
The Awful German Language (1880) - matteuan
https://www.cs.utah.edu/~gback/awfgrmlg.html
======
apo
English grammar is far simpler than German grammar. Eliminating noun genders,
declensions, and cases (as English does) is a great simplification over
German. I've never understood the need for noun genders and I scratch my head
at a society that makes its members memorize such useless information.

That said, German pronunciation is more regular than English pronunciation.
Every letter combination is in most cases pronounced exactly the same in every
word.

Take, for example, the vowel combination "ie." No matter where you see it in a
German word, it will be pronounced "ee".

Likewise, the combination "ei" will always be pronounced "eye."

Contrast this with the scattershot pronunciations English has for the same
combinations:

"Neighbor" uses "ay".

"Albeit" and "Atheist" uses "ee-i".

"Caffeine" uses "ee".

And so on.

~~~
zvrba
> I've never understood the need for noun genders

As a native speaker of Slavic language, I've never understood the need for
differentiating between "THE table" and "A table". It's useless and clear from
the context what is meant (note that both are different from "THIS/THAT
table", which I do NOT deem useless.)

For English and Norwegian, I've learned grammatical rules that cover ca 80% of
use-cases, the rest is guessing and I still get it wrong sometimes.

~~~
davidgh
> As a native speaker of Slavic language, I've never understood the need for
> differentiating between "THE table" and "A table"

This was a common sentiment I heard from Russian students when teaching them
English. The concept of articles is absolutely maddening, I think, when your
native language does not have it.

I recall trying to teach it with a simple explanation. “I heard a dog walking
outside. The dog pushed the door open and entered.” By switching from “a dog”
to “the dog”, I expressed that the dog I heard was the same dog that entered.
We translated the same sentences into Russian and they expressed that it was
natural to assume, without the articles it was the same dog. I then asked them
“but what if was a different dog that entered?” and they indicated the speaker
would likely add a clarifying clause to the statement to ensure that there are
two different dogs in scope.

It caused me to ponder and I came to the realization that some of these
elements of language while seemingly “useless” (meaning, you could clearly
make a language work without them) are what add subtle richness to a language.
Just as I can do without a ternary in JavaScript, I enjoy its succinctness
even if it might be a bit confusing for a new learner.

I recall comparing some of my own difficulties learning Russian as a native
English speaker. My head literally exploded when I realized for every verb I
had to learn a perfective and imperfective aspects. Something simple like “I
did it.” What on earth is the difference between the two aspects, I often
asked. To Russians it was clear - it addeded subtle richness.

I guess what I learned is that in language “not needed” does not mean
“useless”. I learned to love the richness of the Russian language and began to
better appreciate some of richness of my own language that I previously took
for granted.

~~~
zvrba
> “I heard a dog walking outside. The dog pushed the door open and entered.”

"THE door"? Which door? Why is "the" there? Seems as yet another case of
"tautological article", as the answer is "that exact door that was opened by
the dog", so why not just write "[The] dog pushed door open and entered."? No
extra information is conveyed by "the".

Of course it's maddening since no explanation makes full sense.

> I then asked them “but what if was a different dog that entered?”

Indeed, what would you say in English if it were a different dog? "I heard a
dog walking outside. [Another] dog pushed the door open end entered."

Writing the second sentence as "A dog pushed the door.." if there were another
makes absolutely no sense to me (because: which dog? -- another one or the
same one?), so when writing "Dog pushed door.." it's very natural to assume
that it's the same dog.

> What on earth is the difference between the two aspects, I often asked. To
> Russians it was clear - it addeded subtle richness.

Ah, but aspect is more than just subtle richness: it's a tool that it makes it
possible to succinctly express complex temporal relationships.

~~~
davidgh
I’m curious your native language so I can better understand your perspective.
Articles convey meaning to me - relatively, perhaps, or specificity. How to
use “a” vs. “the” is not taught in schools to native speakers of English. It’s
not something that is prescribed by rules. A speaker selects “a” or “the” by
what they are trying to convey and a native speaker does not ever question
when he should use one or their other based on grammar or rules. Instead, he
chooses based on what he is trying to express.

I wonder how the native language you learn as a child impacts the way your
brain not only expresses concepts but how it even perceives them.

