As someone who's had to (or maybe wanted to) learn both english and german, I'd say german has a steeper initial learning curve, but it becomes easier later, whereas english can be easy to get going, but it's difficult to master (obviously the spelling, but also the more advanced use of tenses etc).
Regarding Twain's complaints, the biggest lesson I learned from learning german at an older age was: languages are nonsensical, illogical, and the sooner you stop trying to make sense of it all, the faster you will advance. Children do not learn languages by being analytical and by comparing to what they already know, they learn by just accepting it as it is. This leads to a funny phenomenon that foreign speakers know the actual rules of a language better than most native speakers, simply because native speakers know things are as they are, but not why. Whether adults are capable of this is a different question, but trying to find logic in a language will only lead to frustration.
The difficulty of mastering the tenses is something that I think a lot of English speakers overlook. There's a lot of really precise and difficult-to-explain subtleties in English. (Of course, English isn't unique in this regard -- but I feel like certain things are taken for granted).
Something that catches a lot of English as second language people out is the correct time to use the gerund form (i.e., the '-ing' form). For instance,
(1) I am walking to the shops.
is clear -- it is occurring in that moment. But what about the subtle difference between (2a) and (2b)?
(2a) I live in Berlin.
(2b) I'm living in Berlin.
To me -- a native English speaker -- (2b) implies that the speaker generally lives elsewhere, while (2a) doesn't. But they're both technically correct if the speaker is, at that moment, a resident of Berlin.
There are more examples I could give. Teaching these sorts of subtleties, though, and mastering them can be very difficult.
A final example that I really like, and one that my syntax lecturer used to use a lot:
(3) She would have had to have been being watched.
Seven (or maybe six, depending on how you view 'watched') verbs in a row! Native English speakers grasp this really intuitively, but non-native speakers may have trouble parsing these into a coherent picture. To illustrate this -- try and gloss this sentence another way while conveying the meaning. If you speak another language, try and translate it! English verbs are hard.
I find it weird that many English natives try to claim that English grammar is in fact complex (you are by far not the first). I think it might be because in general many don't speak another language and the most common second language is Spanish which has also a very "simple" grammar.
Regarding your example with the gerund, yes it is subtle, but similar subtleties exist in German, e.g. The difference between perfect and simple past (also exist in English), which many native speakers in both English and German get wrong as well.
An interesting anecdote (which might be related) is, that in my experience having gone to high-school in the US for a year and having done language courses with Australian teachers, that there seems to be much less education on the grammar of the language than in Germany. I often knew the "theory" of English grammar much better than the native speakers (doesn't mean I was better at applying it though).
All that said, mastering English is still difficult, just not due to the grammar. Spelling is one thing, but also the vocabulary is huge. Supposedly Shakespeares vocabulary was 60000 words, the equivalent German poet Goethes was less than 40000.
Talking of perfect and simple past you might be missing the "fact" that for parts of Germany (Upper Bavaria in my case) the simple past simply doesn't exist. At all. (With the exception of "to be" where the perfect doesn't seem to exist). I know, you can argue that away by calling it a dialect but even though I kinda lost my dialect in all the years at school and at work, this has persisted insofar that is still sounds wrong if someone says "Ich ging spazieren."
English grammar is heavily taught in elementary school (K-5, ~age 5 to 11) and middle school (6-8, ~age 11-14) curriculum in the US.
You're pretty much expected to have the grammar down by high school, where the focus shifts to composition (essay courses, etc.)
This was my experience growing up here anyways. The last time I had a test question ask me to circle the past participle was middle school (and the SAT).
Do 14 year olds in the USA know what "gerund" means?
I didn't know terms like that in England in the 2000s, though I picked them up from learning other foreign languages later.
I have heard university professors complain that they can say, simply, "rephrase the paper into the active voice" to a student from <anywhere else>, but many British students don't know what that means.
England now teaches more grammar, but it is not much use generalizing from individual experiences of a particular state/country in a particular decade.
No, I don’t think most 14-year-olds in the USA would know what a gerund is, but most of them would know active versus passive voice. Maybe the kids in advanced or hobbies classes, though. (Speaking as an American high school student)
English grammar in the US would have been elementary and middle school. By high school English classes moved on to just literature and analysis. So you may have just not been present for it.
Well, now I want to see how this sentence would be translated into all the other major languages! I immediately understand the meaning, but can see why it might be hard for a non native speaker to understand. Are their other languages that can say the same thing as concisely?
Google Translate must absolutely butcher this sentence. I just tried Spanish. “Habría tenido que haber estado vigilada.” I know Spanish well enough to know that is hilariously incorrect, but not well enough to know the correct translation.
One issue that prevents translation is just how much passivity is in that sentence. In other languages, more active grammar is preferred, to the point where trying to construct such passivity on purpose would be nigh unintelligible.
For example, in Hebrew, I would translate the sentence as חייב להיות שמישהו היה צופה בה, which literally translates as "it must be that someone was watching her". Trying a more literal take, היא הייתה חייבת להיות צפויה, not only (by sheer necessity) injects the infinitive tense into the middle of the sentence, but also would just cause a native speaker to ask you in English, "why don't you tell me in English what you're really trying to say?"
Whilst I do not know Hebrew your point is very well taken. It aptly demonstrates the sheer complexity of trying to achieve an exact translation between one language and another (in fact from my understanding of the problem an exact translation between most languages is nigh on impossible).
I both admire and pity translators who work for organizations such as the U.N. as they have to translate documents such as treaties and do so with great precision.
However, I suppose my major concern with translations is how sloppy some actually are—that is that errors in translation are not limited by structural limitations caused by differences in the languages as in your example but rather by sheer carelessness. Frankly, I'm fed up with seeing bad translation of subtitles from German into English. I'd be more than happy if I had a dollar for every time I've seen the verbs glauben (to believe) and wissen (to know) interchanged with one another during translation.
Clearly, to know something is very different to believe something but unfortunately it seems that significant numbers of translators find such precision unnecessary.
It's a sentence that would typically be spoken rather than written, but it's only a step beyond "you would have had to have been there", which has genuine occurrences in Google Search.
Which is also funny, because it's apparently convoluted enough in English to have us regularly shorten it to "you had to be there" (which sounds correct, even though I'm fairly sure it's ungrammatical.
My native language is Marathi (India). Though it is not well known globally, it still is pretty dominant if we compare the number of people that speak Marathi (around 83 million).
Anyways, the translation would be: तिला पाहिलं गेलं असतं
As a reply to the question, “what’s the most expensive car on the market?”
1) “I’m guessing it’s some German supercar.”
2) “I would guess it’s some German supercar.”
3) “I guess it’s some German supercar.”
As a native speaker, the first two both sound correct to me, and essentially equivalent. The third sounds a little weird, even though it’s grammatically the simplest. I can’t put my finger on exactly why.
The first two seem consistent as tentative responses to a statement that might contain hyperbole, joke, play on words, double entendre, etc., by maintaining some distance with the statement of supercar-as-fact. In contrast, the third seems to accept the fact outright, and lets the accuracy of the responder assume the uncertainty.
The third reply strips so much away that the tone changes from tentative to apathetic. The third speaker is just doing the bare minimum to keep conversation moving.
In 1) and 2), it's clear the speaker is making some kind of conjecture. In 3), I think there's some bleed-over interfering from the idiomatic "I guess" which indicates that you're reporting hearsay or hedging your commitment to its accuracy. Some languages express this "evidentiary" modality more formally, e.g. via some kind of morphosyntactic change that makes it explicit. English has a ton of ways of expressing modalities, but they're wrapped up together in various kinds of constructions that express tense and aspect as well ("TAM" is an acronym for tense-aspect-mood used in lots of linguistic analysis across all kinds of languages).
Usually it's an error to add -ing to a mental process (Are you knowing the answer?, I'm believing in a deity, etc.). (We can choose to construe a mental process as a material one - it's not a lexical rule about those verbs, but a grammatical means we have access to, e.g. I'm lovin' it, I'm thinking about you contrue them as an activity rather than a mental state.) But perhaps the reason why replacing "guessing" with "guess" changes the meaning so much is because "I guess" is already taken. It should modify the meaning as "I think x" => "I'm thinking x" does, but saying "I guess" sounds like a way of hedging information from a 3rd party.
As a non-native speaker, I'd say it depends on their background and how they learned. To me it feels completely normal and the non-contracted form took longer for me to parse, I think because the contraction is more common in colloquial communication with native speakers, but I'm also sure that if you tried this on me at a point in life where I had mostly school english to go on, the contraction would be more difficult.
