially the same as English, except with some spaces. It’s not like suddenly a short compound word expresses something that couldn’t be in English.
x100 this. You can sort of derive the meaning of a complex word if you grasp one or two parts of it and offer a hacked together English translation, even if it doesn’t map directly. I find that people online who haven’t actually studied German like to meme this often.
The Latin-derived cases from the article, on the other hand, are the truly maddening, and makes you appreciate the simplicity of English grammar by comparison.
This is true, but some German compound words acquire a meaning that doesn't simply derive from their component words. Well-known ones include Kindergarten and Weltschmerz. This is often the case for domain-specific terms (Gestaltpsychologie, Bildungsroman).
I worked on a case management system for a few years that dealt with Norwegian criminal law, and we did the same. Technical terms and conventional parts of method identifiers (like getFoo, setFoo, isFoo and such) were in English while the domain terminology was left in Norwegian. It looks a bit weird when you first encounter it, but honestly it was fine. Especially for a domain with as much emphasis on nuance and as many country specific details as the legal domain anything else would be a terrible idea IMO. Not only would it be really hard to translate many cases, it would probably make the code harder to understand and in some cases even cause misunderstandings.
I work with a lot of Germans and have noticed this. For me to provide the English translation that is the most accurate I have to dig deep. The unabridged English dictionary has plenty of words but I feel slightly guilty providing them with a word which I know is the best fit but which they will probably never encounter anywhere else, and where most English people would just not know this word. The definition is often quite contextual and nuanced, hinting at (for example) the reliability of the thing that is described by it, or the way it is used (or was used) in society (e.g. for good or ill). The "baggage" I suppose.
In my experience, problems is not with German as a language, but with Germans requiring to use their hard language, I live in neighboring country and since like 2010, nobody bothers to learn German anymore, (some small percent still learn, ok) and everyone who I know rather works in different country because of this. Like Netherlands, still hard language (multiple) but they don't expect you to learn it when working for multi-national company.
I don't know where the idea about the preciseness of German language comes from, especially in anything computer-related. For one, German language famously fails to distinguish between safety and security as well as between an error, a fault and a mistake. Whenever Germans discuss any software matters, they seem to be "code-switching" to English terms themselves.
Compounds have to be translated using multiple words, yes - that's just a few extra white space, it doesn't result in loss of precision.
Have to think of a translation for an EinfacheBeansFabrikBewusstAspektInstanzFabrik
What is “Simple Beans Factory Aware Aspect Instance Factory” supposed to actually mean?
That does not seem like a concept at all, let alone an actual German word. “Beans” is not even German, there is no German word spelled “Beans”.
Eierschalensollbrucherzeuger...
> * English for technical identifiers and German for business langugage, leading to lets say "interesting" code*
So it's code-switching code.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code-switching
Good reference to a higher level concept. Your linked article was a fun jumping off point.
Care to share an example or two?
I hope he will give us an actual example from his work. But meanwhile, here's a classic example:
The Donau is a river. On this river is a steamship (Dampfshiff): Donaudampfschiff
This ship is part of an organisation (Gesellschaft) that manages cruises (Fahrt): Donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaft
The ship has a captain (Kapitän) who has a cap (Mütze): Donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaftskapitänsmütze
On this cap is a button (Knopf): Donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaftskapitänsmützenknopf
You could extend this example: The button is colored with a special paint (Farbe), which is produced in a factory (Fabrik): Donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaftskapitänsmützenknopffarbenfabrik
And the factory has an entry gate (Eingangstor): Donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaftskapitänsmützenknopffarbenfabrikeingangstor
In English, this would be a huge sentence, all in reverse order: The entry gate of the factory that produces the color for the button on the captain's cap of the ship belonging to the cruise organization on the Donau.
The German is a lot more compact, if sometimes hard to parse :-)
In fact, with added spaces, works fine in English too (since English is also a Germanic language):
the Donau steamship cruise organization's captain's cap button.
And extended:
the Donau steamship cruise organization's captain's cap button's colour factory's entry gate.
EDIT: Let's not forget to mention its Java implementation, which goes full German:
DonauSteamshipCruiseOrganizationCaptainButtonsColorFactory
The German is only worse because we want to treat it worse, the sentence isn't much longer and they're broadly equal in conceptual cost.
Which isn't surprising since Anglo Saxon is at the heart of the non French bits of English.
Exactly. It’s not like you can even hear the absence of spaces in one or the other. It’s purely a writing choice.
Australian ad of 30+ years ago:
avagoodweekend and dontforgetaboutheaeroguard*
I rather see the Objective-C one, https://github.com/Quotation/LongestCocoa
Awesome example.
Germans are allowed to write compound nouns in hyphens
Donau-Dampfschifffahrts-Gesellschafts-Kapitänsmützenknopf-Farbenfabrik-Eingangstor
It’s not considered prescriptively correct, but often nowadays people just write them with spaces (like in English), especially on phones, because hitting spacebar makes spellcheck/autocorrect kick in.
