The Awful German Language (1880)

"Wife" is female in German, not neutral: Die Ehefrau. "Weib" is old language and rude to use these days.

Also, 'Weib' is not rude in every context. "Wein, Weib und Gesang" is not diminutive towards women, but in fact appreciative (as in 'necessary for having a good time'). We have Weiberfassnacht. And then there are the dialects, in which "Weib" often is indicative of a homely, loving relationship (-> bairisch, Swabian). Context matters.

There's a whole book by Bastian Sick (famous German author) named "Der Dativ ist dem Genitiv sein Tod." -- the title about the Dativ being the death of the Genetiv is playing with that idiom.

https://languagetool.org/insights/de/beitrag/dativ-genitiv-s... -- it's in German and discusses the (perceived) change of that idiom.

As much as I like Twain, the English language is one of the hardest European languages, when it comes to pronunciation (contrary to Italian, which sticks to a few simple rules). So, you're welcome, choose your poison.

Doesn't work as good if one has ears.

That's your natural feel of language, and you are deriving from casual use of Dativ plural ... but in these situations, Genitiv would be correct again (wegen DER Regen, but more clearly: wegen der Regenfälle, as Regen is uncountable (unlike, for example, Sturm/Stürme)).

Your example is vernacular German as spoken on the road, but grammatically, it is incorrect.

Yes, I am lots of fun at parties.

Twain's style was so accessible, it's easy to forget this essay is almost 150 years old.

French of course also have many original grammatical torture instruments. You might think that as a bastard child between Latin and the Germanic Frank tribe dialects it’s no wonder, though elimination of noun declension is rather surprising from this perspective. The truth is that all languages out there have their own dungeon with many traps and treacheries included.

Fortune, nun ni ĉiuj parolas Esperanton. Kaj ne forgesas la akuzativo nin. :D

The Awful German Language (1880) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27173967 - May 2021 (253 comments)

The Awful German Language (1880) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18147467 - Oct 2018 (311 comments)

Edit: Seems true of the previous threads as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44002116

For me it was when I had to realize that for the French, every number larger than what they can count with their fingers becomes a small algebra problem. quatre-vingt-dix-neuf ... four times twenty plus ten plus nine makes 99.

I always found it weird, the vast difference between phonetics of English and literally EVERYBODY ELSE, including closely related German languages.

This saying exists in English too: "wine, women and song".

Of course, most Western languages have gendered nouns - English is pretty unique in that respect. That likely comes from English being born as a pidgin of French and German.

Verbs in German are valuable things. You collect them, hold on to them as long as you can, and then - at the end of the sentence - they all come tumbling out. The order of the nouns at the end of the sentence differs by region. In purest German, they come out in reverse order, giving you a nice, context-free grammar. In Swiss dialects, they come out in the order they were conceived, meaning that the grammar is technically context sensitive. In Austrian dialects, the order can be a mix.

Of course, every language has its quirks. French, for example, puts extra letters on the ends of words that you are not supposed to pronounce. Well, unless the right two words are next to each other, in which case, you pronounce the letters after all.

English, meanwhile, gives learners fits, because the pronunciation has nothing whatsoever to do with spelling. Consider the letters "gh" in this sentence (thanks ChatGPT): "Though the tough man gave a sigh and a laugh at the ghost, he had a hiccough and coughed through the night by the slough, hoping to get enough rest."

Amongst guys, women are still sometimes referred collectively to as "Weiber".

Most of the time we try to use English for technical identifiers and German for business langugage, leading to lets say "interesting" code, but it works for us.

Could you give some examples? As a German native speaker I have to admit I have no idea what you are talking about. :)

as a German native I felt oddly at home with Japanese because funnily enough building seemingly endless verbs at the end of sentences felt very natural. Despite the fact that German, most of the time, is an ordinary SVO language. It's one of the mistakes English natives who just learn German make, that only made sense for me after I thought how odd that structure is.

I've also heard live TV translators really hate this about German because it's annoying, depending on the context, to have to wait to the end of a sentence to translate the whole thing.

As a descendant of the Romans, I can only shake my head at such barbarism.

All diminutives in German are neuter, for whatever reason. You could do the same for “Der Knabe” (“boy”) → “Das Knäbchen” (“little boy”).

Curiously, saying “Die Mad” would be as uncommon – at least nowadays – as saying “Das Knäbchen”.

A language is a dialect with an army and a fleet. As they used to say.

I liked that The Handmaids Tale in German is der Report der Magd.

Not sure about the reduction, but "Wine, women and song" somewhat assumes the point of view from an heterosexual male and could feel offensive just for this.

"Wine, man and song" would sound weird, but it should not sound weirder than the "women" version. That's because we are all used to the male pov assumption and that's the core of the issue.

And of course, to add insult to injury, the phrase will feel like the reduction the grand parent describes to many.

So I think we'd be better off dropping those old phrases in favor of things like your version, which doesn't have these issues.

Note: not a German nor an English native speaker so I might be missing some cultural subtlety that could make my POV a bit wrong and disconnected from reality.

"Sleep well" -> "Slaap lekker", in German "Schlaf lecker" = "Sleep tasty".