If I walked up to a my friend, a native speaker of English and said “I like
dogs” he’d probably respond with “that’s nice”. If I walked up and said “I
like the dogs” he’d probably ask “which dogs?” because the use of “the”
conveys that it is a specific group of dogs. In a language without articles
you might use “I like those dogs” or “I like these dogs” to call out
specificity among dogs in general. That’s great. There’s lots of different
ways to express the same concept in virtually all languages. Redundancy in
expression doesn’t remove meaning from any method.

My whole point was there is no requirement for articles, many languages work
without articles, but just because they don’t convey meaning _to you_ doesn’t
mean they don’t convey meaning _to someone else_. They add specificity and
relatively that is subtle yet important within the language, even if it could
be accomplished by other means.

I heard another example last night when watching sport news and am curious
your thoughts. The announcer said:

“This is not the story of the night but it definitely is a story.” If I drop
the articles, it seems I have to re-word that sentence to convey what is being
expressed.

~~~
zvrba
I'm not disputing that articles are sometimes useful, indeed sometimes you
need "the" or "that" for disambiguation. But in most cases it's [a?] noise
that I can't make sense of as in your previous example.

[I seriously cannot decide whether "it's noise" or "it's a noise" is correct
in the previous sentence because it makes sense to put "some" in front but
putting "a" "feels" wrong.]

> "The dog opened the door and entered."

Why "THE" door? It's not been previously introduced and it refers to the very
door being opened by the dog. SUCH use of articles is confusing and
nonsensical when set against all of the examples where "the" _does_ make a
difference.

Similar examples: "I'm on the phone", "I'm in the shower", "The food is in the
fridge", etc. By the same "rule" that requires "the" in these examples, you
should be supposed to say "I'm at the home", which is for some reason wrong.

Next, should one use "the" / "a" or nothing here: "I'm at the post office."
[Which one? There are tens if not hundreds in a large city.]

I've learned those and many others as expressions by heart, but use of "the"
is a mystery to me.

As for "a", I have two simple rules: nouns (usually) cannot stand naked, and
"a" is appropriate if "some" would be appropriate as well.

Or, if I imagine a teacher saying: "Today, we're going to learn about the
animals that ruled the Earth 100 million years ago."

Why "the" animals? Why did I put it there in the first place? Because if I
read the sentence silently, it feels "wrong" without an article before
"animals", yet I cannot put "a" since it's in plural.

Or, even more amusingly: why "THE Earth"? We only have one.

Or, contrast with: "that ruled planet Earth 100 million years ago". No "THE
planet Earth". Why? Or is it correct to say "THE planet Earth"? I seriously
have no idea.

> “This is not the story of the night but it definitely is a story.” If I drop
> the articles, it seems I have to re-word that sentence to convey what is
> being expressed.

If you drop articles, it'd be ambiguous in English because it could be
interpreted as "This is not (story of night) [i.e., story _about_ night] but
it definitely is story."

The ambiguity in Croatian is resolved by declension; "night" would be in
genitive case which seems to be the role of "the" in that sentence.

"A" in "a story" doesn't seem to have any purpose (to me).

EDIT: So, that's my perspective. I can't describe it in a better way than
listing examples where "THE"/"A" is somehow required (or, worse, it must NOT
be there), yet the use doesn't have anything to do with "specificity".

As an amusing anecdote: A couple of years ago I attended a course on
scientific writing in English and we had to write an essay. The teacher
returned the essay to me, it was full of red ink, and the vast majority of the
errors (like >80%) were wrong use of articles (missing or wrong).

EDIT2: As for my native language (Croatian), definiteness is mostly implied.
When you feel that specificity is needed because there are multiple potential
subjects/objects, you use "THAT/THIS". For example, say you were at an animal
shelter and you wanted to take some animal home. If there only were one dog
among the animals, and you liked that dog of all animals, you'd say "I like
dog, I'll take it home." If there were multiple dogs, you'd point and say "I
like THAT dog, I'll take it home."

~~~
zvrba
As an addition to the shelter example: if there were many dogs, and there were
only one white dog, you would say "I'll take white dog." And so on...

