I'd argue german has freer word order than english English doesn't even let you have adjectives in the wrong order but with german the sentence is still right if you move the object to the front it just sounds a bit weird you cant do that in english
Exactly. English has an analytical grammar and is therefor stricter when it comes to word order, but the rules are relatively simple. German has a fusional, inflecting grammar that gives freer word order but needs more complicated rules. This obviously doesn’t fit fully into the narrative of the strict German versus English winging it on the fly, just like the habitual meaning in English makes it less free and productive in terms of constructing words, because to stay intelligible you have to follow the habits those around you, wich basically forces English to import loan words instead of making new compound words. But this all fits into the space empire vs traditionalist tribe narrative. English has simple, strict rules for sentence structure and word order, but the words themselves could easily be replaced by anything. In German the rules are convoluted and chaotic, but the words, suffixes and prefixes have inherent meaning and summon the sentence’s meaning like an alchemistic formula.
English is ease of communication/speaking focused while german is ease of understanding/listening focused. Which is why nouns are descriptions, verbs have endings and articles are extensive to ensure the listener understood what you tried to convey very well
English sentence structure is free and German is fixed? What? "You saw I" vs "Dich sah ich", one is valid, the other is not and it's not the one it should be according to you ('you' is the object, the one being seen, here). Or "Mir geht's nicht gut" (object verb subject negator adverb) vs. "geht's mir nicht gut" (verb subject object negator adverb) vs. "gut geht's mir nicht" (adverb verb subject object negator), note that the grammatical subject is 's (es/it) here. Slightly different meaning or emphasis, but the point still stands. Can't really use the translation ("I don't feel well", literally "It goes not good to me" ("to me" being a crutch for dative case)), because they are too different. Another one (*xxxx* means emphasized): "*Gesehen* hab' ich dich, aber *gehört* hab' ich ihn" ("Seen have I you, but heard have I him"), which puts emphasis on the lexical verbs (i.e. not 'have' in this case), but I don't think that really works in English even if you fix the word order (which is freer than German, right?) to "Seen I have you, but heard I have him". At least to my non-native ears the only way to properly convey the same meaning in English is "I *saw* you, but I *heard* him" (I changed tense, because in colloquial German perfect is the standard tense for (the concept of) simple past while in English it's not). You can also do the same in restrictive German "Ich hab' dich *gesehen*, aber [ich hab'] (the repetition of "ich hab'" is not necessary in German and I wouldn't do it here, but it's not wrong per se) ihn *gehört*". I was with you for about 3/4 of the video, but I really don't see how you came to the conclusion that German has a word order that is more fixed than English. Also to the "no idea why there are cases and genders" point: There are several studies that showed that there are less misunderstandings under noisy conditions in German than in English. Cases and grammatical genders give the language more redundancy, so you can better grasp what is being said even if you don't understand every word that is spoken.
The only really fixed part in german word order is that the verb comes at second place. And if the werb comes at the end, which is very common in the language, you put an auxillary verb at second place.
“You saw I” and “seen have I you, but heard have I him” are grammatically correct English sentences. You wouldn’t find people talking like that in everyday speech, but such constructions are common in poetry and flowery prose
Small correction to the part about „kucken“ vs „gucken“ at roughly 10:00 minutes. „kucken“ and „gucken“ are both variants of the same word. The one with k in the beginning is more predominantly used in Nothern Germany and the variant with g in the South. This already stands in a Duden dictionary from 1951. And since g comes before k in the dictionary, you have one explanation, why the variant „gucken“ was found first allthough the Nothern pronunciation „kucken“ was heard more, because the Northern German variants were the basis for the so-called „Bühnendeutsch“ - stage german.
Yeah, there's alot of aprocryphal nonsense in this. The exact thing the narrator accuses English of is also done in German. Particularly with lone words. Take the seperable verb Skifahren, meaning the ski, where ski is pronounced shee. Or,
@@goodnesswithfists in writing maybe, since it's not following the spelling rules. In spoken language, the local form is totally accepted. On the other hand, just look at the bavarian wikipedia.
This is a nice video, however the statement that German tends to translate foreign words is simply false. It's basically only done for memes and jokes, nobody takes these seriously or actually uses them. Everyday German is full of English words that were simply adopted 1:1, including even English spelling and pronounciation for the most part. Same with french. German is actually a famous case of a language which tends to simply copy loan words rather than adapt them to its own phonetics (in contrast to, for example, French). Otherwise good video, but this is harsh misinformation.
A nice example is the German sentence: "Ich wollte ein Service kaufen, aber der Service im Laden war schlecht." Here the first "Service" is imported from French, pronounced (approximately) as in French and means a set of dishes, while the second "Service" is imported from English, pronounced (approximately) as in English, and means, well, service.
Your overall comparison of the two languages is basic but fine. What makes your video rather silly is its messaging toward the end. Your interpretation of what these two languages supposedly stand for is very clearly shaped by post-WW2 notions of Anglosphere and Germanosphere and completely ignores the fact that for most of the time during which the two languages developed apart from each other (i.e. the Middle Ages), Britain was closer to a middle-sized feudal state, while the HRE was variably either the most or second most powerful political entity in Europe across the centuries. This trend had only reversed by the Modern Age, during which Britain emerged as a colonial empire, while the HRE was stuck in the past and slowly falling apart. But by then, New English and New High German had largely already formed and received their unique character! I hope I don't have to tell you why these circumstances subvert the entire point of your video. I appreciate a 'Murican actually having a decent German pronunciation, but would suggest you to read more before making plainly inaccurate inferences on the German and English languages (which, to be very clear, I both dearly love). (On some level, I feel like your video is just Anglo rationalization for the lack of grammatical complexity in his language. Oh well.)
3:20 HI SO MAY I RANT HERE A BIT ABOUT DENGLISCH? ALRIGHT THANK YOU. So, I’m a native German speaker, but I’ve grown up with the internet for almost all of my life and have therefore been influenced quite a bit by native English speakers and their way to express themselves. So, to cut to the point: I find myself using Denglisch sentence structures more and more often, for example: in German, when I want to say “You are free to do xyz”, I would usually say “Du darfst xyz machen” (literal translation meaning “You may do xyz”), but I’ve been saying “du bist frei xyz zu machen” (literal translation meaning the exact English version of “you are free to do xyz”) more and more frequently the more I interact with English speakers. Oh and also, funny anecdote, I am heavily involved with native English speakers IRL too, so I once told someone that “Ja, wir sind auf dem floor geslidet” (“Yes, we slid on the floor”) using neither the German word for floor, “Boden” nor the German word for sliding, “rutschen”. Like, what the fuck is going on with my brain for me to just like not speak German correctly anymore?? But like at the same time, I’m pretty hyped about this since I can watch how language evolves in real time, which is pretty fucken cool tbh.