"Nuttig" -> "Useful", in German "nuttig" means "slutty"

"Huren" -> "to rent", in German "huren" means "to whore".

"Oorbellen" -> "earrings", "ear bells".

We should not interpret stuff out of context though, but here I'm not sure taking the context in account would not make the point even stronger. I would be quite surprised about any context changing things for this particular phrase (but happy to be surprised...)

The Donau is a river. On this river is a steamship (Dampfshiff): Donaudampfschiff

This ship is part of an organisation (Gesellschaft) that manages cruises (Fahrt): Donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaft

The ship has a captain (Kapitän) who has a cap (Mütze): Donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaftskapitänsmütze

On this cap is a button (Knopf): Donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaftskapitänsmützenknopf

You could extend this example: The button is colored with a special paint (Farbe), which is produced in a factory (Fabrik): Donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaftskapitänsmützenknopffarbenfabrik

And the factory has an entry gate (Eingangstor): Donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaftskapitänsmützenknopffarbenfabrikeingangstor

In English, this would be a huge sentence, all in reverse order: The entry gate of the factory that produces the color for the button on the captain's cap of the ship belonging to the cruise organization on the Donau.

The German is a lot more compact, if sometimes hard to parse :-)

Franz Kafka put this property to good use and sometimes keeps the reader in suspense for half a page or more until the sentence falls in place.

Swedish had some of this until the second world war, since then we've made it into an english-like pidgin.

Celtic remained a strong influence around modern France, Belgium, the Netherlands so we end up with French counting partially in 20s, even though continental Celtic languages are extinct (Breton, spoken in north west France is an insular Celtic language, more closely related to Celtic as spoken in the British isles and Ireland.)

I don’t know how Danish got base 20 counting though. Must have more reading to do.

"Eine Göttin ist eine weibliche Gottheit."

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6ttin

A special kind of this is the «prosessøkonomisk (process economical) påtaleunnlatelse» where in a large and complex case with many serious offences, some less serious can be non-prosecuted in this way to not spend eternity in the courtroom.

Try to swear loudly and angrily in French, and try it in German. In German like you're cursing the world out of existence, in French it is like wiping your ass with silk.

(One of my current favorite party tricks is speaking Yiddish to German speakers, and cranking up the other aspects to see where the intelligibility breaks down.)

the Donau steamship cruise organization's captain's cap button.

And extended:

the Donau steamship cruise organization's captain's cap button's colour factory's entry gate.

EDIT: Let's not forget to mention its Java implementation, which goes full German:

DonauSteamshipCruiseOrganizationCaptainButtonsColorFactory

But German is a blood-and-tears uphill battle for me and I just can't get over it. It's really fascinating on some level.

https://www.eventpeople.de/aktuelles/eventmarket/ratschlaege...

But it also odd example for this, because it is long as hell anyway already and additional spacing that English equivalent would require is just opportunity to wrap. It is just harder to read, but English equivalent would be easier to layout.

Except for Dutch in the South (Belgians and South NL), that's soft on my ears too. But not my accent, we are descendants of monsters. Why otherwise would we pronounce the G the way that we do?

When you are casting it as appreciative of women because they are necessary for fun, you are applying modern idea that women present at a wild party says something positive about that woman. Back then, it suggested easy sexual availability and that was seen as a bad thing.

Edit: also in general, when people in the past were crass, other people in the past were offended over it. Even women themselves who accepted their role as god given would frequently get offended over hearing what they considered crass language. When women were supposed to be guardians of morality (and Germany had such periods), they would openly take issue with such statement. Because it was their expected role to be offended and to gently positively impact men (in a way that does not actually interfere with what he does).

So it's code-switching code.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code-switching

cut,copy,paste auschneiden,kopieren,einfügen

this can break the UI so you have scroll on a popup just to copy a piece of text because google put "copy" last in the selection.

https://de.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/papabile

(They added the third f or maybe re-added it)

Verb prefix system is the same. Noun conjugation even uses the same prepositions to decide the case. Compound words are slighly different, instead of a tram-station you would use tramlike station.

- It seems the Australian section 10 is handed out by the court, where the English and Norwegian options dispense with a trial entirely. It also looks like a Section 10 doesn't go in a person's criminal record, unlike the other two.

- It looks like the English caution requires an admission of guilt, while the Norwegian option is at the prosecutor's discretion within the rules of applicability of the procedure. Of course someone not demanding a trial when given this can be seen as an _implicit_ admission of guilt, but the legal nuance can probably be important.

- The English and Norwegian procedures are nominally also different in who makes the decision: the English procedure is handled by the police, while in Norway it's the prosecutor's office. But this is more a theoretical than practical difference I think, because the Norwegian prosecutor's office is organized differently than the English Crown Prosecution Service: here, the lowest levels of prosecutors are integrated into the police services they work with, so in practice I think it works out much the same.

Which isn't surprising since Anglo Saxon is at the heart of the non French bits of English.

Germans are allowed to write compound nouns in hyphens

Donau-Dampfschifffahrts-Gesellschafts-Kapitänsmützenknopf-Farbenfabrik-Eingangstor

A people and their language predated the concept of nation-states, but when the latter arrived obviously (geo-)political interests started to blur the facts.

