The Awful German Language (1880)

Reading the article I guess Mark Twain never had a knowledgeable teacher. Is there anything hacker news readers would like to know about the German language?

Why do nouns have "random" articles attached to them? In latin languages like Portuguese the ending of the word tells you which article (masculine or feminine) to use, but in German only "die" has some rules. This is my biggest griped with the language and it's major flaw, when you pair that with adjective declensions and other sort of structures that rely on KNOWING which article to use.

From a foreign learners perspective, it is easier to just learn the article together with the noun.

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.

The gender of a noun is just a noun class. But because Germanic languages lie more toward the analytic end of the morphological typology continuum (whereas Romance languages lie more toward the synthetical end) the information is latent - or rather, the task of conveying that information is left to other words (the articles).

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

  'gat-'

  'cas-'

  'bolach-'

Similarly, 'die' should be considered an inherent part of 'Frau'. So don't learn just 'Frau', learn 'die Frau'. The article 'Die' is just as "random" as '-o' or '-a' is in Portuguese. (I'll skip the part where you can have a form of the word in both classes: gata/gato.) People like to try and find "rules" they can remember instead, but it's a pointless endeavor. Language is a Calvinball game.

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

> there are rules for 2/3 of cases

LOL.

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

Nope, but it's not so different to irregular plural forms or verbs in english.

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

> Every alcoholic drink is masculine

- das Piña Colada

- die Bowle

- die Weißschorl (ÖD: der weiße Spritzer)

I'd love to see a good textbook with MANY excercises, where I have to say or write an entire sentence, not fill in a word, like in 100% textbooks I saw.

> - das Piña Colada

Been living here for 35 years, and I'd have said "die Piña Colada".

Can I refer to animals as 'them' instead of 'him' or 'her'? Die Katze draußen ist so Süß, ich möchte es unbedingt streicheln. I know that it's not considered correct but to me it feels even wronger to just assume it's a pussycat and not a tomcat. Would people actually mind if I do the more, ehm, to-me-logical thing? Does it take you out of what I'm saying, the way that reading "its you're cat" takes me out of a story?

That’s especially maddening because Spanish does have gender, and “piña colada” is feminine and even involves feminine gender agreement between the noun and the adjective.

usually not. You need to guess either cat or tomcat, that designates a grammatical sex. All references are based on grammatical sex. It is strongly emphasized that a grammatical sex is not the same thing as a natural sex.

It is ok to guess the sex of an animal wrong. The same way nobody (should) cares whether an infant is a boy or a girl.

You can enforce to be neutral be refering to "das Tier" and "das Kind". But since it is just a grammatical sex, why should anyone bother?

There are some culturally assumed defaults:

* a nurse is assumed to be feminine, unless the distinction is important

* a cat is assumed to be feminine, unless the distinction is important