Which is a combination of lisp-case and CamelCase. Neat!
I don't remember many events from 1996 but my German boss walking into the office excited about the spelling reform of "Schiffahrt" certainly stood out as a memorable event.
(They added the third f or maybe re-added it)
Context, maybe just for others: Schiff is ship and Fahrt is ride, so eine Schifffahrt is a cruise (and without the article, it is also the term for seafaring in general). Anyway, you can see that Schiff ends with two Fs and Fahrt starts with one, so if you put them together to form a compound word, you get three Fs in a row, Schifffahrt. In pre-reform German spelling, this was deemed excessive, so one would write Schiffahrt, instead. The German spelling reform in the mid-90s changed this, so now you do the logical thing. (Whether the old way really was confusing and which way is more aesthetic are separate questions.)
Yeah, there has been a changeset in spelling rules
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reform_der_deutschen_Rechtschr...
... several times: 1996,2004,2006,2011,2017.
The current correct spelling is either Schiff-Fahrt or Schifffahrt.
This is not an accurate or precise example. You surely know you are misleading people.
German does not simply just concatenate words ad infinitum across logical classification, a concatenated, compound word is generally logically limited by classification. The concatenation generally only tends to be used in relevant (operative word being “relevant”), increasing smaller/lower logical classification. You generally will not rise and fall in that classification, let alone jump horizontally as you concatenate. It is really just a logic tree, you don’t all the sudden jump trunks or branches. It has to be a logically precise unit.
You’re essentially just saying ManBearPig. It’s not an actual thing.
So the entry gate of the factory that produces paint that happens to maybe also be used on the button of the cap of the captain of the ship on the Danube and is also part of a union, is not…
Donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaftskapitänsmütze nknopffarbenfabrikeingangstor
German is a prime candidate to implement PascalCase in a natural language.
This is not necessary. Practiced German speakers generally do not struggle with splitting words into their components because syllables follow relatively predictable patterns. You will run into ambiguities from time to time, of course, but the same applies to tons of other features of natural languages as well. (Do you want to outlaw homophones in English?)
Anyway, there is also a perfectly acceptable and established way of making German words easier to parse if need be: hyphens. So Hyphen-Case instead of PascalCase.
When I was learning to read German, for the longest time I thought the word “letztendlich” was “letz-tendlich” (which is meaningless but at least theoretically pronounceable) rather than “letzt-endlich” (which is what it actually is).
I’m sure a native German speaker wouldn’t make the same mistake, though.
Interesting insight, thanks! Linguistics is fascinating, especially in the wider cognitive science context.
Swedish works the same (unsurprisingly), but note that programming languages also kind of do that. If you had to use a word like that in Java you would just mash all the words together in CamelCase and it would be pretty much the same as using the long German word (and almost exactly as difficult to read) even if technically it moved from being a single word to being a long list of words. It can still be a single identifier without spaces even if you translate to a language where it can not be a single word.
I mean is this really one word though, or a bunch of words just spelled with no spacing?
It really is one "new" word consisting of a bunch of words spelled without spaces. It is a compound, where every word adds additinal information to the last component. An easier example is sth like "Altbauwohnung" which would be an apartment (Wohnung) in an old (alt) building (Bau) where "Altbau" is also a compound. This way of compunding enables you to build new words everyone can understand the first time they encounter them, but also to build those stupidly long words.
It’s one word, like watchmaker or bookkeeper are in English.
What is your definition of “word”? This is not at all a simple question in linguistics. By the way, it can’t just be “written without spaces”, as languages with no writing system at all, and languages whose writing system has no spaces (like Chinese), still have various concepts of “word”.
It is one word in German. It has one article, Germans talk about it as about a single word and treat it as a single word for grammar purposes. You can use it as a single noun in any sentence.
But it also odd example for this, because it is long as hell anyway already and additional spacing that English equivalent would require is just opportunity to wrap. It is just harder to read, but English equivalent would be easier to layout.
An example from my work: in Norwegian criminal law, the prosecutor can in some cases hand out what is called a «påtaleunnlatelse», which means something like «decision to not prosecute». This is a legal punishment in the sense that it goes on your criminal record, but no punishment beyond that is handed out. Basically, the prosecutor’s office can note down «we are convinced we can prove this was done, but have decided not to prosecute».
A special kind of this is the «prosessøkonomisk (process economical) påtaleunnlatelse» where in a large and complex case with many serious offences, some less serious can be non-prosecuted in this way to not spend eternity in the courtroom.
In Australian English, this is known as "Section 10".
In English English it’s a ‘caution’.
So these are kind of fun to compare. At the high level they clearly all have the same purpose: in some cases it's socially useful to have the punishment for a crime simply be a statement of "person X did this thing". But the details vary a bit:
- It seems the Australian section 10 is handed out by the court, where the English and Norwegian options dispense with a trial entirely. It also looks like a Section 10 doesn't go in a person's criminal record, unlike the other two.