@mentally.not.stable393 That's so relatable though! I went to a very conservative high school in Germany and I remember being corrected for saying "Das macht Sinn" (= this makes sense) instead of the proper German "Das ergibt Sinn" (= this gives sense) I also used to listen to lots of Deutschrap, where anglicisms are of course Gang und Gäbe
14:13: "No fixes sentence structure [in English]. In German you have to put words of a certain type in a certain fixed position in the sentence": I doubt that espescialy because of the grammar / word endings. In German you can move your words around because there are extra information due to articles and endings, in English you need word order to get the same information. Example: "The dog bit the man" has a different meaning then "The man bit the dog". In German the first can be written as "Der Hund biss den Mann" (same order as in English) but also as "Den Mann biss der Hund". This is different to the second sentence which would be translated by "Der Mann biss den Hund".
Das wollte ich auch genauso schreiben. Genau so wollte ich das auch schreiben. Auch ich wollte das genauso schreiben. Genau so schreiben wollte ich das auch.
Ah, yes, the dumbest thing in German. If you have declination you don't need word order. If you have word order, you don't need declination. German has both, and I don't understand why.
@@Adoffka Where do you get the Impressionen that there is fixed word order in German? I am a native german speaker and I can assure you that there is much freedim in this regard in German. However I am not a native english speaker, so this might be a case that then one learns English he is told that English has a fixed order and then another one learns German he is told the same about German.
The following is gonna be a non proof-read, hastily thrown together, incoherent rant about your video, you don’t have to read it, I just wanted to get it out there: You’ve gotta be more informed if you’re gonna be speaking this authoritatively. A lot of the claims you make here and the underlying attitude behind them are pretty nasty. In particular the sentences along the lines of ‘English is this way because they prioritise ease of communication’ make my skin crawl, English is like that because English is like that, nobody dropped the case system because it was too hard, a native old English speaker wouldn’t think they were hard. Some other notes: most of the big long German words that are so self explanatory as to not require an explanation are like that because they are not words. More accurately, you can call them words, but in that case, you’d also have to call the english ‘gold coin’ a word, the difference is entirely in the way they’re written. There are compound words that really are words in German, but you’ll most likely find it in a dictionary, and English have them too English grammar is just as complicated as German’s, you can’t see it because it’s not where you expect it to be, an example is the sentence order, which, in English, is not free, at all, it is very strict, and it’s a complicated part of the grammar of the language. The insecure English learner you describe is insecure because they haven’t learned or absorbed the grammar, in this aspect I guess it’s the Germans whose grammar is caveman level Your adjective order example is bad, a brown leather wallet is not a wallet that is brown and leather, it’s a leather wallet that is brown. All natural languages are governed by habit. You’ll see this in German too if you look at what “German” is, which is an expansive dialect continuum with no clear edges. I really would recommend that you don’t make a video like this when you clearly lack a lot of very foundational knowledge. I’m not sure what message this video was actually supposed to communicate, but please don’t take linguistics and twist and morph it into something it’s not to fit your narrative.
The "dialect continuum" point is particularly relevant to the "spelling representing speech" point. The obvious follow-up question is "Whose speech?" There are benefits and drawbacks to phonetic writing systems, and benefits and drawbacks to logographic writing systems. For any _nominally_ alphabetical writing the question is really to what extent you balance the two. I personally think the most intuitive way to think about the English writing system is to see it as technically a logographic system, where those logographs (words) are constructed of 26 very standardised elements (often containing _incredibly_ strong phonetic hints), and where you can also use those standardised elements (letters) in a secondary phonetic function.
@@zak3744 A good example of how ambiguous english is, is by looking at how letters can have multiple pronounciation. Why are the two "c" in circus pronounced differently? Because english doesn't need a "c", it's only there because foreign loan words use it. And the dialect continum is absolutely a thing, even today. I understand dutch better than bavarian, one is supposed to be a foreign language, the other a dialect...
@@HappyBeezerStudios Actually, originally the soft C in English was more akin to a TS sound, but in recent centuries the sound changed to an S sound. You can still fine remnants of this old pronunciation. The word "interference" shows this TS pronunciation. It's just that soft C at the beginnings of syllables changed to S
@@HappyBeezerStudios good point. I actually like c for one reason: you can see the k/s/sh interchange, like in words: music, musician, even tho both of them are latin borrowings. This interchanging will only occur in words of the latin origin tho, and correlate better to other languages. K is a replacement for C when before I or E (king, ket) and in a CK diagraph like in "back". Worse letter G which is always ambiguous, since you can easily tell the pronunciation of the letter C, you can clearly see this in words: "get" and "gem", where the first word is from the germanic origin and the second one from the latin origin. English has so many faults in its writing system, but c is in fact not the worst part, there are many other worse conventions
12:12 about gender of Rhine is nonesense. Genders don't have any meaning in that case, as with most objects. It is also "Die Oder", which is a pretty big river.
well actualy "der Rhein" is quite an outlayer since most Rivers are female. Thinking about it, I do not come up with a single other River that is not female. Could come from the rhetoric figure of the father Rhine from e.g. the "Nibelungenring". [ "Der Po", "Der Nil", "Der Amazonas", "Der Missisippi" ok there are quite some.]
English sentence structure is demonstrably more rigid than German sentence structure, not less. English has basically no inflection left, so the only way to indicate the relationship beween the constituents of a sentence is to reliably put them in a fixed order, subject-verb-object. Whereas in German you have more freedom to mix things up because the inflectional endings can tell you what's the subject, what's the object and so on. In German I can express "the dog bit the man" as "der Hund biss den Mann" or "den Mann biss der Hund" and the meaning doesn't change. In English, meanwhile, swapping the order of the words also swaps their syntactic roles.
But even this makes English more simple than German. As you may know; any noun can verb if you don't care enough, and I think that this freedom is more liberating than the ability to put the noun where you want it because it grants the ability to make a brand new word by simply changing a different word's position in a sentence.
The sentence structure is very likely less strict in German than you implied: Word order is effectively arbitrary, only that some versions are by conventions more „usual“. For example due to noun declension, „Der Wolf tötete den Hirsch“ (the wolf killed the stag, SVO) is just as correct and means the same as „Den Hirsch tötete der Wolf“ (OVS). Similarly, adjective orders are likely to be more free than in English („schöner großer Baum“ and „großer schöner Baum“ as a tall beautiful tree work both easily)
Hey, I am currently creating a conlang and the differences between English and German are truly fascinating! I am a native German speaker and the one thing I love about German is compound self-explanitory words - though super-strict rules make this language hard to master. I am finding a balance between these opposites in my conlang and it'll be great!
So many people make fun about the German language, but I sincerely think it is one of the "best" languages out there. German can be very precise and descriptive.
