The Awful German Language (1880)

I can certainly confirm that learning German grammar as an adult is...challenging. Even though I am now fluent, learning as an adult means that you will always make mistakes on the gender of nouns. There are effectively four genders (male/neuter/female/plural), plus four cases (nominative/accusative/dative/genetive), so you have a 4x4 table giving you a choice of 16 articles that can appear in from of a noun. Only, the 16 articles are not unique: the table contains lots of duplicates in unexpected places.

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."

> 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.

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

The question is: why hasn't the spelling been updated.

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

There have been some minor French spelling reforms over the years but French people are affectionately proud of their language with all its quirks, and changing the spelling of basic vocabulary like “est” would be a bridge too far for them.