- It looks like the English caution requires an admission of guilt, while the Norwegian option is at the prosecutor's discretion within the rules of applicability of the procedure. Of course someone not demanding a trial when given this can be seen as an _implicit_ admission of guilt, but the legal nuance can probably be important.
- The English and Norwegian procedures are nominally also different in who makes the decision: the English procedure is handled by the police, while in Norway it's the prosecutor's office. But this is more a theoretical than practical difference I think, because the Norwegian prosecutor's office is organized differently than the English Crown Prosecution Service: here, the lowest levels of prosecutors are integrated into the police services they work with, so in practice I think it works out much the same.
In law of England and Wales we also have recording of non-crimes, which aren't cautions (it goes back to combating institutional racism).
Only in NSW Australian English. Not understood interstate.
Another example, not involving compound nouns: Norwegian criminal process distinguishes two levels of suspicion. The first level «mistenkt» (suspect) is basically the investigation noting down in their log «we think this guy might have done it», but the second level «siktet» (literally aimed at, no idea how to translate to English or even if an equivalent term exists) is a formal decision made by the prosecutor’s office. And importantly, the use of «tvangsmidler» (coercive instruments, like arrest, search, seizure and so on) requires there to be a siktelse and this status also triggers legal rights for the accused like the right to a defence attorney.
There are similar distinctions in American law, e.g. with the police's right to tarry you. A short stop by the police can be conducted for 'reasonable articulable suspicion' of committing a crime, such as seeing you make a rash judgment in driving, while a longer stop or an arrest requires 'probable cause' such as smelling marijuana in your car after the initial stop.
The exact same issue exists with translating English to German - long German words suddenly dont fit. And with translating English into Polish too.
yes, this can cause even major-ish UI issues - like in android where this happens:
cut,copy,paste auschneiden,kopieren,einfügen
this can break the UI so you have scroll on a popup just to copy a piece of text because google put "copy" last in the selection.
The issue is not so much one of language but of habit and usage. That's why in that sense it is important for scientific and technical domains to be taught and practiced in your own language. This allows terms to evolve and be used habitually in the language.
Related. Others?
The Awful German Language (1880) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27173967 - May 2021 (253 comments)
The Awful German Language (1880) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18147467 - Oct 2018 (311 comments)
As someone who studied German at school and has made serious attempts to learn Finnish and Czech, I have feelings about this. Obviously Twain was being humourous. But I took three years of German two decades ago, and to this day it is easier than Czech (I'm embarrassed to say, as I've lived here and tried to learn on and off for the last six years). I'm exaggerating only a bit.
The main difficulty with most Slavic languages are the grammatical cases/declensions/etc. German does have conjugations, but they have less forms and there are easily noticeable patterns (at least compared to something like Slovene: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slovene_verbs#Full_conjugation...). The words might seem scary, but actually require less thinking to use in sentences.
I absolutely love German, it is one of my favourite languages, there's such beauty in it. I am not a native speaker, but enjoy studying it. I am a native Afrikaans speaker and I see so many similarities between the two, which I find intriguing.
Don't tell the people in the Netherlands and Belgium, but Dutch is a German dialect with pretensions, and Afrikaans is a Dutch dialect, so...
Well, if it comes to that. German is not _really_ a single language. It’s a dialect continuum consisting of sometimes barely mutually intelligible variants. And yes, if you continue following that continuum, you get to the languages you mention.
A language is a dialect with an army and a fleet. As they used to say.
> A language is a dialect with an army and a fleet. As they used to say.
I usually say "A dialect is a language that lost a war", but this one might be better :)
'A language is a dialect with an army and a fleet ' --> I hadn't heard this before, love it! For the curious: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_language_is_a_dialect_with_a...
A bit of relevant context: the quote is from Yiddish, which is primarily Germanic with significant admixture from Hebrew, Aramaic, and Slavic languages.
(One of my current favorite party tricks is speaking Yiddish to German speakers, and cranking up the other aspects to see where the intelligibility breaks down.)
I took a trip to Germany with my Dad, who grew up with Yiddish-speaking parents, and it was amazing to watch people's eyeballs pop out as they began to understand him and then realize what they were hearing.
And the continuum has two big groups: High and Low German (High and Low here being z-coordinates, High German dialects because they come from the more mountainous Southern areas and Low German from the lower-lying Northern parts). Modern day Standard German is a High German variant, whereas Dutch (and thus Afrikaans) are Low German.
A Dutch speaker read Afrikaans without too much effort; understanding spoken Afrikaans is a bit harder, but depending on the person it can be fine.
A Dutch speaker can't read or understand German. Some words are similar, but the same can be said about English. There are a number of differences in the grammar and alphabet.
Of course they're related languages; because I can speak English, German, and Dutch I can kind of read Swedish or Danish on account of being Germanic as well. But that doesn't make a "dialect with pretensions". We might as well say that all current Germanic languages are some sort of "dialect with pretensions" of some old Germanic language. But that doesn't really mean anything.