Randall Munroe, creator and author of xkcd, has written a book called "Thing Explainer", in which he explains complex things with just the one thousand most common English words (the ten hundred words, most English number words don't make the list!) One of the 'tricks' he uses is just listing nouns ("up goer five" = the Saturn V rocket, "mouth water maker" = salivary gland etc.), which is awfully similar to the German concept of compound words. Hence, for the German version of the book the 'translators' had to come up with much more complex rules on how to simplify the language -- a simple list of common words was not enough. They had to reduce the usage of compound words, for instance. So the German version of the book is not simply a translation. It's a very different reading experience than the English original.
12:55 german watching here in this section I want to add that in the whole of Germany there is a discussion if the nut Nougat Creme called Nutella is der die or das Nutella you can speak to one use der and he will correct you to das then you speak to someone else confidentiality use das and the person will say die would be correct and then someone else saying der so if this ever happens to you with Nutella you now know
14:37 Isn’t the sentence structure the other way around? Except the Verb which is either second or last in a sentence all the other words can be anywhere in a german sentence. The first thing I was told in english lesson was that unlike german in english you always have subject - verb - object as a base and when adding stuff like time there are always strict rules.
I wouldn’t say the sentence structure is stricter in German. The opposite might be the case. In German, you can change the word order as you like, as long as you don’t break the ‘Satzglieder,’ which are parts of a sentence that can’t be separated. For example, take a simple sentence: Das Kind geht in die Schule. Which means: The child goes to school. In German, you can say: • The child goes to school. • To school goes the child. If you say: • Goes the child to school? • Goes to school the child? It’s also correct, but now it’s a question. (The second question sounds a little bit like it’s out of an old poem, but it’s not particularly wrong.)
I mean these are features in English which can be understood, but sound archaic. We tend to use "Does" to for questions, which no other Germanic languages do. No one says "Ba Ba Black Sheep, do you have any wool?"
Two points! First, that is not the English flag in your thumbnail. Second, English did not split off from German in the 5th century. German did not exist in the 5th century. English is probably one or two centuries older than German which dates from around the 7th century.
Thanks for the comment! 1. I picked the American to make clear from the thumbnail that the video is about language, not about the German and English peoples 2. German existed since time immemorial, it was the dialect family spoken by Germans = the Germanic tribes. I don't care if it's "ancient pre-Germanic", it all counts as German to me, and it simply has evolved over time. English split off from German after Hengist and Horsa led the Saxons over the North Sea in the 5th century. Since then English has evolved apart from German, due to geographic separation, but also Frisian, Danish, and later French influence.
@@goodnesswithfists Frisian is according to your logic a part of the German language though? Not only but also, so the English language was still influenced by German after the "split". Not meant to be mean, just got confused about this one aspect and might not have worded it elegantly 😅
@@goodnesswithfists you are mixing up "German" with "Germanic". English, like German, both come from an earlier Germanic language or group of dialects, to which we attach labels based on time and place in which they were supposedly spoken (proto-germanic, proto-west-germanic, etc). German isnt this original language in question, it has simply evolved frim it, the same way that English isn't Old English but evolved from it.
It seems rather strange to think that different origins of the words in your language are a sigh of a powerful empire considering they were brought with the danish and french invasions. In russia we dont have articles, have much more vague, flexible word order than in english, a lot of words from different cultures and ages, does it make Russia a prospering powerhouse? I like your content and share the admiration of the anglo-saxon institutes, but sometimes linguistics is just linguistics. P.s. Sorry for any mistakes, im no native speaker, hope the point is clear.
I hold the believe, that in German objects have gender for the purpose of being able to use "Er Sie Es" = "He She It" most often. If words have different genders, you can replace both, but if they share a gender it's ambiguous and you have to repeat the noun. It is impressive how rarely the subject and object of common sentences share the same. I don't have numbers, but it feels significantly less than 1 in 3.
As a German speaker who studied in England this explained something new to me. Often times I was confused why english speakers, who spoke no other German liked to use certain words like "Schadenfreude". Often they would emphasis that its great the Greman has "a word" for that concept. In the beginning I would immediatly reply: "Why don't yoi just say "damage pleasure" " and they would look very strangly at me.😅
@@dorthesanchezz4227 I basically just agreed with the point, I feel like English speakers should have more courage to make up new words from our own language, like the schadenfreude example OP made
This reminds me of a high school friend who was a bit eccentric and went on to study philosophy in university and suddenly she told me she had to start studying German to really understand German philosophy because of the need to understand the "essence" of each single word in a dense text like "The Phenomenology of Spirit" 😅
Ziemlich viel Vorurteil und Vereinfachung in diesem Beitrag, insbesondere beim Ausflug in die Rechtssysteme. Ein Beispiel für die Überhöhung angelsächsischer Überheblichkeit.
Naja es ist schon mal kein VORurteil, sondern höchstens ein Urteil über meine eigene Sprache. Auch im Rechtssystempart ist es viel mehr ein Urteil in meinem Fall und ich hätte es auch viel ausführlicher belegen können. Aber klar, vieles ist vereinfacht um dem Präsentationsformat eines kurzen UA-camvideos gerecht zu bleiben. Aber komm ich disse Deutsch und English doch beide ungefähr gleichviel, also soll sich mal keiner beschweren. Mein Ziel war vor allem, dem Durchschnittsamerikaner (zu denen ich mich selbst mittlerweile zähle) den Charme und die Schönheit der deutschen Sprache näherzubringen und verständlicher zu machen.
@@goodnesswithfistsUnabhängig davon, was du mit welcher Motivation auch immer vermitteln willst, das Hauptproblem ist, dass du von deiner Wahrnehmung und deinen Gedanken ausgehst und dann linguistische Konzepte nimmst, um deinen Standpunkt zu unterstreichen. Ich vermute da gar keine schlechten Absichten, aber sowas führt schnell zu Missinformationen. Lustigerweise passt das Herangehen tatsächlich ganz gut zur alten idealistischen Philosophie deutscher Schule.
While your assessment on the foundation of the legal systems is most likely correct, I am not so sure if the impact on language was as large as you claimed: Old English had most of the same grammatical features (gender, cases, declension etc) but got rid of them over time, while German is linguistically more conservative. That may be due to some top down influences in the 19th century when French loanwords that had been perfectly established were purged out due to anti French sentiments (camouflage became „Tarnung“), but Germany also had significantly less immigration influencing it: England had both Old Norse and Middle French have a significant impact, while Germans were rather migrating out than other groups migrating in at that time. Note also that the English vocabulary is specifically designed to „keep the peasants out“, since most specific vocabulary in law and science etc. is derived from Latin which the peasants did not speak, while only very few of these words in German are rooted in Latin - they are kind of self explanatory to a German speaker at a significantly higher degree.