Actually, if I'm not wrong your example 2a and 2b is about simple present vs present continuous not gerund. Isn't gerund something like "I like swimming" or "I like to swim" (where both works) or while "I enjoy swimming" only works with gerund?
Admittedly both are subtle and somewhat confusing to non-native speakers.
Present continuous is built from gerund, like other continuous tenses. The important difference is therefore between the "simple" verb and gerund. What you refer to is a different use case of gerund.
Big pink riding elephant would be the more natural sequence to me if there are any non-native speakers who are curious. I know there's an established order of types of adjectives. However in this example, it's more of a part of speech order issue to my ear. With riding being both an adjective and a verb, it feels like someone named "pink" is riding a big elephant when the words are in this order. This may be due to the fact that we don't have much for case indicators. So the adjective "pink" is indistinguishable from a guy whose nickname is "Pink". "Riding" as in a riding animal vs a pack animal is identical to "riding" the verb. All you're missing is the artical "a" before big elephant and it could very well be a sentence fragment.
"Fred, riding a big elephant, burst into the arena" substitutes "pink" for a more common name and adds the article and a prepositional phrase and... some grammar that I can't put into words right now and makes it a full sentence.
I guess what I'm trying to get across is that without the adjective order being in line, it's hard to work out the sentence structure which is extremely reliant on word order in lieu of inflection.
I studied linguistics in college and I remember a class on this. But that was 25 years ago. I think it had something to do with how much a part of the object the adjective is, or how easy it would be to change. Red concrete wall instead of concrete red wall because it is fairly easy to change the color of the wall from red to blue, but much harder to change the wall from concrete to wood. So we put concrete closer to the object and red farther away.
Love that last example. I think "to have been being watched" is a bit of a reach though? "To have been observed / under observation" feels more natural. When translating it to french i got to "elle aurait dûe être observée". Incidentally, French has an easier time with this, I think because we have more options there. I couldn't reproduce the quirky structure at all, the flow is just more natural in french.
Native English speaker here, with training in linguistics, and several other languages under my belt over the years.
In my native dialect, statements including "had to have been being" are rather common. My friends, family, co-workers, etc. use them regularly. In fact, I recall saying "he'd have had to have been being reckless" just earlier today. All five of the other people present- both immediate family and non-relatives from this area- knew precisely what was meant. In other words, that intimidating clump of verbs passed unremarked.
Further, to andensande's point, one might be inclined to replace that god-awful monstrosity with something like "he must've been reckless." To do so would be to wipe out some subtleties of meaning from the original. A replacement like "he must've been acting recklessly at the time" feels like the same general meaning to me, but it also sounds stuffy and snobbish in tone (for all that it's probably a much more effective construction).
All things considered, every language that I've ever dealt with in any capacity has had its share of peculiarities. In hindsight, however, I don't recall Arabic, Zulu, or even Gallo-Lati... er, I mean French... having quite as few peculiarities as my sponge-like mother tongue.
I could see saying "she'd had to have been watched" or "they had to have been watching her". Both sound very natural to my ear. Observed to me feels more like they're looking at every minute detail with some emotional distance and maybe a feeling of something novel. A scientist observes a rare bug walking on a leaf. A psychiatrist observes his patients' behaviors. It's maybe a more scientific and heavily detail-oriented form of watching. But a would-be abductor would be watching his victim. He may observe their habits, but that's while he's watching them. It's a very fine line and I'm sure that other native speakers would disagree. But for me, "observe" would feel out of place here.
Very common and feels very natural to me. "You have to be kidding me" "He had to have been kidding" "He had to have been kidding me" or the rougher "he had to have been fucking with me" and "he must have been fucking with me" although "must have", of course, implies more certainty than "had to have". What a wonderfully subtle and complex language we have.
"to be ing", "was ing", and "will be *ing" if I remember correctly, are actually thought to be an early borrowing of celtic grammar. Not much celtic anything was adopted into English, but there's a possibility that this sentence structure may be one of the few contributions of the celtic languages that were displaced by germanic Anglo-Saxon languages that eventually formed English.
You can gloss it with 'under observation' I think fairly well. But the problem with
(1) She would have had to have been observed.
is that it misses out the gerund form preceding 'observed', which alters the meaning slightly in my opinion. It's difficult to get at precisely but I feel like the original sentence has a feeling of time-boundedness around when she was observed which you don't get without that gerund. I think?
The original with "been being watched" feels like something the detective says when he first discovers the fact about watching. It has an exclamative aspect to it. There's a present sense of realization, mixed with the past sense of when the watching had taken place.
"She would have had to have been observed." is something like a lawyers distillation of what happened later for the court.
Trying to translate in French, I came up first with "Il eût fallu qu'elle eût été surveillée", but mostly because of morphological similarity (it's almost the same amount of verbs, right?). It's also just a more literary form of the simpler "Il aurait fallu qu'elle soit surveillée".
That being said, I have trouble to parse the original english sentence so I may be missing subtleties.
I very much agree with English being a hodgepodge of confusing rules, especially those tense-related.
Re rewtriting (3) though: does not the following suffice?
"She must have been being watched".
I can imagine an argument that "She would have had to have" is not equivalent to "She must have" on grounds that the "have had" might suggest additionally that the past-ongoing-watching no longer occurs. I don't really think this flies, though, since the natural reading of "been being watched" already suggests to me that the watching was relegated to the past ("been" being interpreted as only connoting the past, not the "inclusive-or"-type interpretation "previously and perhaps presently"; much as "or" itself is - to my chagrin! - generally interpreted exclusively in standard parlance).
I couldn't think of how to simplify the "been being" though; that is a tough nut.
OK, now I feel like I don't know English. Is this proper English? What does it mean? How is it different from "She would have had to have been watched"? Is the meaning clear to people? I'm scratching my head...
Did you mean "She would have had to have felt like she's being watched"?
I’m a native English speaker here and it’s clear to me. I also think it’s somewhat tricky to express it more succinctly without changing the sentence a fair bit.
Essentially it means “it must have been the case that, at the moment we’re speaking of, someone was watching her.”
Your sentence is slightly different, in that it implies that, in general, someone was watching her during the timeframe we’re talking about, but not necessarily in the exact instant we’re talking about. Also, like the example above, your version could mean she’s someone who in general is watched (like the person who generally lives in Berlin), as opposed to someone being watched right during the instant we’re talking about.
> Essentially it means “it must have been the case that, at the moment we’re speaking of, someone was watching her.”
Another native English speaker here. This would be how I would parse "She had to have been being watched," but I think it's not quite the full picture in this sentence's case. It's important to note that the "would" adds the implication that this conclusion is being drawn based upon some other (possibly unspoken) observation or proposition.
I would say the meaning is probably closer to "In order for some unspoken condition to be true, it must also be true that, during the moment of time in the past about which we are speaking, someone was watching her."
AH! Ok, I think I distilled it down to something simpler: It seems to be similar to the difference between "I would've been spoken to" vs. "I would've been being spoken to". Is that correct?
Ugh, I have to admit it seems technically "correct" after all :-) but with such a painful (and uncommon) sentence structure that it makes you question if it's right...
The former is past perfect[1], and the latter is past perfect progressive.[2]
There are subtleties involved, but the most basic use case is that the former refers to an action that took place before some point in the past (to which the sentence refers), while the latter refers to an action that was still happening at that past point.
"She would have had to have been watched" means she would have had to have been watched at that moment (e.g. because someone was watching the area where she did whatever it was), whereas "being watched" implies that the watching was ongoing and therefore that someone was continuously watching her at the time.
Admittedly English is not my primary language, but "She would have had to have been being watched" seems to be a construct used in a class, but not something you would hear in day-to-day English.
It's a very contorted phrase. I struggle to think of a context in which it makes sense. I honestly don't know what it's supposed to mean. It's a mixture of subjunctive mood and passive voice, both of which detract from clarity.
You can make unclear grammatical constructions in any language. If your aim is clarity, and not obfuscation, then you just eliminate tangled grammar such as this example.
I will attempt to offer a re-phrasing with added context, though:
"The only way that anyone could have known X about her, would be if she were being observed."
(Many english speakers would substitute "was" for "were", because the subjunctive mood is rarely taught to schoolchildren in the UK. That is to say, colloquial english is generally pretty sloppy.)