I can speak English and German which makes me able to somewhat understand written Dutch (especially if I know the context), but no chance when it's spoken.
As a German, I enjoy reading the Dutch text on supermarket products and manuals, it is a source of great fun in my family :) Children especially love it. Dutch just has so many words that sound extremely cute and funny to Germans:
"Sleep well" -> "Slaap lekker", in German "Schlaf lecker" = "Sleep tasty".
"Nuttig" -> "Useful", in German "nuttig" means "slutty"
"Huren" -> "to rent", in German "huren" means "to whore".
"Oorbellen" -> "earrings", "ear bells".
It’s the same for me, a Brit, reading screenshots my Dutch mates send me from say TikTok or whatever localized to Netherlands one that tickles me is ‘reacties’ underneath instagram posts!
Yep. I find it easier to understand German verbally than Dutch. I struggle when Dutch people speak to me, the way they pronounce words are hard on my ears. German feels softer.
Native Dutch speaker here. I find German softer on the ears too.
Except for Dutch in the South (Belgians and South NL), that's soft on my ears too. But not my accent, we are descendants of monsters. Why otherwise would we pronounce the G the way that we do?
Well, it's not a coincidence that the English word for the language of the Netherlands is the same the German state calls itself: "dutch" / "Deutsch".
A people and their language predated the concept of nation-states, but when the latter arrived obviously (geo-)political interests started to blur the facts.
So if you conflate the German state with Germans (I'd challenge that and view the German state as a continuation of the Prussian state), and you don't like the interests of the German state, it is predictable where you'll land on this issue.
Because of this, even if their national anthem does so, calling the Dutch Germans would infuriate them and rightly so, because it would imply justification to some for things like those happening between Russia and Ukraine right now.
I think in the end it is also a matter of "national" self-confidence. While Luxemburgish is virtually indistinguishable to the German ear from say the dialect of Cologne, Swiss-German is hardly understandable for anyone outside of Switzerland. Yet, the Swiss don't have an urge to re-label their dialect as a separate language. And the urge of the Dutch to re-lable themselves is lesser than that of Luxemburg because seemingly no one questions their identity.
All national identities are to a large extent constructed (or less charitably: made up). So the 21st-century idea that Germans are people with a passport from the Federal Republic of Germany is not really any more or less valid than the 19th-century idea that Germans are a cultural group spanning various states including Austria (and maybe even including the Netherlands).
I am a native speaker. And I find German to be a very ugly language. Pronounciation wise. Compared to French or English. It sounds like someone is constantly having a quarrel with you.
German has harsh sound. But in terms of quarrelling, I find that Korean sounds like someone is complaining all the time. But then again I have never learned Korean, so my impression would surely change.
Weaknesses can become strengths. Sometimes you want to have a quarrel. When French people quarrel they must rely on changes on pitch, cadence and volume because otherwise it sounds like they are ordering baguettes at the boulanger.
I feel the same about Afrikaans, ugly and harsh as hell :D
I speak both and to me Dutch is the super harsh spitty one, compared to German and Afrikaans it's not even close!
I think German poetry can be very elegant and English poems feel dull in comparison. At the same time, the plainness of English makes it much better suited for songs. Lyrical German quickly sounds pretentious.
One of the things that helped me improve German was Poetry Slam contests, they are still quite popular over here in many regions, you get poetry coupled with another German property, plenty enough sarcasm.
Cool, Afrikaans is my 2nd language after German :) Groete van Duitsland boet!
I can certainly confirm that learning German grammar as an adult is...challenging. Even though I am now fluent, learning as an adult means that you will always make mistakes on the gender of nouns. There are effectively four genders (male/neuter/female/plural), plus four cases (nominative/accusative/dative/genetive), so you have a 4x4 table giving you a choice of 16 articles that can appear in from of a noun. Only, the 16 articles are not unique: the table contains lots of duplicates in unexpected places.
Of course, most Western languages have gendered nouns - English is pretty unique in that respect. That likely comes from English being born as a pidgin of French and German.
Verbs in German are valuable things. You collect them, hold on to them as long as you can, and then - at the end of the sentence - they all come tumbling out. The order of the nouns at the end of the sentence differs by region. In purest German, they come out in reverse order, giving you a nice, context-free grammar. In Swiss dialects, they come out in the order they were conceived, meaning that the grammar is technically context sensitive. In Austrian dialects, the order can be a mix.
Of course, every language has its quirks. French, for example, puts extra letters on the ends of words that you are not supposed to pronounce. Well, unless the right two words are next to each other, in which case, you pronounce the letters after all.
English, meanwhile, gives learners fits, because the pronunciation has nothing whatsoever to do with spelling. Consider the letters "gh" in this sentence (thanks ChatGPT): "Though the tough man gave a sigh and a laugh at the ghost, he had a hiccough and coughed through the night by the slough, hoping to get enough rest."
I totally agree that learning German grammar as an adult is… demoralizing. Knowing, and accepting, that you will make a mistake every time that you open your mouth, hurts.