📖 Love your video! Though you might want to update the part about German gender after reading this - the whole "things look masculine/feminine" theory has a much more logical historical explanation: Fun fact about German's der/die/das system - it actually has nothing to do with making things "masculine" or "feminine"! It's an ancient system for categorizing words based on their meaning and function. The basic category (what we now call "masculine" with "der") was always the standard way to mark regular concepts. Over time, two specialized categories were added: • "das" (neuter) to mark things that are the result of an action (like "das Gemälde" - a painting, which is the result of painting) • "die" (feminine) to indicate abstract concepts (like "die Liebe" - love) and collections of things. This is why all plural forms in German use "die" - they represent the abstract concept of multiplicity! So when German speakers use der/die/das, their brains aren't thinking "this chair looks manly" - they're unconsciously following these ancient patterns of organizing words. It's basically like having three different filing cabinets for organizing vocabulary! That's why trying to guess a German word's "gender" based on what the object looks like never works - because it was never about gender in the first place! 😊
If you want to read more in-depth about this topic and the German language in general, check out this German blog ‘Deutsch für Dichter und Denker - Genus’.
Sprechgesang is an interesting word, because on the one hand it could mean rap, but it also holds the schönbergian connotation of sprechgesang, which is far more nerdy
There's a crucial detail missed in the spelling rules section, that being that german spelling, in its effort to be "written as it is said" does become based on habit because german is not only pronounced in one way, for example "gucken" where I live is still consistently pronounced as "gucken" and not as "kucken". Another example is "Rad" meaning wheel which is by most pronounced as "Rat" but it by others still pronounced as "Rad" and keeps this spelling despite it being incongruent with the majority as it helps understand morphological patterns suchs as "Rad" becoming "Räder" in the plural. English in contrast is also more rules based than one might think, the rules have more layers however due to becoming comprised of different languages and spelling systems so people struggle to parse them. In german this happens too when dealing with french loan words where the "v" which is generally pronounced as an "f" becomes a french "v" which has to be parsed by understanding the french origin of the word. This is a parallel to how understanding that a word is french can help you know if the "ch" in a word is like a "ch" or like a "sh" such as in "chauffeur" which mirrors the french spelling and approximates its pronunciation. Spelling in languages, especially languages that have strong foreign influence being fixed serves to provide clarity of the origin of words which helps understand how they should be used and other useful morphological aspects of the word. Taut and taught are indeed said the same but taught's ght ending clues me into it being morphologically related to teach since they follow similar spelling rules. These rules depending on how attentive one is and how much one cares can be more or less worthwhile and useful. But they do serve a purpose in many cases. I think it is a bit reductive to sum up english spelling as habitual and german spelling as descriptive when they both incoporate these aspects but in different quatities. German has grammatical gender Tables are not male, they are masculine, there's a crucial importance in not confusing the two. grammatical gender is made on the basis of the words shape and does not reflect any particular aspect of the word in many cases. Nothing make "Forschung" female, it is feminine because the ending, the "ung" makes it feminine. Research is not feminine as a concept. German has many rules that force certain words to take on a gender based on endings and these do not reflect any aspect of its meaning. Mädchen being neuter, not neutral, will still refer to a girl (female) and some people will even go as far as referring to the Mädchen with "sie" (equivalent to english she), but others may use the more grammatically correct "es" (more or less equivalent to it) simply because that is what the grammar would dictate and not a reflection of the person's view on gender, sex or views on the history of the word. French similarly also has grammatical gender, split into masculine and feminine, these sometimes overlap with real world sex, such as femme (meaning woman) being feminine but also often don't such as bite (meaning penis) being feminine despite it being a male body part. Danish has grammatical gender too, it splits words into common and neuter. It is not a comment on any aspect of a word in 99% of cases besides grammatical rules. German has a plethora of rules which dictate the gender of a word based on its ending. It also has many which are undefined, such as "Nutella" not having a clear gender with people switching between masculine, feminine, and neuter based on area and dialect. In some cases gender is used to differentiate between similar words. Like in french which differentiates between "la partie" the party or group, and "le parti" the political party. Or italian which differentiates between "il frutto" the scientific fruit, and "la fruta" which denotes a more vague idea of fruits sometimes in a culinary sense. "German differentiates Grammatical cases and article declensions are used to clarify the purpose of a word in a sentence. In german which used to have less fixed sentence structure and which still allows and often requires you to move words around, having a marker for what is the subject and what is the object helps to clarify who is doing what to whom. English has remnants of this systems in some pronouns. (Who, whose, whom. He, his, him. etc.) and while it is by no means necessary in english due to its now very fixed sentence structure which allows the role of a word to be inferred from its position in a sentence, this cannot always be said for german. "Dich schlage ich" and "Ich schlage dich" mean "I hit you" but the order of the words is different, this can be done with pronouns in english but in german this can be done with most words to some extent and is useful not only in poetry but also to emphasise different parts of the sentence, "den Ente habe ich gefangen" (I caught the duck) puts emphasis on the duck whereas, "Ich habe den Ente gefangen" puts emphasis on me who has caught the duck despite meaning the same thing. On the matter of sentence structure, german has quite free and open sentence structure, having declensions means words can move around much more in a sentence than in english. English having lost declensions relies on syntax, the order of words, to communicate the role of a word. English does allow one to play around with the sentence structure to some extent but is much more limiting by all accounts. The reason natives all speak in similar sentence orders is because it is grammatically required. Learners often mix up the order of words which makes them sound strange, but this is usually in sentences where the meaning can still be parsed from the words and context anyways. As sentences get more complex, it becomes increasingly necessary to follow syntactic rules for fear of confusing the listener/reader. English being understandable when spoken incorrectly should not be misunderstood as english having free syntax. Punctuation in english has a long history and does have rules. However they are rules largely based on reflecting speech and the rhythm of sentences. The commas exist of course to divide items in lists (one, two, three, and four) or to make comments (the boy, despite his young age, did this and that). The comma however also is used to divide sentence parts to follow distinctions that might be made in speech (eat that boy vs eat that, boy). Commas most importantly divide sentences up, giving clear indicators of where one clause ends and another begins. Commas in german fulfil a more perscribed role as they must follow after certain words and sentence structures and the rules are more clearly defined and understood throughout the german speaking world such as needing a comma to mark a subordinate clause (Ich denke, dass das nicht gut ist) here the "dass" marks the start of the subordinate clause and require a comma before it. German still can use commas to divide sentences and make comments just like in english. Honestly, the point on german being designed to "ward off normies" or being "not optimal for communication" is just strange. German having verbs at the end of the clause does not have to do with any semblance of optimal communication it is simply a remnant of older subject object verb sentence structures which used to be common throughout europe. German is usually subject verb object nowadays however, in spoken speech where people do not have the luxury of time especially, people often go against the grammar which might ask one to place active verb at the end of a sentence when an auxiliary is present and simply place the verbs at the start for clarity. German placing a verb at the ending is not any more hard to understand than the approximately 40% of languages worldwide which use subject object verb word order for the majority of sentences including, latin, japanese, korean, mongolian, turkish, quechua and which happens to be the most common word order in the world. In europe it is relatively rare having been superseeded by subject verb object but this is simply a matter of circumstance and not a proof that one is more or less viable for communication. English being lingua franca has very little to do with america's status as a major power and far more to do with rampant colonialism in europe, which Britain, with its overwhelming navy, was by far the most succesful at. Britain would nearly always force english to be spoken to in regions it had colonised and this caused it to become lingua franca in many parts of the world. America's importance as a superpower does help, but it only strengthens the foundation that was built by the british. There are many other languages which are equally if not more influential in other parts of the world which act as regional lingua francas such as chinese languages throughout china and the states surrounding it, french in most of central africa, arabic in the arab world. One should not overstate the presence of english nor should one attempt to diminish its admittedly quite complex grammar which while quite easy to understand for english speakers and speakers of other indo-european languages is completely alien to many languages all over the world and by no means simplistic.German has many varieties and people are good at making out what people mean even if the grammar isn't entirely in line with one's own grammar, whether that be through error or simple dialectal difference. English is very similar and due to its influence being so vast, it has also taught english speakers to try to read between the lines and infer meaning where grammar does not suffice. This is by no means unique to english, it is a result of people trying to understand each other. After writing all this I am considering that this may all have been a thinly disguised shitpost but allas I have fallen for this one.