If a native english speaker like me struggles with an english phrase, there's something wrong with that phrase. If I find myself constructing a phrase like that, my first instinct is that my thoughts must be unclear, because my words are unclear. I'd consider thinking again, and perhaps even re-writing an entire paragraph, just to avoid a phrase like that.
The subjunctive in German is routine and explicit. Indeed, the word "were" in my re-phrasing is pronounced in parts of northeast of england to rhyme with "bear", because it comes from the germanic subjunctive "wäre". But in general, subjunctives in English are concealed - we don't use subjunctive forms of verbs much, the listener is supposed to infer subjunctive mood from the presence of words like "if" and "would".
Twain is winding us up; after all, he was a satirist. The German language is pretty regular, compared with English. It's quite easy to learn. English must be a nightmare to learn, as a foreigner.
Obviously the situation is fairly rare, but it sounds like a perfectly natural thing to say when it's true. I don't think it's an artificial example at all (whereas e.g. no-one actually says "buffalo" as a verb).
> it sounds like a perfectly natural thing to say when it's true
It doesn't sound natural to me at all; it sounds incredibly awkward to me. In a situation like that, I think people would say something like "someone would've been watching her at that moment".
"someone would've had have been" doesn't sound remotely natural. "someone must've been watching her" would be legitimate, but doesn't have the same connotations; it humanises the watcher, whereas "she must've had been being watched" suggests it could have been an organization rather than an individual, and so feels more sinister.
If you're talking about being watched at a particular moment, you're not talking about "an organization" watching; you're talking about a person. And whether it's sinister or not is pretty beside the point. I'm saying that phrasing is pretty darn unnatural English, sinister or not.
(And I meant to write "would've"; the "would've had have been" was just a typo...)
> If you're talking about being watched at a particular moment
But you're not; you're talking about having been being watched, something that was an ongoing process at the time (past progressive).
> And whether it's sinister or not is pretty beside the point.
People choose their phrasing because they want to convey particular connotations. So you can't just say "this is a simpler way to say the same thing" if it carries different connotations.
> I'm saying that phrasing is pretty darn unnatural English, sinister or not.
All I can say is it sounds perfectly natural to me, as a native (British/Irish) English speaker.
You're not going to get across the notion of an organization doing the "watching" sinisterly without additional context, at which point you don't need this awkward wording in the first place. Mind you, you yourself described the meaning as "someone was continuously watching her at the time". That's the natural interpretation of this sentence. I can't speak for BrE I guess, but in AmE the wording is quite jarring, and people would not opt for this wording when they could add "someone" or some other subject and make it sound so much more natural than awkwardly forcing it into passive voice. ("Someone would've been watching her", "someone would've had to have been watching her", "they would've been watching her", "they would've had to kept her under watch/surveillance", etc... the list goes on...)
> You're not going to get across the notion of an organization doing the "watching" sinisterly without additional context
Of course you do. Consider "Do you ever feel like you're being watched?" versus "Do you ever feel like someone's watching you?" Both those sentences are natural English and in a certain sense they "mean the same"; nonetheless they convey a quite different feeling, and neither is a replacement for the other.
>> You're not going to get across the notion of an organization doing the "watching" sinisterly without additional context
> Of course you do. Consider "Do you ever feel like you're being watched?" versus "Do you ever feel like someone's watching you?"
I was talking about in that example. I was not making a claim about every arbitrary sentence containing the phrase "being watched".
Understand that if you add enough contortions and make a sentence jarring enough, you won't get anything across without additional context. (To a human I mean. I guess I have to add that caveat because other you'll post another rebuttal about how a sufficiently strong AI would parse it just fine.)
There's nothing jarring about the sentence though. It's just normal English. The difference between "she's being watched" and "someone's watching her" conveys the same meaning that it would in any other sentence.
I feel like I'm being gaslighted by half the people in this thread that are saying that "have been being watched" is a normal phrase.
For context, I was born and raised in Northern NJ with Jamaican parents, and have lived in Michigan for the past 10 years. I have never heard anyone use grammar like this.
Maybe this is what you are saying, but doesn't "... have been watched" imply that the being watched is finished, compared to have been being watched" implies a that the watching is (or might be) still ongoing, i.e. the use of simple past vs present perfect continuous(?)
No, "have been being watched" is the past progressive. It implies that the being watched was an ongoing thing at that time, not that it's still continuing.
My confusion with complaints about English is the expectation of rules being across the board. Pretty much all languages have irregular verbs or nouns that conjugate differently than the standard method laid out in that language. Portugese and French have a fuckton of these, no one bats an eye. English has a few inconsistencies, everyone loses their shit. The amount of inconsistencies in English are pretty damn few compared to other languages I attempted. While I get the spelling is an issue, it's not like it's alone in that department.
Wow, whoever concocted that mind-twister? That's the sort of problem we students would have given our formal logic lecturer to analyze and draw up into truth tables.
That expression likely exceeds the complexity of an infamous expression (known for its complexity) that was given to us students to analyze, it being 'there is a chance of a possible maybe'.
It hurts my brain just thinking about it, perhaps I'll do so later. ;-)
> To illustrate this -- try and gloss this sentence another way while conveying the meaning.
“Someone must have been watching her.”
I’m making some assumptions about the context of the sentence—but as long as you told me what the context was, I’m sure I could come up with an equally simple replacement.
Personally, I found the original sentence quite hard to parse, despite being a native speaker. It’s not good writing and a good editor would replace it.
That’s how I learned it too, but apparently that is “traditional” grammar. In “modern” grammar any verb with the -ing ending is a gerund now according to Wikipedia.
It's not an invention of Wikipedia editors. If you just read the first paragraph of the article it explains the accepted meaning has evolved over time. It further explains "The distinction between gerund and present participles is not recognised in modern reference grammars, since many uses are ambiguous."
Absolutely agree. I'm a native English speaker who has dipped their toes in Spanish, Russian, and German. Spanish vocab was easy except for some deceptively similar words with very different meanings. Grammar came fairly easy in spite of the differences with English.
Russian grammar and vocab plus the different alphabet were incredibly intimidating, but the different declensions became familiar very quickly. I was familiar with conjugation from Spanish, so that was just a bit of memorization. I like how clear the alphabet and spelling are. Once you learn how to sound things out, you're good to go besides very few exceptions. Everything is very regular, there's just a lot of tenses and moods to get acquainted with. Perfective and imperfective verbs are still something I have to learn on a word-by-word basis.
German grammar was easy except for the different cases. I'd already been exposed to cases with Russian, so I don't know why it's so much harder for me in German. Maybe because I expected it to be closer to English. It's weird the way I can listen to a sentence in German and it feels like I know what they're saying, but if I try to translate it, I don't have a clue.
I don't think you can really class languages by difficulty. You just have to immerse yourself in each. Even in those with recent spelling and grammar revisions, getting the ear for it and using it is the key.
> languages are nonsensical, illogical, and the sooner you stop trying to make sense of it all,the faster you will advance.
In the first day of Koine Greek class, the instructor asked who had programming experience. She made a point of stressing, as she would again, that unlike computer languages, human languages show no signs of design, and not to spend any time looking for it. It was good advice.
Well... not that the advice isn't solid, and she's a good teacher for driving this point into the programmer student's minds. But saying no sign is a bit extreme, there is some level of design in any natural language. Icelandic has a committee that decides on new words. Instead of using foreign loan words they largely make up their own new Icelandic words when needed for new concepts. In German the spelling is centrally planned and gets reformed every other year. Which is why German words are mostly spelled as they're pronounced, as opposed to English. Chinese grammar is super simple and logical. I don't know if this is due to design but it wouldn't surprise me if there had been some reforms in the past. Especially since standard Chinese used to be a somewhat artificial literary language. And speaking of writing: All alphabets are designed of course. Korean is a great example for a really clever and logical design. The reading and writing in turn will have had an influence on the way we think and speak, since it formalized and standardized languages.
>In German the spelling is centrally planned and gets reformed every other year. Which is why German words are mostly spelled as they're pronounced, as opposed to English.
As a native English speaker, this is definitely a big plus. I've had German friends who've regularly expressed frustration that there's often no real rhyme or reason or pattern to either English spelling or pronunciation; you just have to memorize it. (Though I could largely say the same of German and French noun genders, even if there are some patterns that are somewhat [but not entirely] consistent.)
Meanwhile, spelling and pronunciation in German seems to be pretty bijective. If you know how an unfamiliar word is pronounced, you can generally accurately know how it's spelled, and if you how an unfamiliar word is spelled, you can generally accurately know how it's pronounced.