Also, the increase in possible permutations (and opportunities for mistakes) when you add adjective conjugations to the mix is daunting.
I know what you’re getting at when you say that English is a pidgin of German and French, but that’s kind of a distorted version of the truth.
First of all, it is not German, but Old English, which is not particularly more similar to German than it is to any other Germanic language e.g. Icelandic.
Second, the idea that middle/modern English began as a pidgin is a very fringe view in linguistics; the vast majority of people who have studied the question would instead say that it indeed has a huge amount of French (or more precisely, Norman) influence, but not to the extent that we can say it went through a pidgin/creolization process.
As a native German speaker, I think it's fair to say that German is a comparatively poorly designed* language. It has too many needless concepts. I envy Chinese and Japanese; I feel like these languages have got it almost right. If they eliminated measure words, they'd probably be as perfect as a language can reasonably be.
* I know languages aren't "designed" for the most part, but I find it helpful to compare them as if they were.
Also, English has the 5 vowels of the Latin script representing some 25 vowels sounds, to the point that consonants can turn into vowels with no rhyme or reason. The best way to learn that English is nonsense is to live in Britain and learn local city and village names. They all have made up pronunciation rules, evolved over the centuries, sure, but they forgot to update the bloody name on the map to match the sounds.
As a descendant of the Romans, I can only shake my head at such barbarism.
Ha! And don’t even get me started with the Scots and their whiskey. Bruichladdich, Pittyvaich, and Tè Bheag? Bunnahabhain Stiuireadair? Auchroisk??
I swear they only do this to mess with people.
So true. I always wondered why is Leicester pronounced as "lester" and not as "laichester".
Grenich anyone?
Soderk (Southwark), Marlibon (Marylebone), Reding (Reading), Bister (Bicester), Sozbery (Salisbury), Frum (Frome), Worick (Warwick), Noridge (Norwich), Darby (Derby), and the various Gloster, Lester, Wooster
The perks of coming late. Finnish did job properly with only one or two warts...
That depends on how one defines «properly». Finnish, with its nearly 20 noun cases and vowel harmony, has made a spellchecker a computationally unsolvable problem.
>You collect them, hold on to them as long as you can, and then - at the end of the sentence - they all come tumbling out.
as a German native I felt oddly at home with Japanese because funnily enough building seemingly endless verbs at the end of sentences felt very natural. Despite the fact that German, most of the time, is an ordinary SVO language. It's one of the mistakes English natives who just learn German make, that only made sense for me after I thought how odd that structure is.
I've also heard live TV translators really hate this about German because it's annoying, depending on the context, to have to wait to the end of a sentence to translate the whole thing.
Or the tale about a speaker, being translated into German. He tells a joke, the English speakers laugh. He says "ok, and seriously now...", the German speakers finally hear the verb and start to laugh.
"Verbs in German are valuable things. You collect them, hold on to them as long as you can, and then - at the end of the sentence - they all come tumbling out."
Franz Kafka put this property to good use and sometimes keeps the reader in suspense for half a page or more until the sentence falls in place.
Swedish had some of this until the second world war, since then we've made it into an english-like pidgin.
> Of course, every language has its quirks. French, for example, puts extra letters on the ends of words that you are not supposed to pronounce. Well, unless the right two words are next to each other, in which case, you pronounce the letters after all.
A lot of this is to due with latin, which pronounciation evolved over time to give modern French but which origin is still kept in spelling. So it's not that the language "puts extra letters" it's that it kept old spelling when the pronunciation change.
An example: 'est' (to be, third person singular) is very obviously verbatim latin spelling but pronunciation has shifted so that the 't' is not pronounced (and arguably the 's' could go, too).
Sometimes there are useful "rules" about how spelling and pronunciations evolved, which can be useful for English speakers writing in French, too, to remember your accents:
hospital -> hôpital
hostel -> hôtel
castel (castle in English) -> château
The question is: why hasn't the spelling been updated.
In my native German spelling, while there are irregularities, has been updated over times. Sometimes out of habit, sometimes by "order."
There have been some minor French spelling reforms over the years but French people are affectionately proud of their language with all its quirks, and changing the spelling of basic vocabulary like “est” would be a bridge too far for them.
> The order of the nouns at the end of the sentence differs by region.
Could you give some examples? As a German native speaker I have to admit I have no idea what you are talking about. :)
I think he meant verbs, and specifically how you say things like "could have done" - the order of "hätte machen können".
As a native German speaker: Everything Twain rants about here we attribute to French.
Hmm, French definitely has ornamental noun paradigms affecting articles and adjectives, exceptions to every single rule and things like that. But it lakes the cases that German add on top of this. Syntax is not as funny with verb at second position, or end of the phrase, separable verbs, and so on.
French of course also have many original grammatical torture instruments. You might think that as a bastard child between Latin and the Germanic Frank tribe dialects it’s no wonder, though elimination of noun declension is rather surprising from this perspective. The truth is that all languages out there have their own dungeon with many traps and treacheries included.