------
Koshkin
German is an amazing, beautiful language. With not much of the vocabulary
borrowed from other languages, words actually make sense. From that
perspective, German can be seen as the modern equivalent of Latin, and if I
were to choose only one language to remain on the entire planet, it would be
German (sorry English, Chinese and Spanish). Its sounds are easier for non-
native speakers to pronounce - especially compared to English; it seems to be
more resistant to frivolous changes, being sensibly conservative. It’s not
perfect, but Latin is a dead language, and we did not have a will to adopt it
as a universal language - unlike, for example, Israel which had enough
determination to revive a dead language (I find it interesting that they, in
fact, also considered German for the role of the national language).

~~~
bitL
Despite appearance, German is very illogical language full of idioms and
exceptions one has to master. Also, even natives usually don't master the full
extent of language and the overbearing nature of language with its need for
precise use of words/formulations specific to a given situation often leads to
strong reliance on syntax/appearance of complexity. You can see it in typical
German philosophy, where the language gets in the way in order to satisfy its
constraints, often missing the point, being trapped in its structures, unable
to formulate way out due to structural constraints inherent in the language;
being overly rational and weakly emotional, suppressing a whole dimension of
humaneness. Thanks, but no thanks!

~~~
Koshkin
Yet, the greatest philosophers after the Greeks were all German-speaking
(Hegel, Kant, Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsche, Mach...). Also, physicists,
mathematicians.

~~~
yongjik
Well, on the other hand, the greatest musician after the Greeks composed the
majority of his greatest creations only after he stopped hearing German.

~~~
poulsbohemian
Well played, points for cerebral humor.

------
lolc
As a native speaker I can confirm the observations of Mark Twain. What is
ignored in such humorous tirades is that every human speaker will push
information density to the very limit of understandability. In every language.
They will use all the tools available.

Sure, the German case system is getting weaker as the centuries go by. And in
some situations you will wonder why it's used still. But that doesn't mean the
language will be easier to learn once it's gone. As the cases are lost,
preposition will be added in many places. The choice of prepositions will
likely come from English, which means it's arbitrary from a grammatical point
of view.

I claim that reaching spoken proficiency requires the same effort in all human
languages. If you want to speak at the level of a native, prepare for ten
years of study. As a learner you'll use strings of terms that don't follow the
arbitrary conventions, and people will have a hard time understanding.

It amazes me how many people claim English is easy to learn all while using
unfamiliar preposition-verb combinations in unexpected order. You can't leave
hard parsing work to the recipient and say it was easy!

~~~
liftbigweights
> It amazes me how many people claim English is easy to learn

People think english is simple because we don't have the
gender+conjugation+declension system of many languages. So initially, english
appears simple. A boat is a boat is a boat. But everywhere else - from
spelling to grammar to phonetics, english is irregular and has so many
exceptions that it really requires effort to become native or even fluent.

One cow or many cows vs one sheep vs many sheep? One goose or many geese vs
one moose vs many moose? Though goose can become gooses if you use it as a
verb. Or look at envelope. You pronounce it differently depending on whether
you use it as a noun, verb or adjective ( though it might be a regional thing
). And of course the nearly non-systematic accent/emphasis of syllables which
you simply have to learn through listening. Whereas languages like latin have
fairly consistent and systematic rules for accent/emphasis. And then there is
the british insistence on adding a 'u' to words like labor or harbor.

~~~
FabHK
I've seen this quote attributed to G B Shaw: "English is one of the easiest
languages to speak badly, but one of the most difficult to speak well";
however, I can't find a reliable citation.

At any rate, I think it captures something about English. As you say,
languages like German and French take more effort to learn initially
(conjugation and (in German) declension), but then there are only a few ways
of expressing something correctly. English has so many synonyms with slightly
different connotations and idiomatic nuances that it is hard to master.

~~~
tormeh
But I think this is the way languages have to work if they're supposed to be
spoken by non-native speakers or just spoken by a large number of
geographically dispersed people. Even German is losing a lot of its initial
complexity because of the last decades of immigration. This is mostly just in
spoken German for now, but the written word will eventually follow.

And all languages with wide geographic dispersion have a disconnect between
the spoken word and the written spelling, the most extreme example being
Chinese.

------
vinayms
As a speaker of Kannada, a Dravidian language, grammatically, I find Indo
European languages strange in general, with all kinds of rules, and all kinds
of exceptions to those rules. Eg: verb conjugation and noun genders. I have
dabbled with German and Spanish - I really like these two for some reason -
and a bit of Russian. Of this family, Sanskrit seems simpler; not sure if
that's because it was explicitly systematized (refactored) millennia back, and
hence objectively so, or its just subjective since every Indian is made to
learn it at a young age. I find Semitic languages, of which I know some
Arabic, quite attractive. I love how concisely are ideas encoded in these
languages because Dravidian languages are somewhat concise similarly, though
not to that extent.

------
mikestew
Even if you don't know a word German, it's Mark Twain, and therefore well
worth a read. If you don't know German, the essay makes you _want_ to learn
German so that you, too, can suffer along with the author.