English does not have a concept of THE right pronunciation. If you try to change the spelling of a "word", you'd first have to get a number of former British colonies to agree on how to pronounce it. Is it Woed, Worrrd, Woid, Waed? Germany, after losing both world wars only needs to deal with Switzerland and Austria to agree on updated spelling of something.
This is a tangent, but I have a feeling that the Icelandic reluctance to use loan words is actually slowly killing the language. I know people that acually prefer speakning english to each other despite beeing native Icelandic speakers. Apperently having a conversation about modern life is just too complicated.
> languages are nonsensical, illogical, and the sooner you stop trying to make sense of it all, the faster you will advance
This is the point I came to with German and was at a level where I could start speaking it (poorly but enough to be understood) all the time with native speakers. I read up on some things from time to time but mostly ignore a lot of the theory as a child would and just refuse to switch to English as much as possible. It's probably slower this way but it's been one of the few ways I've actually been able to be consistent with practice.
I was always an average foreign language student, until I started to learn German living in Berlin and to speak English at work.
Now I'm fluent in both languages. I forgot most of the German rules I learned during my first months in Berlin taking crash courses. I just know sentence structures because I heard them and used them so often. Like a child, really.
Children learn language by learning phrases and the correspondence of those phrases to things around them or things that happen around them. Rules are learnt later. Learning language is harder when you don't have parents to play the language game with you. Maybe something like aidungeon could be a language learning tool??
I had a similar thought when I studied French in school, i.e. that I could explain a lot more about French grammar technically, explicitly, than I could about my native English. This sort of example occurs to me whenever someone insists that you don't really understand something unless you can clearly explain it.
I'm from a small Dutch bordertown and my first language is a dialect that is part German, part Dutch (and some French) (Limburgish).
In German class, away from that bordertown, outside where the dialect is common, I never paid attentention. Teachers would require me te learn tables filled with exceptions, weird strings of words (mit nach bei..) etc. I simply refused. I often didn't bother to go to class.
Just using the Fingerspitzengefühl that comes with the part-German dialect, was adequate. 7/10 on my exams. So certainly not fluent or even good. At the diploma-handout, the German teacher told me she did not want to, but was required to give me that grade (why a teacher would disclose this to an 18/yo is beyond me, though. There certainly was spite).
Point is: even sideloading a language from a young age helps learn it. At least for n=1.
"Regarding Twain's complaints, the biggest lesson I learned from learning german at an older age was: languages are nonsensical, illogical, and the sooner you stop trying to make sense of it all, the faster you will advance. Children do not learn languages by being analytical and by comparing to what they already know, they learn by just accepting it as it is."
Oh how absolutely true this statement is. As an adult, I find myself deconstructing and atomizing every aspect of the language I'm learning and then reconstructing it bit by bit into English. Not only does this approach slow one's progress down to a crawl but also it limits one's fluency even after one has some basic understanding of the language. [Incidentally, I found this to be more of a problem with French than with German even though I was taught French at a much younger age.]
From my observations, I have noticed that I'm not alone in having adopted this approach, especially so for some of us with a technical bent. It seems to me that we adopt the same analytical approach to learning a language as we do to when learning a technical skill or analyzing some physical phenomenon. Clearly this is the wrong when it comes to learning languages but it's a very difficult habit break. In a similar vein, I recall getting somewhat annoyed when trying to learn Morse code and making no progress. Whilst I was told never to analyze the individual dots and dashes of characters but nevertheless I still did and it was not until I broke this habit (with some difficulty mind you) and that I listened only to the rhythm of the sound of each character that I started to make progress.
Obviously, learning a language is a much more difficult exercise than learning Morse code but the same rules apply in both instances. I recall several decades ago attending a lecture by Noam Chomsky and he made a comment that I have never forgotten as it resonated with me then and ever since. That was that he—a world renown linguist—had difficulty in learning languages—and he cited words to the effect 'that a new language can waft down the corridors of MIT and that most of his colleagues catch it with ease as it passes by—except for him'.
Even at the time of the lecture, I could not help but think that he like me dissects and atomizes a language in ways his colleagues have learned not to do (but perhaps when you're a linguist that approach may be useful—after all, Chomsky is very famous and his colleagues are seemingly very much less so).
> trying to find logic in a language will only lead to frustration
Not really. Language as a system is pretty well understood. What appears to be exceptions or non-sense when learning a language often have a simple explanation when looking at the evolution of the said language.
Unsurprisingly, there are many articles published about "The Awful English Language", such as: [1], [2], [3]
Some examples from [2]:
Let's face it -- English is a crazy language. Besides the above,
there is no egg in eggplant, nor ham in hamburger; neither apple
nor pine in pineapple. English muffins weren't invented in England
or French fries in France. Sweetmeats are candies while
sweetbreads, which aren't sweet, are meat.
We tend to take English for granted. But if we explore its
paradoxes, we find that quicksand can work slowly, boxing rings are
square and a guinea pig is neither from Guinea nor is it a pig. And
why is it that writers write but fingers don't fing, grocers don't
groce and hammers don't ham?
If the plural of tooth is teeth, why isn't the plural of booth
beeth? One goose, two geese. So one moose, two meese? One index,
two indices? Doesn't it seem crazy that you can make amends but not
one amend? If you have a bunch of odds and ends and get rid of all
but one of them, what do you call it? If teachers taught, why
didn't preachers praught? If a vegetarian eats vegetables, what
does a humanitarian eat?
Hamburger is "from Hamburg", not "made from ham", and is borrowed from German. "Frankfurter" (from Frankfurt) and "Wiener" (from Vienna, Wien, in German) have the same etymology.
All languages have the sort of contradictions that are pointing out there, and English isn't especially bad (in fact, most of the examples there are directly inherited from German). Most of the difficult things in English come from it being a Germanic language with a bunch of French bolted onto it. That's why its spelling is so atrocious and there are a lot of duplicated words with very similar meanings in common use.
But, blessedly, English does have the simplest grammar of probably any European language. (I've occasionally heard that Swedish is the closest in simplicity, also being a Germanic language that's dropped most of the complexity, but isn't quite as inundated with loanwords.) Aside from a couple of concepts (the gerund, specifically, which isn't common in some European language families), most grammatical structures in English have direct equivalents in all other European languages.
However, going the other way is difficult: most European languages have formal and informal voices, gendered nouns, some have irregular plurals (German, notably), subtler and more verb tenses (Romance languages), and complex case structures (German and even worse, Slavic languages). If you're a native English speaker that doesn't know what cases are, for example the word for "the" in German changes based on which of the three genders the noun is and how it's used. It could be "die", "der", "das", "den", "dem" or "des", and the endings of words that need to be in agreement with it change as well.
The main reason English became the modern lingua franca is the British Empire, but it does help that it's also a very easy language.
> I've occasionally heard that Swedish is the closest in simplicity
Speaking English and Swedish fluently, I'd say Swedish (and Danish/Norwegian) is simpler grammatically, as it just has the one conjugation per tense regardless of the personal pronoun: I are, you are, we are (är). I were, she were, you were, we were (var). This is why you'll hear Swedes/Scandinavians make typical mistakes like "we was".
As an aside, it also seems to me like Swedish culture is more monolithic/conformist and contains a small set of really common idioms and phrases that get you a long way towards being conversational. It shares that aspect with Dutch as spoken in the Netherlands, as opposed to Dutch in Belgium.
> English became the modern lingua franca
As a second language speaker, I can't help but think poor English is the lingua franca. Not to mention lots of couleur locale in the form of accents.
> But, blessedly, English does have the simplest grammar of probably any European language.
The deceptive thing, though, is compound tenses and phrasal verbs; in both cases you express a meaning with multiple words that couldn't have been predicted from the meanings of the constituent words alone. These are both pervasive in English and both very tricky for learners, but they often don't feel like "grammar" because they're not inflectional. (Well, phrasal verbs are more like lexicon.)
Which European languages don't have compound verb tenses? All of the four I'm reasonably familiar with do. Germanic languages lean on them more than Romance languages (which have a wider breadth of non-complex tenses), but the concept isn't unfamiliar. Again, aside from the gerund, there's an almost one-to-one mapping in usage between English and German tenses. I don't speak any other Germanic languages than those two, but I'd assume that to be more broadly true in that family.
I have the impression that English compound tenses and their nuances are harder than other European languages', although other languages definitely do have them.