Fortune, nun ni ĉiuj parolas Esperanton. Kaj ne forgesas la akuzativo nin. :D
Laking the cases is Danish.
> French of course also have many original grammatical torture instruments.
For me it was when I had to realize that for the French, every number larger than what they can count with their fingers becomes a small algebra problem. quatre-vingt-dix-neuf ... four times twenty plus ten plus nine makes 99.
Yeah, you can take an other locale and use "nonante neuf" instead. People generally take "quatre-vingt-dix" as a single token, they don't actually think about it in a compound perspective. Just like onze, douze, treize, quatorze, quinze, seize, where -ze stands for ten, so it's "n + 10". But in this case it's not synchronically as obvious as this composition is analyzed from morphological point of view, -ze in itself is not attached to any autonomous token in French. If anything French will rather lead to analyze numbers in terms of "k*10+n" instead, unlike German.
Well if you like that, you'd love Danish numbers, where 99 is nine and half (before) five times twenty, or »nioghalvfemsindstyve« (or more commonly shorten to »nioghalvfems«).
I recently got curious about the roots of this, and it turns out it’s from Celtic languages. All the Celtic languages count in base 20, and they were widespread across continental Europe before the Romans introduced Latin to their conquests and then the Germanic tribes brought the Germanic languages in.
Celtic remained a strong influence around modern France, Belgium, the Netherlands so we end up with French counting partially in 20s, even though continental Celtic languages are extinct (Breton, spoken in north west France is an insular Celtic language, more closely related to Celtic as spoken in the British isles and Ireland.)
I don’t know how Danish got base 20 counting though. Must have more reading to do.
Swiss French seems to have regularized some of this in a sensible way? Indian English does much the same with some things; not strictly “correct” English, to the extent those words don’t exist in British or American English, but I can’t argue that it doesn’t make more sense or isn’t more consistent so I never argue the case. I generally view those regularizing pressures from non-native sources as a positive thing for languages.
I suppose like the general American of today, he has just never really learnt an n-th language (where n>1).
He actually learned German well enough to have appreciative audiences in Germany, but he also knows how to make amazing comedic essays on many topics. He did plenty about US-specific topics, and about French too, not just about German.
Which gives us Hitler memes where they audibly says German words that are very similar to their English counterparts, but the /funny/ subtitles is just a Beavis and Butthead level joke.
Doesn't work as good if one has ears.
As someone who's learned a few (natural) languages over the years, German remains the only one that just instills me with a sense of dread, or maybe some sort of internal animosity. Russian? Sure. French? Yeah. English? Obviously. Japanese? Still in the kanji mines but making progress. Spanish? Sweet.
But German is a blood-and-tears uphill battle for me and I just can't get over it. It's really fascinating on some level.
I am a native German and had Russian as a second foreign language. Try applying Russian Grammar rules to German, you will find they are almost identical.
Verb prefix system is the same. Noun conjugation even uses the same prepositions to decide the case. Compound words are slighly different, instead of a tram-station you would use tramlike station.
Ahaha, was für ein Scheißkerl! Frankly, I used this text to tease my teacher when he suggested to read something in German together.
"Tomcat" is male in German, not female: Der Kater.
"Wife" is female in German, not neutral: Die Ehefrau. "Weib" is old language and rude to use these days.
And a girl is a "Mädchen", which is neuter, even though a boys is a "Knabe" and definitely male.
Amongst guys, women are still sometimes referred collectively to as "Weiber".
Fun fact: “Das Mädchen” (“little girl”, neuter) is diminutive form for “Die Mad” (“girl”, female).
All diminutives in German are neuter, for whatever reason. You could do the same for “Der Knabe” (“boy”) → “Das Knäbchen” (“little boy”).
Curiously, saying “Die Mad” would be as uncommon – at least nowadays – as saying “Das Knäbchen”.
> Curiously, saying “Die Mad” would be as uncommon – at least nowadays – as saying “Das Knäbchen”.
I liked that The Handmaids Tale in German is der Report der Magd.
Consider that the text is, in fact, from the 19th century.
Also, 'Weib' is not rude in every context. "Wein, Weib und Gesang" is not diminutive towards women, but in fact appreciative (as in 'necessary for having a good time'). We have Weiberfassnacht. And then there are the dialects, in which "Weib" often is indicative of a homely, loving relationship (-> bairisch, Swabian). Context matters.
If you involve Swabian (which I could argue is more than just a dialect), everything goes out the window and you start again anyway.
And “weiblich” is the commonly used adjective instead of the Latin derived feminine.
An example:
"Eine Göttin ist eine weibliche Gottheit."
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6ttin
> Wein, Weib und Gesang
This saying exists in English too: "wine, women and song".
Sorry to be picky, but "Wein, Weib und Gesang" is not neutral. It reduces "Weib" to the value of Wein and Gesang, something only needed for pleasure.