~~~
dmlorenzetti
Also this bit from _Connecticut Yankee_

"She had exactly the German way; whatever was in her mind to be delivered,
whether a mere remark, or a sermon, or a cyclopedia, or the history of a war,
she would get it into a single sentence or die. Whenever the literary German
dives into a sentence, that is the last you are going to see of him till he
emerges on the other side of his Atlantic with his verb in his mouth."

~~~
escherplex
True. German sticks auxillary verbs in the middle of a sentence and main verbs
at the end. Knew a guy from Lufthansa who joked that sometimes he would attend
lectures with orators delivering long sentences and sometimes wouldn't know
what was being referenced until the end of a sentence when the main verb
showed up two minutes later.

~~~
spiralx
Which is why I've read that jokes - where the format is setup and then the
twist - are hard to express in German :)

------
GreeniFi
I’m not German but spend a lot of time with Germans who are more often than
not fantastic fun. And quite “freigeistlich” I find.

This is an excellent German stand-up comedian who plies his trade in London:
[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=48gV9W9UZHk](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=48gV9W9UZHk)

A curious thing that I have noticed that when Germans speak and write English,
they often don’t differentiate between 2 previously mentioned subjects or
objects. For example:

Dave and Andy went to London with lunch and a book. He forgot it at the train
station.

Is it something in the structure of the German language that means this
confusion is created in translation? Ie we are left unclear as to whether it
was Andy or Dave who forgot something and whether it was his lunch or his
book.

~~~
iodiniemetra
English has a lot of unwritten rules as well. Which sounds correct?

I have a large red ball.

I have a red large ball.

I imagine german has the same, and I wonder if it's one of those cases. For
example, to a german speaker, it would be completely clear that Dave is the
one who forgot the book because the first subject mentioned is always the
relevant one, or something like that.

~~~
jpatokal
There actually are "rules" for adjective order in English:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adjective#Order](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adjective#Order)

For example, size precedes color, hence "large red ball".

------
zwieback
I'm German but have been living in the US for 25 yrs and my verdict is that
the German grammar is overly and unnecessarily complicated. The pronunciation,
on the other hand, is sane, which cannot be said of English.

~~~
pitaj
It's not English pronunciation that's wrong, it's the spelling.

~~~
mbeex
[https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~clamen/misc/humour/TheChaos.html](https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~clamen/misc/humour/TheChaos.html)

------
mitchty
Heh, its honestly not that bad of a language, and has undergone two reforms
(maybe 3? I forget) since this document was created.

The "awful" parts of German are in some ways its saving grace. Example:
surfing is Wellenreiten, literally wave-riding or riding waves. This whole
thing is all over German with compound words.

Its really no different conceptually from "the old blue car" in English, its
just mashed together as a single compound word without spaces. You get used to
it fast and then get to (maybe) impress your friends by belting out insanely
long words in German.

~~~
emsy
Then there are also slightly funny ones

-plane / Flugzeug / flight stuff

-lighter / Feuerzeug / fire stuff

-light bulb / Glühbirne / Glow pear

-eyeball / Augapfel / Eye apple

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

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

~~~
anoncake
Maybe it is in Texas German

------
delib
I think an overlooked aspect of the German-English comparison is the system of
tenses. In German, you can get by with basically just two tenses: the present
and the perfect. The past tense can almost always be replaced by the perfect
when speaking. When you want to express something that lies in the future, you
can just use the present and it will in most cases be clear from context.

Compare that to English, where the mastery of the tenses (i.e. when to use
which tense) is essential. Distinguishing the use of the simple forms from the
progressive forms can be tough for non-native speakers. And then there are all
the different past tenses: simple past, present perfect, past progressive...
in many cases it sounds really strange when these get mixed up. Think of
something like: I have gone to the store last night. Or: He never was in New
York. (When the speaker means that he has never been.)

~~~
wirrbel
I agree. I'd add that a lot of people overlook the complexity of English
idioms and vocabulary. It is easy to pick up the basics of English, it is much
more difficult to get to proficient level for writing a book for example.

Imho as a native German I have the impression that with German it's the other
way around. In the beginning it's hard. But once people attain a basic level
there is not much to learn anymore.