I eat breakfast
I am eating breakfast
I ate breakfast
I was eating breakfast
I have eaten breakfast
I have been eating breakfast
I had eaten breakfast
I had been eating breakfast
I would eat breakfast
I would be eating breakfast
I would have eaten breakfast
I would have been eating breakfast
I will eat breakfast
I am going to eat breakfast
I will be eating breakfast
I am going to be eating breakfast
I will have eaten breakfast
I am going to have eaten breakfast
I can't think of another European language that would idiomatically use (or maybe even require) quite this range of constructions.
"complex case structures" are a useful tool in most languages (German to a lesser extent). They allow you to reshuffle the words in a sentence e.g. "the boat carries the car" without disrupting its meaning.
> Sweetmeats are candies while sweetbreads, which aren't sweet, are meat.
My favourite one, which I had the er pleasure of trying to explain to a vegetarian unfamiliar with mince pies; which might also be British English-specific is:
- mince is meat
* but mince *pies* contain no meat
- mincemeat is not meat
* and is the key ingredient in mince pies
- minced meat is meat
* and =mince
* and could be used in the making of a pie
* which would be extremely different from a mince pie
Here in New Zealand, a Mince Pie is a pie containing mince meat. The type of mince pie you're talking about is called a Christmas Mince Pie or a Fruit Mince Pie.
We also have chips (the type you might have with a hamburger), and chips (the type you might eat cold from a bag). If you need to clarify which one you mean, for some reason "potato chips" exclusively means the latter (for the other type you might say "hot chips").
Mincemeat used to contain beef. Now, typically, it doesn't, although I recall having mince pie with beef and brandy in Swindon in another life.
So maybe this is not good example of English being like a Mark Twain's German schizo language. Gastro-culture changed on it and the folks at Merriem-Webster didn't get the email, that's all.
Are you sure that is it? Meat[1] used to mean food in general. In Swedish, the cognate would be “mat”, and that still means meat, much like hund (hound) means dog, and djyr (deer) means animal. I rather thought that meat in mincemeat was from “minced [sweet]meat”. Or, just “minced food”.
Are you saying mince pies didn't traditionally contain meat? Recipes up to the late 19th century include meat, and even today I can find some that do, although very rare - usually beef suet is the only remaining animal ingredient.
No, I'm saying that "mincemeat" has nothing to do with meat preservation. Mince pies certainly exist (though in my neck of the woods, it's more likely to be a tourtierre).
Mince pies are definitely a thing in New Zealand (and Australia to some extent).
They come in all sorts of varieties - plain mince, mince and cheese (yum), steak and cheese, mince and potato, and then some exotic varieties like butter chicken pie.
They're typically cheap and made from bad quality ingredients, but you can get very good quality mince pies if you know where to go.
If you're a hungry teenager and you need a snack - nothing beats a mince pie.
Minced meat pies are so ubiquitous in Australia that we usually just say "pie". "Mince" is nearly always assumed to be animal meat.
The fruity kind of pies that only appear at Christmas time are called "mince pies", but we should really find another name for them because it's a constant source of disappointment when you expect savoury goodness and are presented with a sugary lump.
Anything in America called a "mincemeat pie" is a million miles removed from this; it's going to be something syrupy and a little bit lumpy with cloves and dried fruits. Mince to us is "ground beef"; if you asked for a pound of mince at the supermarket, you'd be directed to the aisle with the Mentos.
It continues to optionally (and traditionally it would certainly have/been very much more common to) contain suet.
If it ever contained anything one could in good faith call 'meat' (by modern definition, at least), it's news to me. [Edit below]
(The brandy however is borderline essential! Certainly a mince pie ought to be served wirh brandy butter.)
That said.. I don't think it's relevant how the quirks came to be, as in, it's no less interesting if it's easily explained away as 'oh well that used to make sense', because it's still funny/ambiguous/confusing when you take a step back and take everything at face value.
[Edit: you are absolutely right: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mincemeat - it was essentially preservation by naturally sourced citric acid and sugars. News to me indeed! I stand by above though.]
More importantly, they were historically egg-shaped and (off-)white; the large and phallic purple variant that now dominates is the result of selective breeding over centuries.
So nope, not "an" eggplant, some eggplants, and those only may look like eggs in their early stages. They may also look like plums. Do we call the purple eggplants plumplants because they resemble plums at some indeterminate stage in their growth?
In Britain (and most Western European languages), we call them aubergines. The origin is the "Sanskrit word vātin-gāna denoted 'the class (that removes) the wind-disorder (windy humour)': that is, vātin-gāna came to be the name for eggplants because they were thought to cure flatulence"
Of course there's no ham in hamburger - it's a hamburger steak sandwich, where "hamburger" means "of Hamburg" or "Hamburg style". The generic "burger" is a back-formation from hamburger and is the thing that makes no sense.
It's a coincidence that the word "Hamburger" contains the English word "ham". But it's an odd coincidence:
After some brief research, it seems that both the English word "ham" and the name of the town of Hamburg have their origin in the Old High German word "hamma" which means "hollow or bend of the knee".
In the case of ham, it refers to part of the leg of an animal. In the case of Hamburg, it got its name from Hammaburg, which was the original fortification where the town was founded. In this case, "hamma" refers to some kind of feature of the piece of land, which was on a bend of the river.
I have to admit still being confused about sweetmeats. If a Brit uses the word, are they talking about a specific type of candy, made in a specific way, from a specific type of shop? Does it need to be baked? Or have flour? Or does a Snickers bar count as a sweetmeat? Or a gumdrop? Hard candy? Or is it more like something from a bakery? Indian sweetmeats also seems to be a thing (from an image search right now). What's the difference, if any? Is any of this related to Turkish Delights?
I don't understand the connotation of the word, as much as the meaning of it.
If a Brit (like me) uses the word, we're probably dressed up in old-fashioned clothes and trying to sound authentic while serving cakes to the LARP group. Or running a traditional restaurant/café[1].
I couldn't give a good definition without referring to a dictionary.
Indian English retains several archaic terms, little used since the early 20th century. An Indian probably can give a good definition.
Americans have an odd view of the UK that merges both historical periods and regions. We are just likely to consider something we read in a Jane Austin novel British (which it might indeed have been ... 1-200 years ago!) as more recent media like the film Notting Hill.
My understanding is that sweetmeat is just an older word for candy, sweets or confections, archaic to both the UK and US english.
The example is just provided to show how inconsistent plurals are in English. 90% of the time you just slap an "s" on the end of a word, but there's a crazy amount of exceptions to that rule.
It's not a native English plural, it's Latin straight from the nominative plural <indicēs>. You will find that <indexes> is far more common in English. The supposedly "correct" plural, <indices>, is something that has to be learned through education, typically.
There are a lot of Latin/Greek terms (typically scientific) whose plurals must be similarly learned because otherwise native English speakers will use the simple plural -s suffix with no concern whatsoever.
English is this way because it doesn't really exist.
English started as old German. Then vowels shifted. Then the Normans arrived and added a lot of French words on top. When German grammar proved too hard for them that was simplified too.
On top of all that is a bunch of Latin and Greek added when England lead the scientific and industrial revolutions (in part because English couldn't logically supply words for new things). These kept their own rules grammatically. Or they didn't, pretty much randomly.
None of these jobs were ever "finished", so nouns in English don't have genders (like they would in German) but actually some do still (mainly pronouns) and some words right next to each other come from different languages (Cow is German, Beef is French hence they sound nothing alike).
Since England has not been conqoured or undergone unification since before all this started (except for the Norman conquests which were part of this) nothing has every been standardised. This is why spelling English words is all but impossible (German words are spelt almost exactly as they sound, English words almost never as they sound, you just have to memorise them, ALL of them).
Compare this to German or French with logical spelling, strict, consistency in grammar and single root languages.
English really is awful and quite an unusual language.
English did not start off as "old German", that's factually incorrect. It started off as Old English aka Anglo-Saxon, that is the languages of the Saxons, Angles, and Jutes which emmigrated from the north sea and areas which are now in the Netherlands, Denmark and Schleswig Holstein. Not the same as "old German" which would be Old High Franconian, an entirely different branch of the Germanic family.
German and English have almost 2000 years of separation. More than Italian and French and Spanish.
But yes Old Norman (and Old Norse) modified the language extensively.
So what did Old English and "Old High Franconian" (Old High German?) start off in common as, if not "Old German"? Linguists would call it Proto-Germanic though. The parent poster isn't factually incorrect though.