So if you conflate the German state with Germans (I'd challenge that and view the German state as a continuation of the Prussian state), and you don't like the interests of the German state, it is predictable where you'll land on this issue.

Because of this, even if their national anthem does so, calling the Dutch Germans would infuriate them and rightly so, because it would imply justification to some for things like those happening between Russia and Ukraine right now.

I think in the end it is also a matter of "national" self-confidence. While Luxemburgish is virtually indistinguishable to the German ear from say the dialect of Cologne, Swiss-German is hardly understandable for anyone outside of Switzerland. Yet, the Swiss don't have an urge to re-label their dialect as a separate language. And the urge of the Dutch to re-lable themselves is lesser than that of Luxemburg because seemingly no one questions their identity.

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reform_der_deutschen_Rechtschr...

... several times: 1996,2004,2006,2011,2017.

The current correct spelling is either Schiff-Fahrt or Schifffahrt.

I usually say "A dialect is a language that lost a war", but this one might be better :)

A lot of this is to due with latin, which pronounciation evolved over time to give modern French but which origin is still kept in spelling. So it's not that the language "puts extra letters" it's that it kept old spelling when the pronunciation change.

An example: 'est' (to be, third person singular) is very obviously verbatim latin spelling but pronunciation has shifted so that the 't' is not pronounced (and arguably the 's' could go, too).

Sometimes there are useful "rules" about how spelling and pronunciations evolved, which can be useful for English speakers writing in French, too, to remember your accents:

hospital -> hôpital

hostel -> hôtel

castel (castle in English) -> château

Anyway, there is also a perfectly acceptable and established way of making German words easier to parse if need be: hyphens. So Hyphen-Case instead of PascalCase.

But there are rules for 2/3 of cases. https://sprachekulturkommunikation.com/genus-der-substantive...

You can classify by suffix.

* -ung, -heit, -keit -> feminin, e.g. die Schönheit

* -ling -> masculin, e.g. der Flüchtling

* -chen, -lein -> neutrum, e.g das Mädchen

You can classify by category. Every alcoholic drink is masculin, except for beer.

You can classify by phonetic spelling. That is probably the closest you have to Portugese.

A Dutch speaker can't read or understand German. Some words are similar, but the same can be said about English. There are a number of differences in the grammar and alphabet.

Of course they're related languages; because I can speak English, German, and Dutch I can kind of read Swedish or Danish on account of being Germanic as well. But that doesn't make a "dialect with pretensions". We might as well say that all current Germanic languages are some sort of "dialect with pretensions" of some old Germanic language. But that doesn't really mean anything.

I swear they only do this to mess with people.

avagoodweekend and dontforgetaboutheaeroguard

That does not seem like a concept at all, let alone an actual German word. “Beans” is not even German, there is no German word spelled “Beans”.

Just imagine if someone studied Portuguese but learned vocabulary like this, never bothering with the ending vowel:

  'gat-'

  'cas-'

  'bolach-'

To make a weird tech analogy: Romance nouns are like laptops, with a touchpad built in. Germanic nouns are like desktops, you have to remember to carry a mouse* along.

* Die Maus

I’m sure a native German speaker wouldn’t make the same mistake, though.

German does not simply just concatenate words ad infinitum across logical classification, a concatenated, compound word is generally logically limited by classification. The concatenation generally only tends to be used in relevant (operative word being “relevant”), increasing smaller/lower logical classification. You generally will not rise and fall in that classification, let alone jump horizontally as you concatenate. It is really just a logic tree, you don’t all the sudden jump trunks or branches. It has to be a logically precise unit.

You’re essentially just saying ManBearPig. It’s not an actual thing.

So the entry gate of the factory that produces paint that happens to maybe also be used on the button of the cap of the captain of the ship on the Danube and is also part of a union, is not…

Donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaftskapitänsmütze nknopffarbenfabrikeingangstor

In my native German spelling, while there are irregularities, has been updated over times. Sometimes out of habit, sometimes by "order."

Of course I am biased but I actually believe that there is no other language that is so elegantly conducive to precise thinking. And above confusing example is actually illustrating this. If thinking is a bit like moving around on a high-dimensional mental manifold then language is an imperfect projection onto a mostly serialized data structure but with referencing (maybe 1.x dimensional). (If you project something from n dimensions onto less than n dimensions you always lose information)

And with German you can explore this mental manifold in a depth and strictness like with no other language. Like entering a meta debug mode where you can form a sentence creating an implicit reprojection into the space where the manifold resides and then muse about how this makes sense.

I often find myself doing that and playing around with "understanding" a sentence in different ways. A simple example would be that you can take almost any German sentence and by stressing a different word the meaning subtly changes. An analogy could be those pictures where you see something and after looking long enough at it it looks different. For example a sketch of a 3D box which you can flip. At some point you can do this intentionally by applying an invisible switch. Same feeling with German statements.

But German has also some short comings especially in the emotional department. For example there are no good translations for "smile" and "to look forward to". Another language I dabbled in is Thai which is pretty much the total opposite of German - very fascinating and refreshing.

First of all, it is not German, but Old English, which is not particularly more similar to German than it is to any other Germanic language e.g. Icelandic.