Also the rule base and word creation tendency is shared by German with many other Euro languages. Besides, modern German has become very uncreative and just fills up on English, which has also made German spelling confusing as it incorporates English spelling now.
The changing of order with the object is a cool advantage. You could say “Ich bin über die Autobahn gefahren“ (I was driving on the Autobahn) or “Gefahren bin ich über die Autobahn“ (Driving was I on the Autobahn) and its still a valid sentence
In german as in a lot of languages with genders the gender of the word is mostly conditioned by the ending of the word. As a gendered language speaker you just "feel" it. If a word in german ends with an "e" (pronounced like a in apple) you just feel that it's feminine. A lot of girls' names end with an e. It's just the way it is. -Er is mostly masculine, -schaft is feminine, -um is neutral. It is so in a lot of languages. In my native one if a word ends with an "a" (pronounced like a in car) it's very unlikely it would be masculine
Your example of the Oxford comma could be better - it doesn't tell the reader if Lloyd and Marian are your parents or not. I offer this as a better example: "I'd like to thank my parents, Donald Trump, and Madonna". There are three distinct entities being thanked in this sentence. Without the Oxford comma after Trump, the speaker's parentage is highly suspect! 😂😂😂
Spelling in German is not always logically consistent. The only language I know where spelling is strictly kept to the way a word is pronounced, is Italian.
As an English speaker learning German, I've come to see the sense of descriptive nouns - krankenwagen is better than ambulance - and the value of spelling as pronounced or v.v. Against that is the needless gender ascription to nouns, adjectives, and possessive pronouns. I can't really see the gain here. While the native German adult has no problem, both foreigners and young German children have to be corrected/taught. An inconsistency in the much vaunted German logic? In the rare cases where confusion might be avoided, surely ambiguity is easily clarified otherwise. The matrix of articles, pronouns etc could be dispensed with. I am impressed with the German ability to reform spelling and generate native equivalents of foreign words (self-descriptive, of course!) I wish English would update its medieval spelling to match modern pronunciations, but sadly most attempts haven't gained traction. An interesting video, thanks!
When it comes to pronunciation, you're discounting just how consistent Spanish is. The only inconsistency I can think of is whether c makes a "k" sound or a "s" sound. Even then, you can usually infer what it sounds like from practice. Por ejemplo: conversación
La consonante C se pronuncia de 2 formas distintas en español: se corresponde con el sonido /Ɵ/ delante de las vocales E - I (cerilla, cien) y, con el sonido /k/ delante de A - O - U (casa, coche, cuadrado), delante de consonante: L o R (clase, cráneo) y al final de sílaba (bloc).
So spanish has the same inconsistency as english with that letter. Why is it "circus" and not "cirkus", or "sircus", or like in german "zirkus" Basically the result of loanwords. English already has "s" and "k" for those sounds, but latin loanwords would come with a c, so english got a c. Same with "q", "y" and "j", they don't need to exist in english, but loanwords, mostly latin and french use them. And there are other letters that used to exist and would make sense to be brought back. Especially since they represent distinct sounds that don't have their own letters now. Ðat ƿaȝ iou kould ƿrite perfektlȝ fine english ƿiþout using ƿeird foreign letters, instead iou use english letters.
Regarding gender and articles in German. The article does not always denote the gender of a specific thing. Especially regarding objects which are rationally neutral but may have masculine or feminine articles. Regarding the word Mädchen: When we add the suffix „-chen“ it is the cute or small version to the thing. So „das Mädchen“ which is „the (neutral) girl“ came from „die (feminine) Magd“, which means woman or female servant.
2:56 You say that Selbstbewusstsein means self-consciousness as in knowing oneself. But self-consciousness doesn't mean knowing oneself! It means being aware of oneself, but not aware as in aware of your own character, but aware as in having your attention directed onto that thing in the current moment (whether you know it well or not). That's why self-consciousness is generally negative: it's probably good and comforting to have knowledge of yourself, but it's not normally comforting to be the centre of attention, to have everyone staring at you. (Although maybe that's the difference, Germans famously like staring, do they also like being stared at? 😂)
German here lol, do we like being stared at? (I can only answer for myself ofc): There's different kinds of stares. When I was on good terms with my crush at school, she'd stare (back lol) at me lovingly, smiling. When things got rough, her stares we're neutral. Later, they were angry. So it really depends whether you like stares on what expression the stare carries 😄.
In terms of word order, Modern English is much more strict than German. In English, every sentence is subject-verb-object. "_I have_ recently _bought_ flowers for my mother at the store" has a key structure that can't change: "_I have bought_ flowers". I can emphasize aspects of this sentence by putting them at the front, as a sort of pretense: "At the store, _I have_ recently _bought_ flowers for my mother." or "Recently, _I have bought_ flowers for my mother at the store." or "For my mother, _I have_ recently _bought_ flowers at the store." In German, you can freely switch between subject, object and other parts of speech due to the declension of nouns and conjugation of verbs. The only fixed part of speech is the verb, which does follow one rule: Verbzweitstellung, which means the verb is at the second position (in main clauses*). If the verb consits of multiple parts, only the main part stays at the second position and all other parts are put at the end of the sentence. "have bought" is "habe gekauft" in German. "_Ich habe_ letztens meiner Mutter Blumen im Laden _gekauft_." can become: "Letztens _habe ich_ meiner Mutter Blumen im Laden _gekauft_." "Im Laden _habe ich_ meiner Mutter letztens Blumen _gekauft_." "Im Laden _habe ich_ letztens meiner Mutter Blumen _gekauft_." We can also switch the place of "meine(r) Mutter" and "Blumen", if we adjust the articles: "_Ich habe_ letztens im Laden Blumen für meine Mutter _gekauft_.", etc. However, the combination "Letztens _habe ich_ im Laden meiner Mutter Blumen _gekauft_" could be ambiguous, as "im Laden meiner Mutter" can both mean "at the store, for my mother" or "at my mother's store" - if German articles were more different in declension, we could get rid of this ambiguity and have even freer word order. *In subclauses, the verb is always at the end: "The store, where _I have bought_ flowers for my mother once, is open" becomes: "Der Laden, wo ich einmal meiner Mutter Blumen _gekauft habe_, ist geöffnet." This is actually a feature that English also had, which you can see in Shakespeare's texts. "The store is open, where once flowers for my mother _I have bought_." was a correct way of saying it in ye olden times.