And interestingly, there's a significant body of research showing mutual intelligibility between Old English and Old Norse, which are less similar than than Old English and Old High German.
Old English texts have been found in (modern day) central and southern Germany (e.g.: Fulda), which implies that they were reading them there. This would be from the 7th to 10th century timeframe, IIRC.
Sure, but the common ancestor was never called "Old German" or "German"; and not only linguists, but the speakers themselves would never have called themselves Germans. They had various ethnonyms, but not that one.
"Saxon" is probably the word that the could have settled on. But that's not really an ancestor of modern high German, more the low German speaking dialects in the north west (Niedersächsisch).
I don't think this is being pedantic, frankly. And it's horrible to say English "doesn't really exist"; English is a beautiful language with a long history as old as (in fact in some ways older than) German. (FWIW I'm a native English speaker but my father's family is German, so while I'm not fluent in German I do have education and personal exposure to both languages. I've also studied a bit of Anglo-Saxon. Enough to see just how different it was from old Frankish spoken by the early "Germans" in the same time period)
I had to go back to the original parent's post to make sense of your reply. I found the parent's post to be an accurate, tongue-in-cheek description of the evolution of the English language. It clearly wasn't written by a native speaker and makes more sense if you substitute "German"[1] with "Germanic". I can see why an English native speaker might take offense. I am a native speaker also but I don't take offense. English serves as a pretty awful lingua franca which has cursed most of the world with struggling to make sense of its inconsistencies, but there's nothing to be done about that now.
Also keep in mind the topic of this discussion, which is a humorous diatribe against the modern German language (written in beautiful, flowing English by one of its best writers to have ever lived). A native German speaker could quite easily take offense at it. I happen to have struggled through obtaining German fluency in my college years and while I wouldn't agree with everything that Twain wrote, I find his piece hilarious.
[1]: "German" being an originally Roman Latin term for a group of related peoples speaking, what amounts to closely related dialects rather than separate languages. The definition of "language" is also really indistinct. It really comes down to mutual intelligibility than anything else, see Norwegian, Danish, Swedish (separate "languages" but mutually intelligible). You're certainly aware that the modern Germans call themselves and their language "Deutsch" -- an old word for "people" and that was the case in English in the past, see the "Pennsylvania Dutch" who most certainly don't come from the Netherlands or speak modern Dutch. Old English had liberal use of the term "þéod" (people) which is cognate to "Deutsch"/"Dutch". The country of "Germany" has only really existed since 1871.
For those that learn a new language, it is a good idea to suspend criticism on the language while you learn it.
Every language has its pains. German using Sein and haven for auxiliary verbs in the past makes things way more complicated to learn. Not to talk about the irregularities of the past participle of verbs(that are not used in speech) that makes reading and writing way harder.
But if you focus your mind on that you will for sure stop learning the language because you will have an excuse. The fact is that you could learn it like Germans could too, and in the end English is part germanic.
And you can cheat. I learned Mandarin very fast, simplified and traditional script, which is crazy for most people because I cheated. I created my own software tools of spaced repetition software and because as a foreigner I did not have to follow the rules like Chinese nationals do.
For example, Chinese take the order of writing characters and the process itself as sacred. For Chinese there is only one way of writing a character, but it doesn't need to be that way, you can cheat and learn to identify most important symbols you find on the street fast. The order and calligraphy is secondary.
Ironically, the faster you use a language and can read things, the faster you will be able to write it. Just blocking yourself not being able to read a newspaper or novel because you can not write perfectly a symbol does not make sense.
The phonetics of Mandarin unless you create software to repeat and repeat and repeat every day is simply impossible for any adult foreigner, because we as children have not learned the basic sounds. German phonetics by comparison is trivial in a tenth of the time.
> The phonetics of Mandarin unless you create software to repeat and repeat and repeat every day is simply impossible for any adult foreigner, because we as children have not learned the basic sounds. German phonetics by comparison is trivial in a tenth of the time.
I'm not sure what you mean by this - that is very much person-dependent. As a primary English speaker, I was near-fluent in German before attempting Mandarin, and I found the inflection and tonal side of the language relatively trivial, whereas writing/reading (and generally rote vocabulary) have always been a struggle for me (similar experience across attempts to learn Latin, German, French, and Mandarin).
English pronunciation only vaguely follows word spelling and must be memorized in many cases. The classic phrase:
"A rough-coated, dough-faced, thoughtful ploughman strode through the streets of Scarborough; after falling into a slough, he coughed and hiccoughed."
shows how the "-ough" has no reasonable rule that can be used to determine word pronunciation, despite similar spelling.
By comparison, spelling and word pronunciation in Spanish and Italian (and probably many others as well) match exactly. You know how to spell a word from the way it sounds. You can easily read aloud written text and have little to no idea what it means.
The irony: despite Mark Twain's vicious rant, German is quite consistent on following the spelling, just like Spanish et al.
That doesn't mean some phonemes aren't hard to pronounce for the uninitiated, nor does it exclude accents and dilects and the everyday contraptions of the language.
I don't believe Mark Twain's Appendix D is vicious nor a rant. In fact, it is a brilliant piece of humorous writing in its own right and I would give a great deal to be able to write and communicate as well as that. Furthermore, having worked in both Austria and Germany I've known several native German speakers who are fluent in English and who laughed themselves almost hoarse after I brought it to their attention. They weren't a bit offended by it, they then pointed to the many peculiar idiosyncrasies of English and said that in any competition for same then English would likely be the winner. (BTW, you'll even find native German speakers reading The Awful German Language on Project Gutenberg.)
Moreover, I learned more about the German language from Twain's writing than I ever did from the equivalent number of words in any German language textbook written in English. Clearly, I cannot do justice in the space or time available but let me mention a few instances.
"These things are called "separable verbs." The German grammar is blistered all over with separable verbs; and the wider the two portions of one of them are spread apart, the better the author of the crime is pleased with his performance."
The 'REISTE AB'/'departed' example that Twain quotes is both humorous and very memorable: "The trunks being now ready, he DE- after kissing his mother <...> <...> ...more dearly than life itself, PARTED." After reading this it's almost impossible for someone who is learning the language to ever let separable verbs pass them by without noticing them.
"These things are not words, they are alphabetical processions."
Of course, they are. And as Twain points out they also possess 'perspective'—and many native German speakers would agree with this assessment, in fact some are quite bemused by the fact that their language has the world's longest words.
"<...> Of course when one of these grand mountain ranges goes stretching across the printed page, it adorns and ennobles that literary landscape—but at the same time it is a great distress to the new student, for it blocks up his way; he cannot crawl under it, or climb over it, or tunnel through it. So he resorts to the dictionary for help, but there is no help there."
Not only is this wonderfully descriptive prose but it's in fact true. To prove the point, here are a few more that are not included in Twain's text:
Whew, that's 79 or 80 letters depending on which spelling one uses.
"One cannot overestimate the usefulness of SCHLAG and ZUG."
That's very true, and so are very useful (and somewhat tiny) words such as zu, bis and nach — that is, once one gets to understand their German nuances (initially their usage can be confusing—at least I found them to be so given that to, till and until in English are used in a somewhat less prescriptive way.
"The Germans do not seem to be afraid to repeat a word when it is the right one. They repeat it several times, if they choose."
Until I read this passage, it was never evident to me that we native English speakers actually go out of our way to avoid word repetition.
"In the daybeforeyesterdayshortlyaftereleveno'clock Night, the inthistownstandingtavern called 'The Wagoner' was downburnt. When the fire to the onthedownburninghouseresting Stork's Nest reached, flew the parent Storks away. But when the bytheraging, firesurrounded Nest ITSELF caught Fire, straightway plunged the quickreturning Mother-Stork into the Flames and died, her Wings over her young ones outspread."
Even the cumbersome German construction is not able to take the pathos out of that picture--indeed, it somehow seems to strengthen it. This item is dated away back yonder months ago. I could have used it sooner, but I was waiting to hear from the Father-stork. I am still waiting.
There are some German words which are singularly and powerfully effective. For instance, those which describe lowly, peaceful, and affectionate home life; those which deal with love, in any and all forms, from mere kindly feeling and honest good will toward the passing stranger, clear up to courtship; those which deal with outdoor Nature, in its softest and loveliest aspects—with meadows and forests, and birds and flowers, the fragrance and sunshine of summer, and the moonlight of peaceful winter nights; in a word, those which deal with any and all forms of rest, repose, and peace; those also which deal with the creatures and marvels of fairyland; and lastly and chiefly, in those words which express pathos, is the language surpassingly rich and affective. There are German songs which can make a stranger to the language cry. That shows that the sound of the words is correct—it interprets the meanings with truth and with exactness; and so the ear is informed, and through the ear, the heart."
