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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: 0.203s | 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. umanwizard ◴[16 May 25 09:33 UTC] No.44003402[source]▶
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.