~~~
robaato
Absolutely. When I was at school the only grammar I learnt was in Latin,
French or German - wasn't taught in English. But as native speaker you read or
listen and absorb the "rules".

Had a French girl friend for a time who was studying English and linguistics
at Agrégation level (masters) - she would sometimes ask me was it better to
say X or Y in English. I would usually prefer one because "it sounded right"
but often couldn't come up with a reason as to why. Then she might tell me the
rule according to her professor - and I almost always found them very
convincing!

------
xae342
I found whipping through the grammatical logic trees in German, and
exceptions, were like the grammatical equivalent of composing a Fuge, or
writing a Lisp function on the spot. Eventually the elegant form of the
language can be see after struggling with the details. Arthur Schnitzler’s
short stories helped me see a soring elegance in the language that wasn’t
obvious to me for a while after becoming fluent.

------
chengiz
This has several transcribing errors. For example "of the Mud" should be "oh
the Mud"; Leg is written instead of Garment once, which makes Leg both neuter
and feminine.

[http://twain.lib.virginia.edu/huckfinn/mtrdg1.html](http://twain.lib.virginia.edu/huckfinn/mtrdg1.html)
is better.

------
simonmales
As a foreigner living and working in Germany for a number a years, reading
succinct explanations of German grammar is actually quite refreshing.

Personally, grammatical concepts in English for me are quite challenging. Now
try and learn a language that has complex grammar rules when you don't
_actually_ know your own rules is quite imitating.

~~~
noonespecial
Same here. German always follows the rules. You might not _like_ the rules,
but it always follows the rules!

~~~
louisswiss
Until it doesn't.

Is it das Nutella or die Nutella?

~~~
wolfgke
> Is it das Nutella or die Nutella?

>
> [https://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Nutella&oldid=181...](https://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Nutella&oldid=181164035#Genus_%E2%80%93_der,_die_oder_das_Nutella)

------
carlosgg
"I heard a Californian student in Heidelberg say, in one of his calmest moods,
that he would rather decline two drinks than one German adjective."

:)

------
hevi_jos
German is not that hard, specially coming from English, which is a germanic
language itself.

The Michel Thomas learning audio programs are fantastic for getting a grasp of
the language.

If you read and read and watch and watch TV,without analyzing what you do you
get naturally the feeling of the language, without the suffering.

Mark Twain did what 99% of Germans,Austrians,Swiss are never going to do. Stop
and overthink it too much.

That was probably the most reasonable way to learn German outside Germany in
1880. It is not today.

If you are interested in learning any language, I recommend the book "Fluent
forever". It tells you how to start leaning a language and all the resources
to learn on your own.

~~~
TulliusCicero
I don't mind most of German except for gender+case+plural+whatever variables
giving you like eight different forms of "the" and similar complexity for "a"
and for adjective endings, and even impacting suffixes for the noun (end
declinations). Having to think ahead to "okay what's the gender of the noun
I'm gonna use three words from now...now factor in the case implied by the
preposition preceding it...okay it's 'dem' \+ '-em' \+ '-en'".

Like I'm sure English has similarly complicated bullshit (the spelling is
obviously a gigantic dumpster fire), but wow it's like a whole grammar domain
I have to think about that doesn't even exist in English. It just feels like
German has way more "modifiers" and variants of words.

~~~
rubberpoliceman
> Having to think ahead to "okay what's the gender of the noun I'm gonna use
> three words from now.

Now, that's interesting. I'm a native speaker of German, and just the other
day I realized that one of the mistakes I keep making in English is to make
the "a/an" distinction not based on phonetics, but on agreement with the noun,
disregarding any words preceding it: I know that it's "an error", not "a
error"; but then I also tend to say (or write) "an common error".

------
kleiba
_Then the teacher lets me softly down with the remark that whenever the word
"wegen" drops into a sentence, it always throws that subject into the Genitive
case, regardless of consequences -- and that therefore this bird stayed in the
blacksmith shop "wegen des Regens."_

Interestingly, this grammatical rule has changed since Mark Twain's times -
minimally in spoken language where the Dative case is commonly used. But also
in more formal or more educated contexts, standard German allows the Dative
case after "wegen" in certain cases.

In general, the Genitive case is used less and less, it seems that German will
in the long run only entertain three grammatical cases instead of the current
four.

~~~
ur-whale
"allows"

The very idea that one is "allowed" to say or not say certain things is just
so deeply wrong ...