Second, the idea that middle/modern English began as a pidgin is a very fringe view in linguistics; the vast majority of people who have studied the question would instead say that it indeed has a huge amount of French (or more precisely, Norman) influence, but not to the extent that we can say it went through a pidgin/creolization process.

IIRC (not sure about this) English is thought to have lost its case system mainly due to influence from Old Norse (which had a similar case system but with different and not mutually intelligible endings), not French.

* I know languages aren't "designed" for the most part, but I find it helpful to compare them as if they were.

The Latin-derived cases from the article, on the other hand, are the truly maddening, and makes you appreciate the simplicity of English grammar by comparison.

Compounds have to be translated using multiple words, yes - that's just a few extra white space, it doesn't result in loss of precision.

Also, the increase in possible permutations (and opportunities for mistakes) when you add adjective conjugations to the mix is daunting.

But over time most of the change have proven to be successful ...

And yes, the French "est" will remain for the time being, but for me as a student of French there would have been a lot of low hanging fruit.

But today the interesting thing to me is how modern communication changes this. Text messaging leads to a massive increase in "dialect writing" while at the same time auto correction (and more recently AI) counters that. Back in the days™ writing was mostly done by the elites (authors, news papers, authorities) and the private letter was well thought. But test messaging, online forums, ... lead to more text being generated by "average" public, which over time certainly impacts "professional" writing.

(me neither but that is the kind of factories you build there ... at least in folklore)

In my experience as a German, everyone instantly switches to English if just one non-German speaker is in the group.

It’s just one instance of the more general principle that the gender of nouns with a common suffix are based on the suffix. E.g. all nouns ending in -keit or -ung are feminine regardless of whether they have any connection to the biological female sex.

I simultaneously know too little about German and have seen too much horror stories on German that I cannot identify whether this is but a typographical-error or actually pursuant to DIN orthographical standards

Also, the fact that collocations can acquire more specialised meanings than just the sum of their parts is hardly unique to German (in English, the "theory of relativity" means something very specific and isn't used, e.g., for moral or epistemic relativism).

Technical entities get English names, domain entities get German names.

I also dimmly remember a German version of VBA.

It’s a typical kind of lashing out by hubristic people who reject complexity they cannot master with vigorous anger; kind of like how a child may call math stupid out of frustration. It’s probably a symptom of the jingoistic era, especially in trust-fund-baby-country called America.

It is not just spelling. There are periodic calls to simplify grammar for no other reason than apparently people get dumber and dumber over time and can't learn the language anymore so it should be simplified.

One example in France is reform to reduce the use of the subjunctive tense. For example, now when I read the news I see horrible stuff like "Après qu'ils ont" (instead of "Après qu'ils aient" [and btw "est" and "aient" are pronounced the same ;)]), which would have sent my primary school teacher into a rage. Why do that? Cynically just because the members of the Académie Française need to find something to do...

Also, it’s not clear that either is “more complex” than the other across the board. German has more complex noun morphology (cases, etc) whereas English has more complex phonology, for example.

"Are you claiming it was appreciative of women back then?"

I think it depends very much on context, who said it, where does it get said, to whom and in what type of voice etc. The saying "Wein, Weib und Gesang" as such could be appreciative towards women, and I think it could be said in a non-demeaning way, also in the times, where women had a much worse standing as of today.

I think this, not because I know anything about that time back then, but because I learned in the last decades how heavily the perception or meaning of words can change. And how very personal those perceptions are. When I went to school, we used words casually, that would be offensive today. And I know that my friends and I used these words without thinking twice if they're offensive, because to us, they just weren't. Others could be offended by those words at that time. But this is because other people have a different moral, or knowledge, or education, or age etc.

What I want to say with all that: we are almost unable to comprehend how people back then thought, talked and meant the stuff, they said back then. Because we are pretty much blinded by our own current perception and moral of things. For example, I tend to think amicably about the past, so my interpretation of stuff that was said in the past gets a "rose tint". Others tend to think that the past was bad, people were stupid and crass, and wrong. So they interpret things in a much darker light, than me. I can't say that anyone is more right than the other, because it comes down to very personal interpretations.

> It was expression about loud wild partying, the sort of that is annoying to everyone living on the same street as your beer pub is. The women who were present were not appreciated, they were look down at sort of tramps. A well behaved woman was not supposed to be present.

This is what you learned and interpreted about that phrase and time. For me this is a possible situation you describe, but there are also very different situations, where this phrase could come from. In my social circles, the word "Weib" was used in a very endearing, appreciative way towards women. Women used that word for describing themselves as strong, and emancipated. So the phrase "Wein, Weib und Gesang" could have a very positive connotation. That says nothing about what happened a few hundred years ago, it just shows how personal language in the end is.

They're not Latin-derived, they come originally from Proto-Indo-European (which had even more cases). Many other Indo-European languages retain cases (Slavic languages, Greek, etc.), but were lost in English and the Romance languages.

What does come from Latin is the way we name and analyse these cases traditionally.

Though not quite chinese level

That said, I simply don't understand the mindset of people who move somewhere for an extended period of time and don't bother to learn the language. It locks you out of a lot of opportunities and makes you dependent on other people (especially for official/administrative/legal purposes). It also simply doesn't work in many places - (younger) Germans may speak decent English, but try going to Spain, Italy, or even Japan and see how far you get if you insist on speaking only English.

