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The Awful German Language (1880)

(faculty.georgetown.edu)
189 points nalinidash | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.205s | 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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1. 0xBDB ◴[] No.44010888[source]
> 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.

The John McWhorter theory (not sure if it's generally accepted, but he seems to have evidence that it happened in the right part of England at the right time) is that it comes from Viking-era Danish settlers learning Anglo-Saxon. Similar languages, but different enough that adult learners dumped out all the complications they could.