←back to thread

The Awful German Language (1880)

(faculty.georgetown.edu)
186 points nalinidash | 1 comments | 16 May 25 04:09 UTC | HN request time: 0.204s | source
Show context
bashkiddie ◴[16 May 25 07:48 UTC] No.44002796[source]▶
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?
replies(3): >>44002828 #>>44007857 #>>44009822 #
iamsaitam ◴[16 May 25 07:53 UTC] No.44002828[source]▶
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.
replies(2): >>44002930 #>>44003131 #
1. anvandare ◴[16 May 25 08:46 UTC] No.44003131[source]▶
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