But I agree that languages with more complex morphology aren't somehow "better", that's just weird elitism coming from an era where every language was analysed as if it were some variant of Latin, Greek or Sanskrit.

I live in Zürich and I get by just fine unable to speak German. I can read it just fine because it is similar enough to Swedish, my native language. I doubt I will ever learn Swiss deutsch, it really is a language on its own - with very strong dialects.

But today there are amazing translator apps that can make it so much easier parsing official documents.

Drawing - Zeichnung

Picture - Bild

You were thinking of Bild, I guess?

Similarly for English and French, seen as practical and artsy, resepectively, due to say Hobbes/Smith and the likes of Baudelaire or Rimbaud.

Whether any of that makes any sense is a problem for the philologists, I suppose.

Really funny, very well written, and most of all, while exaggerated: all true.

German is laden with a ton of fairly useless and purely ornamental flourishes, it's truly a pain to master.

Every step of the way, your mind is haunted by this recurring thought: "why in heaven's name would they inflict this to themselves?"

It's even worse than French if you count the number of genders.

For instance, we first learned what a direct object was (something which is done with/to, e.g. in “I ate the ice cream”, “the ice cream” would be direct object). Then we learned that in German, the direct object is declined in accusative (which primarily affects the article, and adjective declination). This was consistent across multiple classes and teachers and books and schools. But my German German teachers had never heard of the concept “direct object”; for them, only the “accusative object” existed. Of course, the accusative object would be in accusative, but also, its presence would signal e.g. whether to use “haben” or “ist” for “is” in certain situations (for which I learned an entirely different set of rules that they had never heard of).

You would think that this is because my native language (Norwegian) has different concepts, but our entire way of teaching Norwegian grammar was uprooted at some point pre-WW2 _precisely to map well to German_, to prepare students for German classes when that was a more common second language than English was. (There were tons of things I never understood why were important until I got to apply them to German later.) So you'd think they'd match better.

Have you maybe considered the idea that a simplification might actually be an improvement?

As in: a language's first and foremost role is to communicate ideas and feelings as efficiently and clearly as possible, and with the broadest possible reach and not to impress the plebs with how sophisticated your sentences can become.

In that light, which of {English, German} best fits the bill in your opinion?

German was PITA, French was pretty easy but obviously I had a personal French teacher, and old lady who was amazing

I don't speak German at all anymore :/

Normally whatever is acting as an adjective ie "donut-eating relative" but with such a long example it seems a bit trickier.

Is it in the dictionary?

Up until the point you have to read and write them.

Especially written Japanese, which is a giant mess of stuff they borrowed from the west, china as well as native stuff.

You're criticizing a satirical book excerpt written by Mark Twain in the middle of the 19th century. It is not meant in any way to be taken seriously, nor does it reflect modern American culture as a whole. Around 70 million Americans speak a second language.

The reason we're talking about it ~150 years later is because it resonates with anyone who has tried to learn a second language, especially one as complex as German.

You might want to keep your pompous kneejerk anti-American sentiment in check until you educate yourself a bit more.

Some of the French neologisms instead of English words are more popular in Quebec (but on the other hand, Quebecers also use a huge amount of English loanwords that French people don’t).

The part where you have to have the equivalent of a LIFO stack in your brain, piling stuff up and praying you won't overflow, until the effing verb finally shows up and deigns informing you of what is actually happening in the sentence, well that is not, I believe an attribute of French, and definitely specific to German (I believe Japanese has that to a certain extent has well).

While English is changing relatively quickly, German isn't. Children today read original texts from the Gutenberg era in school without any trouble.

Where I grew up, we actually read some old english texts in school. It was hard, but certainly doable, using just our knowledge of modern German and English and the local dialects (north frisian and low german).

:-)

LOL.

And are they rules to remember which word falls in the 2/3rd ?

Yes, but did you considered that original meaning could have been, roughly, "getting wasted and going to strip club"? That is how I have seen it being used in older books I read. It was not meant to be about women, it was meant to be about certain kind of men, certain kind of partying and lifestyle.

>What I want to say with all that: we are almost unable to comprehend how people back then thought, talked and meant the stuff, they said back then. Because we are pretty much blinded by our own current perception and moral of things.

We can get some idea tho, we are not completely helpless here. When you are making an assumption that it was positive, you are being heavily influenced by how you want it to be. Not even being influence by what it might mean today (fun sentence that means nothing), but by how you want the past people to be.

Reinterpreting past so that it appears more positive then it was is equally incorrect. And it is a bit me pet peeve, because it is frequently used to discount actually factually correct statements about history. It is used to make it sound more conforming to our norms then it actually was in practice.

> This is what you learned and interpreted about that phrase and time. For me this is a possible situation you describe, but there are also very different situations, where this phrase could come from. In my social circles, the word "Weib" was used in a very endearing, appreciative way towards women.

That is todays interpretation word and also of women breaking past social mores. In todays movies, a 19 century woman smoking cigarettes is cool. Because it is always an emancipated strong character dealing with tough guys.

