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The Awful German Language (1880)

(faculty.georgetown.edu)
186 points nalinidash | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0.418s | source
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bradley13 ◴[] No.44002276[source]
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."

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sph ◴[] No.44002388[source]
Also, English has the 5 vowels of the Latin script representing some 25 vowels sounds, to the point that consonants can turn into vowels with no rhyme or reason. The best way to learn that English is nonsense is to live in Britain and learn local city and village names. They all have made up pronunciation rules, evolved over the centuries, sure, but they forgot to update the bloody name on the map to match the sounds.

As a descendant of the Romans, I can only shake my head at such barbarism.

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miroljub ◴[] No.44002774[source]
So true. I always wondered why is Leicester pronounced as "lester" and not as "laichester".
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darkwater ◴[] No.44002915[source]
Grenich anyone?
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sph ◴[] No.44003141[source]
Soderk (Southwark), Marlibon (Marylebone), Reding (Reading), Bister (Bicester), Sozbery (Salisbury), Frum (Frome), Worick (Warwick), Noridge (Norwich), Darby (Derby), and the various Gloster, Lester, Wooster
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1. darkwater ◴[] No.44003531[source]
Yeah but Greenwich is a place known world-wide, and I guess a high percentage of people mispronounce it (I was one of them).
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2. miroljub ◴[] No.44004004[source]
It's known worldwide, but many people never heard an actual Britt pronouncing it.

In my country, it was always pronounced as green-each. Only in this thread I realised it's written Green-wich and pronounced gren-each.

And I'm pretty sure I'll forget it quickly and just keep calling it green-each.