The Awful German Language (1880)

As a native German speaker: Everything Twain rants about here we attribute to French.

I suppose like the general American of today, he has just never really learnt an n-th language (where n>1).

Which gives us Hitler memes where they audibly says German words that are very similar to their English counterparts, but the /funny/ subtitles is just a Beavis and Butthead level joke.

Doesn't work as good if one has ears.

He actually learned German well enough to have appreciative audiences in Germany, but he also knows how to make amazing comedic essays on many topics. He did plenty about US-specific topics, and about French too, not just about German.

Hmm, French definitely has ornamental noun paradigms affecting articles and adjectives, exceptions to every single rule and things like that. But it lakes the cases that German add on top of this. Syntax is not as funny with verb at second position, or end of the phrase, separable verbs, and so on.

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

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

> French of course also have many original grammatical torture instruments.

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

Well if you like that, you'd love Danish numbers, where 99 is nine and half (before) five times twenty, or »nioghalvfemsindstyve« (or more commonly shorten to »nioghalvfems«).

Swiss French seems to have regularized some of this in a sensible way? Indian English does much the same with some things; not strictly “correct” English, to the extent those words don’t exist in British or American English, but I can’t argue that it doesn’t make more sense or isn’t more consistent so I never argue the case. I generally view those regularizing pressures from non-native sources as a positive thing for languages.

Yeah, you can take an other locale and use "nonante neuf" instead. People generally take "quatre-vingt-dix" as a single token, they don't actually think about it in a compound perspective. Just like onze, douze, treize, quatorze, quinze, seize, where -ze stands for ten, so it's "n + 10". But in this case it's not synchronically as obvious as this composition is analyzed from morphological point of view, -ze in itself is not attached to any autonomous token in French. If anything French will rather lead to analyze numbers in terms of "k*10+n" instead, unlike German.

I recently got curious about the roots of this, and it turns out it’s from Celtic languages. All the Celtic languages count in base 20, and they were widespread across continental Europe before the Romans introduced Latin to their conquests and then the Germanic tribes brought the Germanic languages in.

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

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

Laking the cases is Danish.

I suspect that French people aren’t really thinking about this when they speak, just like in English we aren’t usually consciously aware that “ninety” is derived from “nine”. It’s obvious when you stop to think about it, but for the most part “ninety” is just its own separate token in our mind, and so is “quatre-vingt-dix” to the French.

> everything Twain rants about here we attribute to French

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).

Werner Herzog on French:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6pY-0JfEdLY

(From a mockumentary)

Yeah, I vividly remember writing whole essays in school with only two sentences like that (sometimes over several pages of relative and temporal sentences and adjective chains), just as a raised middle finger to my German teacher who sleighted me once over the interpretation of some baroque poem.

Good times.

In some victorian-era (possibly earlier) writing you will find numbers Four score and 5, which is just that: four times 20 plus 5, 85.