11:18 Why are car brands used with the maskuline gender? My explanation: unspecified car/automobile -> Das Auto Der BMW, Mercedes, Toyota, ... -> Der Wagen (especially: Der VW: Volkswagen) Die BMW, Kawasaki, Ducati, ... -> Die Maschine ('engine', these are all motorcycles, differentiated by the article.) This 'rule' also extends to loanwords like Der Truck (Lastwagen), Der Computer (Rechner), Das Smartphone/Android/iPhone (Telefon), Das Katana (Schwert), etc. i.e. find the German categorization or translation and use its article. ... still haven't found out why Die File (Datei) sounds wrong, as I am used to Das File (Programm?) / Der Folder (Ordner)
Never heard File being used either way. It was always just Datei or Programm. So it'd be the same phenomenon as with Nutella, if File has become a loanword. Maybe Duden knows? Folder is also rare to hear
Duden says das or der. Having the grammatical gender derived off of "Aktenordner" as translation for the English word file for the masculine article or the other meaning "Aktenbündel" for the neutral article. Though the entry also talks about the origin of the English word in French, but that's beside the point of the gender of the anglicism File in German
It's a side effect of working in IT with partly international teams. It gets even worse on projects in special fields, we decided to leave business terms ("Amtsdeutsch") in our program code as is and use English only for the technical stuff...
@@HappyBeezerStudios Would you say "Ich downloade" oder "ich loade down"? I suspect the former. Therefore the "ge" has to go at the beginning, "gedownloaded".
The thing about having verbs near the end of dependent clauses in German is what I hate the most about it as an English speaker. I have looked at other languages, such as Swedish and Norwegian and they don't do this. I also speak spanish also and it also doesn't do that. I mean you can, but that's more of a stylistic thing. I put also too many times. Oh well. Anyway, holding so much info about a noun, its properties, and any other nouns in my head before I get to find out what happens to it isn't always easy. You get used to it, but it's tough. I most noticed it when I was reading a german text and live translating it into english on the phone for someone. I had to read entire sentences before I could say it in english, because I didn't always know what the nouns were doing, and the english sentence needs a verb almost always before the german version needs it. You get my point. But anyway, great video and thanks for the discussion about this fascinating topic
Sometimes English does it the German way and I love it, but we tend to draw a hard line at compounding more than two words before we just decide to steal it from French or something instead. Why? I dunno, people decided it sounded cringe in English for some reason.
Old English is a German dialict, l love Old English, but when England was conquered, French was the official language in England, which was changed to French, and stayed that way 300 years. There is a heavy French influence. Originally, English was written in Runes, in which each letter is an image, a meaning, a sound.
Finally someone comments on the beats! It's all from Kollegah, as an homage to Germany's greatest Sprechgesangskünstler, bei dessen Belletristik selbst Goethe und Schiller sagen würden: "Hut ab!" Bossaura kann ich natürlich auch nach jahrelangem Aufenthalt in Amerika immer noch auswendig
I like these memes that compare romance words, and english with a romance loanword, and a germanic language ukrainian: zoloto russian: zoloto serbian: zlato english gOlD wooo, wacky
Es ist schmerzhaft sich von einem Voruteil zu lösen. Die Amis sind mit Filmen aufgewachsen in denen der Bösewicht erst aggressiv deutsch rumbrüllt um dann in einem grauenhaften Akzent englisch sprechenend einen Grammatikfehler an den anderen zu reihen .. Die allermeisten erkennen das Klischee nicht und nehmen das Stilmittel als bare Münze!
Ironically, everyone does speak German normally. YOU are the problem! The entire rest of the world likes to portray German as an inherently aggressive language solely because of WW2. If you don't believe me you can read Mark Twain's light-hearted book on how German is a comically flabby language (something that many English speakers think about, say, Dutch today). "I think that a description of any loud, stirring, tumultuous episode must be tamer in German than in English. Our descriptive words of this character have such a deep, strong, resonant sound, while their German equivalents do seem so thin and mild and energyless. Boom, burst, crash, roar, storm, bellow, blow, thunder, explosion; howl, cry, shout, yell, groan; battle, hell. These are magnificent words; the have a force and magnitude of sound befitting the things which they describe. But their German equivalents would be ever so nice to sing the children to sleep with, or else my awe-inspiring ears were made for display and not for superior usefulness in analyzing sounds. Would any man want to die in a battle which was called by so tame a term as a SCHLACHT? Or would not a comsumptive feel too much bundled up, who was about to go out, in a shirt-collar and a seal-ring, into a storm which the bird-song word GEWITTER was employed to describe? And observe the strongest of the several German equivalents for explosion--AUSBRUCH. Our word Toothbrush is more powerful than that. It seems to me that the Germans could do worse than import it into their language to describe particularly tremendous explosions with. The German word for hell--Hölle--sounds more like HELLY than anything else; therefore, how necessary chipper, frivolous, and unimpressive it is. If a man were told in German to go there, could he really rise to thee dignity of feeling insulted?" -The Awful German Language, Mark Twain
Do think Middle English would be more similar to German in translating and representing speech compared to Modern English? Especially before the vowel shift.
Interestingly middle english is the hardest for me to understand. I get early modern english just fine, and old english isn't too hard either, it's basically weirdly pronounced german.
English? easier? It isn't. Absolutely not. How is it easier to learn something that only is governed by custom rather than clear rules that apply most of the times? "The universe" also only speaks math. English is what one would consider a pdigin language that was elevated to something more. A mixture.. arbitrarily mixed together to the smllest common denominator and thus it actually is, in my eyes, a learning disability if you have learnt it as a native language, simply because it lacks the concepts that countless other languages share.
Hahah that's a good one: English ="pidgin language that was elevated beyond its station", better than my expression from the video: English = "caveman talk with large vocabulary" It's easier to learn than German though, in the same way it's easier to acquire a casual habit than to learn mathematical theorems with all their corollaries and lemmas. Also - you're speaking it.
@@goodnesswithfists I am speaking it because i surrounded myself with it - i would speak any other language just a well if i surrounded myself as much with it. German etc is difficult to learn for ENGLISH SPEAKERS - but say a Frenchspeaker will have much less trouble. Simply because it shares many concepts that english does not. It is always easier to get used to to something primitive, if you are sued to something highly complex, rather than teh other way around.