But back then, women smoking cigarettes were scandal and looked down on by polite society. They were not emancipated, they were outcasts with all disadvantages that it brings.

That’s fair, but so have German and many other Germanic languages. For example, Proto-Germanic had six cases whereas German only has four (and colloquially spoken German mostly only has three). Dutch has only vestigial remnants of a case system and Afrikaans has none at all.

How old? “Old English” is a term of art meaning the language exemplified e.g. by Beowulf or the writings of Aelfric, which I would be very impressed if you could read without special study, so perhaps you meant Middle English or Early Modern English.

As an example, the beginning of Beowulf reads: “Hwæt! We Gardena in geardagum, þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon, hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon.”

Middle English is the language of Chaucer and Early Modern English that of Shakespeare.

As a native English speaker (who can also read German at an intermediate level), I can read Shakespeare with some difficulty (relying on the copious footnotes that modern editions are peppered with), Chaucer with extreme difficulty, and Beowulf not at all.

The biggest trouble nowadays with learning German is that all textbooks are DUMB and don't give enough practice. Basically they're tests on steroids. This is not the way you can internalize the grammar. You may know the rules, but still unable to use them correctly when speaking or writing.

All the books are shiny, with lots of drawings, photos, bells and whistles, even media content over an app, etc. But, as said, none of them contains enough excercise to practice grammar. Over last 6 years that I did an effort, I've never seen a textbook step away from this format.

Teaching by Goethe Institut is equally awful: most time you excercise by inserting just one word in a sentence spellt for you. When finally you reach speaking at length and not to the given pattern, everything falls apart, and you're told off: "oh, so many mistakes, go repeat the grammar rules." (No wonder most students choose the strategy to just speak at the kindergarten level. Das Bau ist grün. Berlin ist die Haupstadt Deutschlands. Ich möchte in einem Vorstadthaus leben.)

Germans! Admit, you conspired together to not let us learn your precious language!

Don't worry, only few German natives speakers are actually able to speak or write without grammar errors. Let's not even get started on spelling.

In my country, it was always pronounced as green-each. Only in this thread I realised it's written Green-wich and pronounced gren-each.

And I'm pretty sure I'll forget it quickly and just keep calling it green-each.

The biggest challenge I've had when writing multilingual user interfaces aren't lacking a way to translate, but just practical issues like dynamic string construction or where the structure of the UI somehow doesn't work in another language, or when a given string is used in multiple parts of the app in the English version, but the non-English versions need different strings in different places[0], or just where an English single word translates into a whole sentence (or vice versa).

[0] For example some languages don't have a commonly used word that means "limb" - i.e. arm _or_ leg. A bit niche, but if you're doing something medical-related it can cause issues.

It's not that German lacks precision per se but most of the jargon originated in the US or even England, and rather than coming up with German translations, it has become custom to use the original English. Which, frankly, makes everyday tasks like looking up documentation or debugging a lot easier.

Compare this to French where the Académie Française makes sure that you don't have to use these nasty English words! Yikes. And if there isn't a good French translation, they just make one up - my favorite example: the word "bug" (as in programming) has a made-up "French" alternative: "bogue". As far as I understand, no-one uses it, but it exists.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rinderkennzeichnungs-_und_Rind...

Afaik: At some point in the history of the language there would(?) have been rules for these nouns, but not today.

"Selbständig" (freelancing) is obviously derived like self-standing, but "selb" is archaic and completely unused, prompting native learners to write 'selbstständig, which is wrong.

Couple more ones like this. Ask a native speaker about hinüber vs herüber, they will be perplexed, because it feels so dialectal. And nobody even knows about imperfect tense vs perfect tense, it's just stylistics to most.

Yes, yes you are.

See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_French - "attorney", "culprit", "grand jury", "tort", "voir dire" and so on

I think what you're trying to say is that people who are pretentious and middle-class (who in your experience are affluent white Americans) like to reach for Latin words because they sound grander. Orwell had a lot to say on that in Politics and the English Language:

https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...

> Pretentious diction [is] used to dress up simple statements and give an air of scientific impartiality to biassed judgements. [...] Bad writers, and especially scientific, political and sociological writers, are nearly always haunted by the notion that Latin or Greek words are grander than Saxon ones

That said, I don't think you can discuss German jargon without talking about Beamtendeutsch. I'm fairly comfortable reading in German — I'm slower than I am in English, but I can, say, read a book in German. Then I'll get a letter from some Amt somewhere and it'll be utterly unintelligible. Worse, I'll pass it to my German partner, and she has no idea what it says, and we'll need to go and find someone to translate the document we've just got back into regular German. I'll take "appendicitis" any day of the week over having to learn whole new grammar constructs just to interpret an official document!

The English lay term is probably something like "bursten belly" that would also cover everything from hernias to intestinal rupture.

All languages have noun-phrases. In this case, they are transparent.

    >:-(

And yeah, you can see with those two latter terms where the issue lies :)

Those two were traditionally actually used this way in the safety and security context - I think I even have the script for the "Datenschutz und Datensicherheit" lecture I had on uni in the '90s lying around somewhere in the attic.

But their meaning has changed and muddled so much over the years - probably not helped by the fact that "Sicherheit" is much closer to "security" in colloquial usage, and probably vice versa(?) - that they stopped being useful and used in this context.