How about this criterium instead: did the person you are trying to communicate
with actually understand what you wre trying to said.

------
vram22
I've been learning German slowly over time. As someone else said in this
thread, at least some parts of it (more so _some_ of the vocabulary) is not
very difficult for people who know English well, which is partly due to
English and German having some common historical roots, I've read. E.g. the
"Saxon" in the term Anglo-Saxon is from the Saxons, from the Saxony area (part
of Germany), or so I've read in the past.

One of my favorite German words is entschuldigung, for the sound of it.

There's a ring to the thing.

Have you seen what I mean?

:)

[https://translate.google.com/#de/en/Entschuldigung](https://translate.google.com/#de/en/Entschuldigung)

------
soperj
2 favorite words in german:

hand = hand schuh = shoe handschuh = glove

schlaft = sleep anzug = suit schlaftanzug = pajamas

~~~
DavidSJ
Don’t forget:

Zahn = tooth, Arzt = doctor, Zahnarzt = dentist.

~~~
ziftface
Well "dentist" is just a fancier way of saying "toothist" so "tooth doctor"
doesn't sound too bad.

------
jhanschoo
I chuckled that Twain humorously was complaining about nouns coming after
wegen being in the genitive case. After all, it parallels with the 'of' in
English analogue, 'on account of'; 'of' in English is used to mark notions
that most Indo-European languages that still retain a genitive would express
in the genitive. One still frequently encounters the vestige of the English
genitive case: it is the -'s or the -s' that one affixes to words to indicate
that the word signifies the possessor of some other word.

------
svat
I took this article as a starting point to discuss Sanskrit:
[https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/2953/87](https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/2953/87)
(also at
[https://shreevatsa.wordpress.com/2014/07/](https://shreevatsa.wordpress.com/2014/07/))
— roughly speaking, w.r.t. deviance from English, Sanskrit is German++.

------
quotemstr
I've always loved this essay. It's a great example of good-natural ribbing
that manages to make humor out of the eccentricities of something (a language,
in this case) while making it clear that the people who like that thing are
fine people. Mark Twain doesn't _really_ hate the German language nor think
anything but the best of Germans --- and it comes across in the essay. I'm not
sure whether we can still write essays like this today.

------
ur-whale
German is - in a way - very similar to Forth and PostScript: you need a stack
of potentially infinite depth to parse it.

------
amai
Mark Twain was absolutely right. German is in the Top 10 of the most weird
languages in the world:

[https://corplinguistics.wordpress.com/2013/06/21/the-
weirdes...](https://corplinguistics.wordpress.com/2013/06/21/the-weirdest-
languages/)

------
itissid
Also it seems there is a "standard" form of german since 1996:
[https://www.fluentin3months.com/german-hard-to-
learn/](https://www.fluentin3months.com/german-hard-to-learn/)

~~~
anoncake
The German _orthography_ was reformed in 1996. That did not change the
vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation etc, i.e. the language itself. Like any
other natural language, German evolves naturally.

Also, the orthography had been standardized since 1901.

------
subpixel
I believe Hungarian has something like 16 cases, making German less difficult
to learn that in could be.

------
FabHK
Obligatory terrible joke:

The house of a German professor is on fire. He runs in, shouting "I need to
rescue my work from obliteration!" and comes out with a huge tome. He runs in
again, mumbling about his magnum opus, and appears again with another volume.
The fire fighters warn him that the house might collapse anytime and it's
dangerous to go in, but the professor exclaims "But I need to save volume III,
it contains all the verbs!"

Oh, and while we are at it: My mathematician friend claims that Latin is
closed under permutation, while German is closed under concatenation.

------
lucb1e
Reminds me of this joke, the basis of which seems commonly attributed to Mark
Twain but as far as I can find, it not actually from him. Not sure what the
original is, but here is one of its many copies floating around:

[https://www.davidpbrown.co.uk/jokes/european-
commission.html](https://www.davidpbrown.co.uk/jokes/european-commission.html)

~~~
dang
That definitely wasn't Twain. It originated as a letter to the editor (perhaps
to the Economist?) and got revised as people passed it around on the internet.
Unfortunately I can't now find the article I once read which traced this.
Perhaps someone else can conjure it up.

~~~
spiralx
Here you go :)

[http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/05/iorz-feixfuli-m-j-
yilz....](http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/05/iorz-feixfuli-m-j-yilz.html)