You are applying logic and common sense from this century, to words of other centuries. This doesn't work, and never will. I think this is important, because a lot of people do this and nothing good comes out of it.
Yes, perhaps you are right. But then, look at who responded to my comment - all usernames suggest male companions. We are also now, not back then. Nothing prevents us from rethinking things from time to time.
Yes, sexism is not a new thing from today, and such sentences are witnesses of this. We might be interpreting stuff from the past with today's eyes, true, but that doesn't make the interpretation wrong. There are a lot of things we know now and didn't before. It's even totally possible we have reading keys that might have been unavailable back then.
We should not interpret stuff out of context though, but here I'm not sure taking the context in account would not make the point even stronger. I would be quite surprised about any context changing things for this particular phrase (but happy to be surprised...)
Are you claiming it was appreciative of women back then? It was expression about loud wild partying, the sort of that is annoying to everyone living on the same street as your beer pub is. The women who were present were not appreciated, they were look down at sort of tramps. A well behaved woman was not supposed to be present.
When you are casting it as appreciative of women because they are necessary for fun, you are applying modern idea that women present at a wild party says something positive about that woman. Back then, it suggested easy sexual availability and that was seen as a bad thing.
Edit: also in general, when people in the past were crass, other people in the past were offended over it. Even women themselves who accepted their role as god given would frequently get offended over hearing what they considered crass language. When women were supposed to be guardians of morality (and Germany had such periods), they would openly take issue with such statement. Because it was their expected role to be offended and to gently positively impact men (in a way that does not actually interfere with what he does).
Would "wine, friends, and song" do the same?
No gender is weirdly specific in your version.
Not sure about the reduction, but "Wine, women and song" somewhat assumes the point of view from an heterosexual male and could feel offensive just for this.
"Wine, man and song" would sound weird, but it should not sound weirder than the "women" version. That's because we are all used to the male pov assumption and that's the core of the issue.
And of course, to add insult to injury, the phrase will feel like the reduction the grand parent describes to many.
So I think we'd be better off dropping those old phrases in favor of things like your version, which doesn't have these issues.
Note: not a German nor an English native speaker so I might be missing some cultural subtlety that could make my POV a bit wrong and disconnected from reality.
Why do you assume reduction?
The example with the rain is wrong. It's either the proper "wegen des Regens" (Genitiv), or the new idiom "wegen dem Regen" (Dativ). "wegen den Regen" means something slightly different (more like: "because of _multiple_ rainfalls")
There's a whole book by Bastian Sick (famous German author) named "Der Dativ ist dem Genitiv sein Tod." -- the title about the Dativ being the death of the Genetiv is playing with that idiom.
https://languagetool.org/insights/de/beitrag/dativ-genitiv-s... -- it's in German and discusses the (perceived) change of that idiom.
As much as I like Twain, the English language is one of the hardest European languages, when it comes to pronunciation (contrary to Italian, which sticks to a few simple rules). So, you're welcome, choose your poison.
I would argue (as a native speaker) that "wegen den Regen" is also possible and basically is equivalent to "wegen den Regenfällen".
Of course I am biased but I actually believe that there is no other language that is so elegantly conducive to precise thinking. And above confusing example is actually illustrating this. If thinking is a bit like moving around on a high-dimensional mental manifold then language is an imperfect projection onto a mostly serialized data structure but with referencing (maybe 1.x dimensional). (If you project something from n dimensions onto less than n dimensions you always lose information)
And with German you can explore this mental manifold in a depth and strictness like with no other language. Like entering a meta debug mode where you can form a sentence creating an implicit reprojection into the space where the manifold resides and then muse about how this makes sense.
I often find myself doing that and playing around with "understanding" a sentence in different ways. A simple example would be that you can take almost any German sentence and by stressing a different word the meaning subtly changes. An analogy could be those pictures where you see something and after looking long enough at it it looks different. For example a sketch of a 3D box which you can flip. At some point you can do this intentionally by applying an invisible switch. Same feeling with German statements.
But German has also some short comings especially in the emotional department. For example there are no good translations for "smile" and "to look forward to". Another language I dabbled in is Thai which is pretty much the total opposite of German - very fascinating and refreshing.
> the English language is one of the hardest European languages, when it comes to pronunciation
I always found it weird, the vast difference between phonetics of English and literally EVERYBODY ELSE, including closely related German languages.
They're the only ones who were conquered by French speaking post-Vikings.
> "wegen den Regen" means something slightly different (more like: "because of _multiple_ rainfalls")
That's your natural feel of language, and you are deriving from casual use of Dativ plural ... but in these situations, Genitiv would be correct again (wegen DER Regen, but more clearly: wegen der Regenfälle, as Regen is uncountable (unlike, for example, Sturm/Stürme)).
Your example is vernacular German as spoken on the road, but grammatically, it is incorrect.
Yes, I am lots of fun at parties.