This is possibly not something that is taught very explicitly in school, but it's what the terminology means. (Or at least it's how I was taught. Linguistics being such an old discipline used to analyse so many different languages means that different people will use terminology differently.)

When my Russian colleague asks me to speak German because he wants to practice then I speak some German with him. Otherwise all our conversations are in English.

The experience might be different in "older" companies.

However, some Americans even have trouble with Glasgow (Glaz-go, not Glass-gow) and Edinburgh (Ed-in-burra, not Edin-bro)

And we have plenty of literary evidence that the women in these young subcultures were not feeling being objectified either, such as:

Goethe (Werther, 1774): "The joy with which one sometimes unites with friends is also a very pleasant thing among women."

Also Mozart/Schikaneder (Zauberflöte, 1791): “A woman who does not fear night and death is worthy and will be initiated” - indicating they should be given access to (often occult) lodges, thus more than "entertainment", but an equal

Schiller (Intrigue and Love, 1784): “When reason bows, the heart opens.” (Schiller emphasizes the importance of feelings and passion, reflecting the era’s turn away from pure reason and strict morality, typical also of student life.)

Novalis’ (Hymns to the Night, 1799): "For woman is humanity’s mistress, And we give ourselves to serve her.”

Doesn't exactly sound like "Women are tramps unless they blush and faint at the idea of partying", does it?

A minor benefit is that references with words like "this" are less ambiguous when gendered, and you can unambiguously reference multiple things as long as they have different gender

Anyway, I absolute love Afrikaans. I also like droëwors, but that's a different topic. You should have a look at Icelandic -- it is the opposite of Afrikaans on the morphological complexity scale of Germanic languages. Quite a bit more going on with endings and such than in German. And yet it is weirdly familiar, because it is, well, also Germanic.

the poem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chaos :)

https://resources.german.lsa.umich.edu/schreiben/umlaute/ https://www.novalutions.de/en/how-to-type-an-umlaut-in-micro... https://www.process.st/how-to/type-an-umlaut-in-microsoft-wo...

and IIRC something similar worked for Ctrl-' + e = é , Ctrl-` + a = à, Ctrl-~ + n = ñ, and so on.

So there's at least some association for (punctuation mark) + (vowel) = marked vowel and I could see people dropping the Control key and doing what's done here.

Technically it is correct, but in doing that you lose the essence of the word “roman” and of the whole influence French culture had over the whole of Europe until not that long ago, including in Germany. It is in these cases where it is quite obvious that Britain was an island at the edge of Europe, culturally and not only.

I assure you, as a matter of fact, (A) the size of your social circle is very limited, and (B) such an attitude as yours could safely be labeled as cultural ignorance bordering on cultural arrogance.

Not anymore:

https://www.duden.de/rechtschreibung/selbststaendig

Translating German into English resulted in code being understood neither by Germans nor by Englishmans :-)

In English: "assets and liabilities" (Old French derived). In continental languages: "actives and passives" (medieval Latin accounting vocabulary).

Well that's a good question I don't know the exact answer to. So I looked at the examples you provided.

Early Modern English:

Shakespeare's early modern English is something I can read fluently (and I know we read & acted his plays in original in school). To me that's basically the same as current English, just with slightly different vocabulary.

Middle English:

Original: "Whan that Aprill, with his shoures soote" / Platt: "Wenn dat April, mit sien schuren sööte" / English: "When that April, with his showers sweet"

Original: "Inspired hath in every holt and heeth" / Platt: "Inspireert hett in elk Holt un Heid" / "Inspired has in every wood and heath"

That's probably the one we read in school. If you read it, it sounds like a grandparent combining mispronounced english and their dialect.

Old English:

Original: Cnut cyning gret his arcebiscopas and his leod-biscopas and Þurcyl eorl and ealle his eorlas and ealne his þeodscype, tƿelfhynde and tƿyhynde, gehadode and læƿede, on Englalande freondlice

Platt: Knut König greet sien Arzbischopes un sien Lüüd-Bischopes un Thorkell, jarl, un all sien jarls un all sin löödschaft, twalfhunnerte un tweehunnerte, widmete un laien, Engellande fründliche

English: Cnut, king, greets his archbishops and his people-bishops and Thorkell, earl, and all his earls and all his people ship, twelve hundred and two hundred, ordained and lay, in England friendly.

Now this one is much harder, especially as the spelling is getting even weirder, and the vocabulary includes a lot more danish words than middle English would, but pretty much every word exists in either modern English, or modern Low German.

> As a native English speaker (who can also read German at an intermediate level), I can read Shakespeare with some difficulty (relying on the copious footnotes that modern editions are peppered with), Chaucer with extreme difficulty, and Beowulf not at all.

The German dialects are clearly divided between Low German and High German, with different vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation. Standard German is based on the vocabulary and grammar of High German, so it won't be very helpful.

The closest living relative to Old and Middle English would be North Frisian, but Low German as spoken in Anglia today is still relatively close (as shown above).

BlueSky brainrot take. Habeas corpus predates modern Germany.