Not just an elevated pidgin language, but an elevated pidgin language that has continued to evolve, but hasn't updated it's written form in centuries. Using modern english is basically randomply putting together latin, french, danish, german, and a bit extra-eurpoean, written how the words were pronounced in the middle ages.
This is a great video. Most of the rules only came with the nationalization in the 19th century by the Prussians, before that there was much more uncontrolled growth in the German language. Even sentence structure was still open. Today's standard German is the sum of all German dialects.
English became the universal language not because it's "easier", but because it was the language spoken by the British Empire and the current world superpower, the USA. Before them, French was the lingua franca, and before French, Latin was. So saying that English is the global lingua franca because it's "easier" than the other languages sounds a bit disingenuous and doesn't match with the current linguistic consensus (how difficult a language is depends on how close your first language is to the target language, and how much exposure you get from it). Besides that, I still enjoyed most of the video, and, while I disagree with the conclusion, I still think the video is great. (Sorry if I sound a little harsh, English isn't my first language so I have some difficulty expressing myself sometimes).
@goodnesswithfists English, of or pertaining to England.. Could use the Austrian flag for German next time.. Since many speak it there. Anyway, I'm not as grumpy as I sound but I definitely don't understand your reason but wish you all the best in the adventures of the language the Americans invented😊
how many grammar rules english and german have has nothing to do with law, linguistics is a separate field that evolves essentially arbitrarily. plus, having "more" grammar rules is not a thing, if you say having v2 verb position is a rule I could say not having it is also a rule...
Yep. Mädchen is the diminutive of "die Magd," maid in the sense of maiden, not servant. Though Magd isn't used any more and at most Fräulein is used, which is also going out of favour. Because still classifying some women as young and unmarried is not appropriate/needed any more.
@@gokbay3057 Maid is absolutely a word in german, it's not used anymore because Mädchen and Frau have completely replaced it but everyone knows of the term "holde Maid"
@@GBlockbreaker I'll admit that I was mistaken about "Maid" not existing as a German noun after further research. But that research still indicates that Mädchen most likely derives from Magd (even giving Mägdchen as an obsolete form/historical link between them) rather than Maid.
I posted a comment earlier but removed it because it felt a little too snarky, but I wanted to rephrase my message. This video, while entertaining and at time presenting accurate surface-level information about how German and English function, has quite a few problems with its linguistic assertions and prescriptive conclusions. I want to try to respond point by point here and break down some of my critiques and how it is somewhat problematic to push some of these claims. My response is quite lengthy and essay-like, so if you are turned off by reading long explanations or analysis, this might not be the comment for you. If you think this is ridiculous or unnecessary, I understand (if you need to send a short -worded rebuke, that's fine), but I think constructive criticisms in relation to topics of science or worldly understanding is healthy for furthering interest and accuracy in topics/sciences such as linguistics. Starting with Krankenwagen and Naturwissenschaft, I think to claim that Krankenwagen or Naturwissenschaft alone can explain how the words themselves are used and their semantics is questionable at best. Take Krankenwagen, which as you mentioned comes from Kranker (a sick person) and Wagen (“wagon” but also “car” and vehicle”), and let’s say hypothetically you have never seen a Krankenwagen or ambulance ever, but you know what a Kranker/sick person is and what a Wagen/vehicle/wagon is. How would you know whether someone is talking about a Wagen that is a car or a wagon? How would you know the purpose of the Wagen is for? How would you know what role the sick person/Kranker has in relation to the Wagen? How would I know it is not a horse-drawn wagon that brings people sick people to their burial pits as much as it would be a gasoline-power red and white truck that brings sick people to a hospital. The answer is I would not without external context or clarification. What about the word Krankenwagen indicates a “gasoline-power truck with a big area in the back filled with various medical equipment driven by specialized paramedics who studied for years at a university, who drive people who are sick/injured/dying to a place called a hospital in order to treat said ailment or injury”? The answer is still nothing, and I would know nothing outside of Wagen and Kranker (assuming I understood all the possible meanings of those in German without knowing of hospitals, paramedics and ambulances). A similar thing would apply to Naturwissenschaft. Of course we have Natur (which is a 'dreaded' loanword itself) and Wissenschaft deriving from Wissen (to know) and -schaft (-hood/ship). If we looked at the bare semantic meaning of Naturwissenschaft and translated it into English we would get “knowledge of nature”, which is not quite what science/natural science/Naturwissenschaft mean. A lumberjack or hunter might have knowledge of nature however that does not make them natural scientists or auf Deutsch Naturwissenschaftler. Likewise would a German seldom describe a Jäger or Holzfäller being naturwissenschaftlich despite the word etymology itself indicating a plausible connection between the two. Naturwissenschaft and science although stemming from roots relating to “to know” or “wissen” are quite distinct categorically and in their use. Their etymologies indicate their origin and perhaps reasoning why they now are used where they are used, but it is not really helpful at saying what their current definitions or usages may be. Words are not bound by their past and often evolve past what their original meaning might have been. Sometimes, words are only tangentially related to their previous meanings, (Natur)Wissenschaft might be someone related in a semantic context to 'wissen' but it is no longer solely about knowing or knowledge. The google definition of ‘science’ is quite explanatory: “the systematic study of the structure and behavior of the physical and natural world through observation, experimentation, and the testing of theories against the evidence obtained.” As I said, relating to knowing or knowledge, but it itself is neither of those two solely. I am not fully sure of your “confidence” argument however, as you said, you can say just confidence, self-trust, self-assurance, future-confidence, self-confidence/aplomb, and self-consciousness or self-awareness in relation to Selbstbewusstsein. These are all possible and acceptable words to use in English (in my opinion), and I really do not see how the German ones provide any more innate insight than the English correlates. If the complaint is loanword influence, then do not look at German Selbstsicherheit because sicher itself is an old Germanic loanword from Latin sēcūrus (from the same origin as English “sure”). Is it so much better to say “self-sureness” than “self-assurance”? Both have “sure” in their root, which is a really common word in English. Same with Rap versus Sprechgesang (which also has meanings outside of American “rap” music itself). I really do not have any personal problems with German speakers calqueing or forging new words to describe phenomena, but saying Sprechgesang is somehow better than saying Rap is not really a statement about reality but rather a personal prescription, which is fine, I suppose, but not really anything objective or scientifically grounded.
