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The Awful German Language (1880)

(faculty.georgetown.edu)
186 points nalinidash | 1 comments | 16 May 25 04:09 UTC | HN request time: 0.302s | source
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DocTomoe ◴[16 May 25 04:27 UTC] No.44001832[source]▶
As a native German speaker: Everything Twain rants about here we attribute to French.
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psychoslave ◴[16 May 25 05:18 UTC] No.44002051[source]▶
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

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DocTomoe ◴[16 May 25 05:36 UTC] No.44002138[source]▶
> 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.

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1. sitharus ◴[16 May 25 07:04 UTC] No.44002531[source]▶
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.