You sound like a prescriptivist ;)
des Regens wegen FIFY
Just had some menonites come to my place to buy something last evening, and they confer amongst themselves in "low" german, which to my ear is much nicer sounding than the other variety. I also like the sound of Swiss speaking "swiser dutch", which has a bit of sing song whistly lilt, and is apparently incomprehensable to anyone who wasn't raised with it. A Canadian/german farmer down the road, did make much of his income translating german to english, mostly for technical manuals of equipment, but that work hss devolved into proof reading the automated translations, the whole translation industry having quietly been taken over. Though another recent experience in a high end, high volume cabinetry shop full of exotic german equipment, revealed that technical support is done from germany, and requires muliti lingual tech support people to do voice calls.....down time on a million dollar "saw" running at .1mm accuracy, bieng painfull
The compositional powers of German, Dutch and plenty of other languages are really amazing. People invent words on the fly and promptly forget immediately after and the listener just understands what has been said. In my Dutch native language, we had the word "pausbaar" (which means something like "in possession of the necessary properties to become pope) coming up recently.
In some languages there is an actual word for this in the dictionary: papabile
https://de.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/papabile
Ah, I read "pausbaar" as the "ability to pause" since "pauzebaar" would be odd to say :')
Ahhh, the recurring themes of popeability and pope-worthiness.
Reading the article I guess Mark Twain never had a knowledgeable teacher. Is there anything hacker news readers would like to know about the German language?
Why do nouns have "random" articles attached to them? In latin languages like Portuguese the ending of the word tells you which article (masculine or feminine) to use, but in German only "die" has some rules. This is my biggest griped with the language and it's major flaw, when you pair that with adjective declensions and other sort of structures that rely on KNOWING which article to use.
From a foreign learners perspective, it is easier to just learn the article together with the noun.
But there are rules for 2/3 of cases. https://sprachekulturkommunikation.com/genus-der-substantive...
You can classify by suffix.
* -ung, -heit, -keit -> feminin, e.g. die Schönheit
* -ling -> masculin, e.g. der Flüchtling
* -chen, -lein -> neutrum, e.g das Mädchen
You can classify by category. Every alcoholic drink is masculin, except for beer.
You can classify by phonetic spelling. That is probably the closest you have to Portugese.
The gender of a noun is just a noun class. But because Germanic languages lie more toward the analytic end of the morphological typology continuum (whereas Romance languages lie more toward the synthetical end) the information is latent - or rather, the task of conveying that information is left to other words (the articles).
Just imagine if someone studied Portuguese but learned vocabulary like this, never bothering with the ending vowel:
Similarly, 'die' should be considered an inherent part of 'Frau'. So don't learn just 'Frau', learn 'die Frau'. The article 'Die' is just as "random" as '-o' or '-a' is in Portuguese. (I'll skip the part where you can have a form of the word in both classes: gata/gato.) People like to try and find "rules" they can remember instead, but it's a pointless endeavor. Language is a Calvinball game.To make a weird tech analogy: Romance nouns are like laptops, with a touchpad built in. Germanic nouns are like desktops, you have to remember to carry a mouse* along.
* Die Maus
It is interesting that after two world wars the stereotype of German was that of a hard and harsh language. I think Twain earlier take is more correct.
German is indeed a harsh language, filled with glottal stops and harsh consonants. The publicity doesn't help either, but it's mainly the phonemes.
Try to swear loudly and angrily in French, and try it in German. In German like you're cursing the world out of existence, in French it is like wiping your ass with silk.
One of grading criteria for German B2 exam (mid-level in European framework) is Sprachgefühl, a feeling of (a feel for?) language. As mentioned earlier, if studying as an adult, you will probably keep making mistakes, but a lot just comes from being inside the German bubble.
Related video by RobWords "Is German really 'Awful'?" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VcekIrFjwe0
A analytic language speaker discovers synthetic/fusional languages.
Hilarious, wish I would have seen this when I was studying German.
I would love to read "The Awful English Language" written in an alternative universe where Twain is German.
slightly offtopic: I would be delighted if Tucholsky had written something hilarious along those lines. But he didn't as far as I know, he focused more on the German language himself.
https://www.eventpeople.de/aktuelles/eventmarket/ratschlaege...
Is https://guidetogrammar.org/grammar/twain.htm not what you are looking for?
I'd expect a lot of moaning about how something is written and how it is spelled to appear to come from two different planets.
I think you're looking for the poem "the chaos" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chaos
https://ncf.idallen.com/english.html
Ghoti.
Fish?
(1880)
Twain's style was so accessible, it's easy to forget this essay is almost 150 years old.
Despite the offended Germans here, it is important to realize that Twain learned German well enough to perform (in German) in Germany, and was actually better known as basically the 19th-century version of a stand-up comic in America and Europe in his lifetime rather than the novelist he is remembered for now.
I didn't see any offended Germans here! People seem to be taking the article in its intended (fun) spirit.
Edit: Seems true of the previous threads as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44002116
To add to this, I think Germans are usually the most chill about making fun of their own language. Well, I guess except English because it became so international.