"Habeas corpus originally stems from the Assize of Clarendon of 1166, a reissuance of rights during the reign of Henry II of England in the 12th century.[12] The foundations for habeas corpus are "wrongly thought" to have originated in Magna Carta of 1215 but in fact predate it."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habeas_corpus

"The Jumping Frog: in English, then in French, and then Clawed Back into a Civilized Language Once More by Patient, Unremunerated Toil"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Celebrated_Jumping_Frog_of...

Nominative--Mein gutER Freund, my good friend. Genitives--MeinES GutEN FreundES, of my good friend. Dative--MeinEM gutEN Freund, to my good friend. Accusative--MeinEN gutEN Freund, my good friend.

Typing German in an email or Whatsapp, sometimes I get these details wrong and sometimes (shame!) I have to try a Google Translate from English.

The other thing he makes fun of isn't that strange. Splitting "Abreisen" for example (to depart) is natural because it's a compound word in the first place. And more over, in the example, the admittedly funny "De .... [flood of words] ... parted" it's not even one word, it's two (reist ab). German does lend itself to gratuitous nesting of sentences, but that doesn't mean that good German has to.

The fact that the language has such a degree lf these holdovers has something to do with Americans (or, rather the Anglosphere more generally), which is why the GP can note that it is a difference from German, where once upon a time; Germany had the same use of scientific, clerical, and professional Latin in the past, after all.

Google's auto translated subtitles are hopeless here.

Schutz is protection. Can refer to both I guess. E.g. Datenschutz would be about security, while Arbeitsschutz is about safety.

This seems like a slightly strange objection to me; I would have thought the actual semantic problem lies with "Bildung", in that a Bildungsroman generally involves some kind of learning/development/improvement, whereas a coming-of-age novel does not necessarily involve this.

> It is in these cases where it is quite obvious that Britain was an island at the edge of Europe, culturally and not only.

I mean this is a very weird claim, which assumes that Europe is culturally homogenous (e.g. I think you will find that Britain and France are culturally closer than France and Slovenia).

I'm not familiar with "blackboard" being a valid term for any board that is black, but specifically one used in pairing with chalk to be written on.

etc.

It did not happen in the Anglosphere because England was run by the Normans for hundreds of years, during which the common law system grew enormously...

Let's also not forget ecclesiastic Latin! Significantly less common in the HRE since Martin Luther's protestations!

Every language has technical words that "cannot be translated." But when we say "cannot be translated," what we mean is "it is unsafe to expect a foreign reader to know what the term means without explanation." It's not that it can't be translated; it's that there isn't necessarily a single-word equivalent. I agree with the original suggestion that these can be a challenge to translate elegantly. But, speaking as a lawyer by training, the solution is obvious: you begin your technical document by describing novel technical terms. Then you use them in your document without explanation.

Consider "sushi": how do you translate that? Nowadays, we don't. But before it was widely known, you could've just said "a sour rice dish" and be done with it. (For those of you thinking "no wait, sushi is raw fish," no. That's sashimi. Sushi is vinegared rice mixed with other stuff, often. (Sushi can be with egg, pickled plum, crab, beef, etc. none of which are fish.)

Makizushi = rolled sour rice

Nigirizushi = sour rice to be gripped

Chirashizushi = sour rice with stuff scattered in it

This isn't specific to concepts like "Bildungsroman." You're essentially saying "this word isn't just a word, but a word with implicit cultural context."

That's true of pretty much every word. Hell, translating "ao" from Japanese, you'd think is so simple: blue. Except it can also mean green because in Japanese there is less historical, cultural distinction between blue and green. So obviously green traffic lights are called "blue" in Japanese, not green.

You'll never get a perfect translation of anything that's longer than a couple words. The point of translation is getting close enough. Translating Bildungsroman as "coming of age novel" gets you so close, that if your conversation hinges on the actual nuance, you're almost assuredly talking to someone who will understand what Bildungsroman means, so you just use that word.

EDIT: One of my friends at uni did his thesis on the difference between Japanese "natsukashii" and English "nostalgic." I've always thought about that as the perfect example of how any simple translation is fraught with cultural complications. There are certainly things I would call "nostalgic" but I'd never call "natsukashii," because nostalgia can come with sadness, but natsukashii never does.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEx0edmLdLo

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-dimensional_space

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartesian_coordinate_system#Th...

https://www.google.com/search?udm=2&q=3d+coordinate+system

- das Piña Colada

- die Bowle

- die Weißschorl (ÖD: der weiße Spritzer)

In case any anyone's still wondering: the word is cotton

There could have been a movement away from old inherited terms. But there wasn't. And I have no better idea as to why than classism.

(German has a word for that! Jägerlatein, "hunter's latin", as a term for blowing up terminology to keep away the working population and restrict the game to the upper classes that are better educated, and frankly have a lot of time for that BS.)

Latin terms are still used in German legal writing. Just not this one.

And it annoys me to no end how many restaurants serve "chirashi" with completely plain, non-vinegared, non-seasoned-in-any-way rice. Just "throw some sashimi on some white rice".

Don't know about that. Garten, garden, a nurturing environment for raising delicate flowers. Children's Garden. Kindergarten.

A Dutch speaker can't necessarily read or understand German. However, a Dutch person nearly always does, and often flawlessly so.