With these wonderfully perceptive words, Twain not only shows us what a master he is at conveying his message but also that he is an acute observer of human nature. It is also indicative that his knowledge and fluency of German is higher than one may gather at first glance. Here, I can attest to the validity of what Twain says in respect of these German words. For instance, Schubert's remarkable song cycles Die schöne Müllerin (The Fair Maid of the Mill) and Die Winterreise ([the] Winter Journey) often reduce me to tears. Also, I find the pathos and heartfelt meaning of these words abundantly evident whenever I wander though a German Friedhof (cemetery). These powerful and yet unusually simple German words stare back from nearly every Grabstein if so as to remind one of one's own mortality.
The thing is, there are rules and explanations for everything, but they are not the kind of rules that would help a foreigner learn the language. They are the rules of languages and orthography being transformed as a result of waves of invasions, with each invader bringing their own language and changing the pronounciation of some of the native words, to be replaced by another invader doing the same.
This is not unique to English, but I do think that English is more eclectic than most other languages.
> You know how to spell a word from the way it sounds.
Spanish is my mother language, and actually it's the opposite way: given a written word, there is only one obvious way to read it (except for loanwords and a few words that keep old spellings like "México"), but given a spoken word, it may be written in two different ways (e.g. vaca/baca, kilo/quilo), or it may have a silent H ("ahí hay un hombre que dice ay"). The orthography is not fully phonetic, but you are right it's infinitely easier than English.
If you want to find languages with an almost perfect phonetic spelling, look at Eastern/Northern European languages with an ortography created in the late 19th or early 20th century.
> Every noun has a gender, and there is no sense or system in distribution; so the gender of each must be learned separately and by heart. There is no other way. To do this one has to have a memory like a memorandum-book.
And yet, every German speaker seems to be able to remember this, without evidence of them being better at memorization than others?
As usual, it's easy to forget how hard things are for others when you're the expert. I'm sure Twain never thought about how ridiculously hard many English words are to spell, and how people learning English as a second language struggle quite a lot with it.
But the thing is, with practice, we do learn these things. With practice speaking German, you'll learn and remember the gender of each noun, it simply becomes part of the noun itself. And with practice writing English, you'll learn the spelling - illogical as it is, it simply becomes part of the word itself.
But looking at my language, I'm not so sure how much of this is pure memory. Swedish, like all Scandinavian languages, has four genders for nouns, but only one of them stick out and modify words and sentences. Being a native speaker, I of course know the gender for each noun, and you could argue that I have memorized this. But I can also properly gender new words. I can gender words I've never heard before. I can construct new words, and gender them correctly as well, and have other Swedish speakers independently agree with me on what the gender of this new word is. So clearly there are rules, it's not the case that someone else decided the genders, and then everyone else had to memorize what this person arbitrarily chose.
And I'm pretty sure German actually works the same way.
> I'm sure Twain never thought about how ridiculously hard many English words are to spell
I'm sure Twain was well aware of it, and wrote the article on the awful German language tongue in cheek for amusement, rather than as an actual complaint.
In fact, English does something very similar. There's a bookshelf, but never a furniture - you can say a piece of furniture if you want to be fancy. There's a cow, and cows, but never a cattle, or even cattles. (What do you mean they are uncountable. They are freaking cows.) Then there are crazy stuff like a pair of scissors. (I mean, has anyone seen a scissor?) Somehow native English speakers memorize all of this.
At least genders are conceptually easy: given a word, you have one gender. (Though I'm sure there are complications.)
You can very often guess the gender of a word in german using some heuristics. For instance, anything ending in -heit is feminine, and -chen neutral.
I wrote an elaborate analysis os these heuristics (if someone is into this kind of thing) https://mejuto.co/statistical-grammar-guessing-a-german-noun...
But you should take into account that some rules are more general expressions of others. For example, in your penultimate "(recommended)" table, there is no point in having both "-hen" and "-chen" for neutral, as the latter is a specialization of the former. Same for "-ung" and "-rung"/"-tung" in feminine.
"I am indeed the truest
friend of the German language - and
not only now, but from long since - yes,
before twenty years already. And never
have I the desire had the noble language
to hurt; to the contrary, only
wished she to improve - I would
her only reform. [...] After all these
reforms established be will, will
the German language the noblest and the
prettiest on the world be."
It would be very strange if he learned this language for his whole life and would despise it. But Mark Twain wouldn't be himself if he couldn't mock a thing he loved.
> And yet, every German speaker seems to be able to remember this, without evidence of them being better at memorization than others?
actually we don't the system is so stupid that we try to remove the gender altogether or try to make stupid words like "der Student"/"die Studentin" because Mark Twain tought it is only a linguistic gender, but unfortunatly a lot of people do not think that our gender is only linguistic, that's why we try to re-gender a lot of words. sometimes by splitting it into two, sometimes by using special characters. Our language reforms do not make it easier, they make it worse.
to make it easy, for us we learn "der tisch" and not just "tisch" so the noun is learned aswell.
> As usual, it's easy to forget how hard things are for others when you're the expert. I'm sure Twain never thought about how ridiculously hard many English words are to spell, and how people learning English as a second language struggle quite a lot with it.
Exactly. You most often cannot guess the gender of a noun in quite a lot of languages (German, Spanish, French, etc), but most of the time you also cannot guess how an English word is pronounced without having heard it before (and made the connection with the spelling, which is sometimes very tricky).
It's not so clear and cut. For example, "acción" and any other noun that express the result of a verb ends in -ón, but they are female words. There are also plenty of male words that end in -a, and female words that end in -o: https://www.practicaespanol.com/mas-de-40-palabras-que-acaba...
> But I can also properly gender new words. I can gender words I've never heard before. I can construct new words, and gender them correctly as well
It's generally the case in French too, but there are cases for which people don't agree. A recent example is a nation-wide disagreement on whether to say "le" or "la" Covid.
Could you tell something or give a link about that Swedish fourth gender? You made me interested when you wrote about it but I can't find anything about it on the Internet.
Correct, there is only en-ord and ett-ord and it has been so for centuries.
There are 3 personal pronouns (One of them less than 20 years old for politically correct language to describe either woman or man.) But grammatically all 3 cause declensions like en-ord, so they don't form a different grammatical gender.
> As a solution some feminists in Sweden have proposed to add a third class of gender-neutral pronouns for people.
Uh, no, we borrowed it straight up from our neighbours in Finland, because Finnish doesn't have gendered third-person pronouns!
As an added bonus, "hen" slots in perfectly among the other two pronouns (han/hon), it follows broad vowel rules for gender, and it's perfectly understandable even if you've never seen the word used before.
All four genders are listed on that page: masculine, feminine, common, neuter. The first three are grammatically identical, but the fourth one sticks out.
In English, the indefinite article is either a/an, depending on the vowel sound of the noun. In Swedish it's either en/ett, depending on the gender. Examples:
en mus - a mouse
ett hus - a house
But the grammatical gender carries and modifies more things like the definite article (den/det) and every adjective.
One of the Twain's famous examples that language is full of exceptions and hard to learn is that the word for girl is neuter.
However, that shows that he didn't understand things all that well. Or the message was more important than the facts. While in general gender does indeed not follow much logic and needs to be learned by heart it's not true for this class of words. For derived words the gender is determined by the kind of derivation. E. g. diminutives are always neuter, and so is the word for girl, which technically is a diminutive, even if today's speakers don't see it like that.
So right, if he knew more he could give better examples ('das Weib', a nowadays pejorative term for woman (related to 'wife' presumably) doesn't have that diminutive structure and is still neutral), but his point still stands? This feels like Gettier problem territory. :P
> diminutives are always neuter
I assume you mean to only talk about "-chen"-suffixed diminutives right? [ there are other kinds of diminutive construction in German that aren't neutral - e.g. -ling , Zögling, takes masculine ]
-ling is always masculine (I would not call them diminutives, you cannot form them from many words)
-chen and -lein (diminutives) are always neuter, they can be formed from many nouns
-heit and -keit, and -ung are always feminine
I don't claim that the gender has logical meaning. But for derived words the rules typically hold (I would not be suprised if a few exceptions could be found)
> I assume you mean to only talk about "-chen"-suffixed diminutives right? [ there are other kinds of diminutive construction in German that aren't neutral - e.g. -ling , Zögling, takes masculine ]
Which is even more fun as -ling is generally seen as more objectifying than -chen, even though -chen is neutral and -ling is male.
Also -ling is not so much a diminutive but more of a suffix for Nominalisation (Zögling stems from 'ziehen' [to raise],and refers to someone who was raised, Widerling from 'widerlich' [despicable], thus a despicable person, Schreiberling from 'schreiben' [to write], a Writer], Frühling from 'früh' early [spring]). Gives a somewhat pejorative connotation at times.
The key misunderstanding here is of course that 'Genus' is not necessarily 'Sexus'.
[I'd like to acknowledge that my designation of "-ling" as functioning sometimes as a diminutive is a thing that might be debated for all the grounds given in this and in another comment, but I think it would make precisely nobody happy to pursue the matter further (while at the same time appreciating the points made, that do indeed give me pause)].
I think your argument is somewhat invalidated by your last sentence: the world for girl is generally seen as a standalone word, and so it seems odd.
Of course there is reason why is it so, but that is true for all oddities in every language: they made sense originally but as the new thing became the norm the origin of it is lost.
> the world for girl is generally seen as a standalone word, and so it seems odd.
That’s the thing: language also change the way you see things. Native English people might find it strange for the reason you mention, but German people can find it normal, because it is a diminutive following the usual rules. It is not a “standalone word”: it is a root and a suffix.
It is not an oddity at all within the framework of the language (which has its share of irregularities already).
I am not sure that it is seen as standalone. Surely, one doesn't use "Maid" or other archaic terms from which "Mädchen" is the derived word. But to me I am aware that its a diminutive. If I speak dialect I also use the dialectal diminutive (Mädle). Of course to someone learning the language that level of understanding is hard to reach without immersion for years.
Hardly anyone enunciates the 'x' in a word like 'sixth'. I say 'sikth' (and I fancy myself a fairly eloquent speaker). It's got too many consonant sounds; the human tongue just isn't agile enough for a word like that. You might get it properly-enunciated by a university don, or certain kinds of very pernickety radio presenters.
Me too. I think that difficulty is restricted to UK and then maybe only England. I know pretty much everyone in Ireland pronounces the 'x', and I don't recall any Scottish people doing it the BBC way. I've no idea about the US, Aus, etc.
Specifically Gutenburg and his hellish press. Before movable type English had the letter “thorn” - perhaps some of the pronunciation problems arose then?
But what do I know? As a nativ spanich spikr, I rimembr bing prplexd
That doesn't make sense. Typesets are just symbols carved into metal. You can just make your own typeset for your own language and in this case all it required was one more letter so the barrier to entry is practically zero.
IIRC the movable type printing press was imported from the continent when printing in England started, and by importing that includes the typesets and staff to operate the printing presses. French printers typesetting English text were not very motivated to establish extra characters.
Random related anecdote: For years the Mormons would distribute their Book of Mormon in German translations but these were printed overseas and they didn't have the 'ß' character, so they used the greek letter β to substitute 'daβ' instead of 'daß', etc. We tend to forget living in the digital publishing age how limiting mechanical workflows can be.
In this case, the double use was probably intentional (to save space in the limited character set range) but still confusing to the reader when they encountered the wrong glyph.
Yes, of the six letters lost from the English alphabet, thorn and yogh are probably the most consequential for the spelling mess. In this, though, we can safely blame the French. ;)
German has a difficult grammar (was a real pain when learning German as a kid) but at least when reading German you know how to pronounce it, English pronunciation like German gender must be learn by heart :)
I am not sure whether this can be objectively measured. All kids learn (at least) one language the natural way. I have the strong feeling that related languages will always be easier for them.
I speak English as a foreign language. I don't think articles in English are a challenge. It's the USA, but not the France. I can feel the cold or a cold and know the difference. I don't know many rules, it's mostly like I would use them in my mother tongue.
I have many colleagues, whose mother tongue does not know articles at all. If they write a page of text,
there are often a dozen of mistakes related to articles to correct.
But it's not that I would just be smarter. I have spoken another foreign language daily for over 25 years. I speak fluently and can make myself fully understood. Still I make quite some mistakes all the time.
Once you learnt the phonetics for the alphabet, you'll find German is pretty consistence.
I don't know what you're trying convey in your examples though, because all the example have consistent pronunciation. Inconsistence pronunciation often because it is borrowed words from French (das Experiment (Ex-pe-ri-mo'n?)) or English (das Schedule, informal vocab.)
Compound words do have the potential to throw this for a loop. The pronunciation is regular if you can decompose the word, but if you miss where the word boundaries are all bets are off. For example "linkshändig"
English is my second language. I took German throughout middle school and high school. I did alright with it. When I went to college, I decided to switch it up and take French.
I could not get it. At all. Part of it was an extremely easy first semester professor followed by an awful, hard second semester professor. However, it just never, ever clicked with me. I went back to German to satisfy my two year college requirement.
Later, upon reflection, I realized that I am heavily reliant on knowing grammar rules, and French was just too much of a change from German/English. Sure, German's verb conjugations and genders were new to an English speaker. However, because of the similar grammar, German was a lot easier for me to pick up than anything I've seen since.
Its funny how sometimes 'antiquated' English text uses word order that is so similar to German ('When I Was One-and-Twenty'... etc). Sometimes when I read such stuff, I get the feeling that my English teacher might have marked the sentence as incorrect or 'sounding to German'.
As a student of Dutch I empathize with some of these. Though it is pretty cool that, if you stick with it, your brain is capable of reshaping itself into these new forms. Even as an adult - I started learning it at around 35.
It’s interesting to compare languages on how much you can simply ignore and still communicate - for example broken English where you don’t conjugate anything can usually be deciphered and English spelled phonetically is pretty easy to read (even if all the words are spelled wrong).
> It is a bleak Day. Hear the Rain, how he pours, and the Hail, how he rattles; and see the Snow, how he drifts along, and oh the Mud, how deep he is! Ah the poor Fishwife, it is stuck fast in the Mire; it has dropped its Basket of Fishes; and its Hands have been cut by the Scales as it seized some of the falling Creatures; and one Scale has even got into its Eye. And it cannot get her out. It opens its Mouth to cry for Help; but if any Sound comes out of him, alas he is drowned by the raging of the Storm.
As a german, accept my apologies.
Though I don't get which word for "fishwife" exactly he was referring to that has a neutral gender.
Closest translations that come to mind are "Fischersfrau", "Fischerin" - or even "Fischverkäuferin" if you want to be bureaucratic. But all of these are grammatically female.
edit: TIL "Fischweib" is a well-established word (and indeed neutral). Wikipedia translates it to "mermaid" though, which doesn't really seem to fit the story.
Perhaps “Weib”
An outdated,today slightly pejorative, word for “Frau”
But to me the term “das Fischerweib” doesn’t sound familiar either, so I am not sure
I didn't know Weib was considered perjorative - although I've never had occasion to use the word.
The English word 'man' used to mean 'person'. A female person became a 'wife-man', i.e. a woman. So the word 'mankind', for example, doesn't (or didn't) imply that female humans don't exist.
For a less antiquated example, imagine that the text introduces the girl (das Mädchen) Fiona, and then persists in referring to her as "es", because the word Mädchen has a neutral gender.
The article seems to miss the point that Twain was a humorist trying to be funny, not a linguist trying to write a serious criticism of a language's defects.
Side note - in all the many times Twain's essay has come up on HN (partial list at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27177031), I don't think I've ever seen a case of a German speaker taking offence at it or even reacting defensively. That's impressive! That is not how flamebait usually progresses. In most cases, the title would be enough to get hostile reactions, and the text too, despite that it's obviously in good fun and that only a serious student of German (and master humorist) could have written it.
Regarding Twain's complaints, the biggest lesson I learned from learning german at an older age was: languages are nonsensical, illogical, and the sooner you stop trying to make sense of it all, the faster you will advance. Children do not learn languages by being analytical and by comparing to what they already know, they learn by just accepting it as it is. This leads to a funny phenomenon that foreign speakers know the actual rules of a language better than most native speakers, simply because native speakers know things are as they are, but not why. Whether adults are capable of this is a different question, but trying to find logic in a language will only lead to frustration.