English speaker form new words all the time as well, but like you said it is frowned upon more, especially in primary/secondary school. English compounding is quite common as in German but usually English speakers do not perceive compounded words as one due to orthography. German: Unabhängigkeitserklärung vs. English: Independence declaration. Sure, you could remove the space or insert a hyphen and say: Independencedeclaration or Independence-declaration, but English speakers while writing tend to prefer the space, just as German speakers could say Unabhängigkeits-Erklärung or Unabhängigkeits Erklärung, but tend to prefer the merged form. Take French where compounding is not grammatically permissible: Déclaration d'indépendance, which is very similar to English: Declaration of independence or German: Erklärung von Unabhängigkeit (though, the German example is quite rare if not odd to hear). However, one can still say “that nation released its independence declaration” as well as “that nation released its declaration of independence”, although the latter would sound quite off in my opinion since I would think of the American Declaration of Independence, aka the specific document, and compounding would be an easy way to distinguish from that document. I think the spelling part is also quite misleading. German: ä, ö and ü all come from ae, oe and ue with the “e’s” for each initially being written above the letter and then shifting to the two dots likely for ease when writing. Eszett or ß comes from the s (specifally the long s “ſ”) and the “z” merging together, which is much easier to identify when seeing Fraktur letters. English also uses the “W” quite frequently which did not exist in Latin, which derives from the double uu. German also shares the “W”, along with a lot of other European languages, but it is not exist in ancient Latin. “J” is also did not technically exist in Latin and is a spin-off of “i”, but this alteration is not unique to English. English spelling is pretty phonemically inconsistent, but I would not claim German is phonetically consistent either (it is however much more phonemically consistent). The reason for its lack of phonetic consistency can be seen in the word “Reich”. The phonemes of “Reich” can be broken down as such: [r][ei][ch], three phonemes for three combinations of letters, all of which translate to their phonemes in other contexts. [r]ahm (Rahm), z[ei]t (Zeit) and stor[ch] (Storch). However, these phonemes indicate nothing of how speakers pronounce these phonemes, merely that there are these phonemes. The /r/ could be a velar fricative, uvular fricative, uvular approximant, uvular trill, alveolar tap, alveolar trill or even an alveolar approximant. Seeing the letter “r” alone gives no indication how it might be pronounced. Same could be said for “ch” which has quite a lengthy and complicated history in German and is by no means indicative of any one certain sound. Sure, it could be a palatal fricative (many German have it as such, especially in Standard German), but that by no means indicates uniformity. Many Swiss German speakers lack the palatal fricative and solely use the velar~uvular fricative which is primarily seen in Standard German following back-vowels. German is also well know for having massive geographical differences in how people speak or what it means to speak ‘properly’. Go ask Germans how to pronounce the long “ä” in “während”, and you will get a whole Mischung of “correct” answers. English “splitting off” from German is also quite linguistically false and misleading. The concept of what we consider German to be did not exist at least til the 700-900s and is long after English split off from Proto-West Germanic. Modern Standard German is even newer, likely beginning in its literary form around the 1500-1600s and arriving in its spoken form during the late 1800s to early 1900s. Saying Proto-West Germanic is German or even Proto-Germanic is German is also quite misleading and false. Proto-Germanic was primarily spoken in modern Scandinavia and some parts of nowadays Northern Germany, so from a geographic standpoint, very German biased. Proto-West Germanic is the ancestor language(s) of of course German, Dutch, Frisian and English, and when you look back at reconstructions of it, it becomes quite clear that it is not Modern German nor does Modern German necessarily resemble it better than any of the other West Germanic languages. It is its own thing. Also saying German is more complex than English is quite misleading too. It really depends on which areas of grammar one looks. Complexity in one area is not exactly indicative of complexity in every area, and it is easy to cherry-pick complexity within either language. Also saying English has “caveman-level grammar” is quite silly. As previously mentioned, English grammar can be more simplified in some areas and more complex in others. Take the distinction of “I am making” vs “I make”. In German, both can be expressed by “ich mache” and to express the continual aspect either requires context like “jetzt mache ich Kekse” or the adverb “gerade” - “ich mache gerade Kekse”. Either way, this is a pretty concrete example of English having a more complicated aspectal system than German with having separate grammatical forms for the habitual and the continuous. There are more as well for both English and German, but it is quite rash to assume that one is more complex or simplified based on cherry-picked examples. Also saying English is easier than German is debatable and generally dependent on various factors like income, first-language, exposure to English/German, etc. Someone living in rural Bavaria as a second language speaker will have a much easier time learning German than a Russian speaker learning English solely through primary/secondary school. Language simplicity and grammar is high depended on the aforementioned factors and cannot be singled down to grammar, spelling or pronunciation alone; it’s all dependent on the self and one’s own circumstances. People have already critiqued the sentence structure judgement here, and it is not really worth bringing it up. I would say though, that both English and German have equivalent “freedom” in sentence construction, at least freedom to adequately and functionally express oneself. Freedom of the placement of the verb/subject/object/etc can vary between the two, but one can always find restrictions in one and freedom in the other when directly comparing syntactic word order. Punctuation does not really have to do with spoken language, and it is mostly just a writing preference/style. There is no objective correct way to use punctuation, every writing standard is built upon norms and habit. Whether we believe those norms and habits to be “objective” is up to the individual speaker, but from a scientific perspective there is no correct norms or habits outside of those we tell ourselves. The legal system argument is… compelling, yet irrelevant unfortunately for linguistic change and overall language use. There just is not sufficient evidence to indicate any legal determinism linguistically. Language usage and evolution existed long before and probably after our modern legal systems. Even prescriptivist institutions like L’Académie Française can only prescribe word spelling and grammar rules which they themselves deem ‘fit’ for proper usage. Unfortunately, they are powerless to broader language change and is evident through their negative framing of current language change like English borrowings, grammar shifts and so on. These institutions also do not realize that language change is driven by human social interaction and upbringing and throwing on regulations and prescriptions top-down does not prevent this from happening. If it did, people would not be griping about anglicisms in both French and German. As for orthographic prescriptions, you are free to spell however you want. You might face social pressure and or backlash, but those are not linguistic restrictions rather social ones. If you want to spell “Rindfleisch” as “rintflaish” or “RinntFlæysc”, more power to you. It is a question of social pressure rather than being some innate feature of the language to uphold linguistic authority prescriptions. Both German and English are still languages “made” from below, because linguistic change and norms generally aren’t driven by scholars or academics but rather everyday people, who might be told how to write or speak, but are at the end of the day ultimately free to choose how they wish to express themselves. Here is also a good Simon Roper video on the subject: ua-cam.com/video/Gp-bsOXbMNY/v-deo.htmlsi=b7oYhONMhq9EJv-Z If you read all of that, I thank you, especially for a UA-cam comment. As I said, your video is quite entertaining and made me laugh at points. I do not wish this to be insulting either your own knowledge or personal experience, but rather to show my perspective as someone who studies linguistics and is passionate about English and German linguistics specifically. My goal here is ultimately to show my alternative perspective. I thank you for the video regardless and hope you continue on with language content.
Not really, that’s its origin, but it’s not what it *actually* is, the same way that ß is no longer a ligature of s and z, the same way ä is no longer an a with an e written on top of it, the same way ñ isn’t an n with another n on top of it.
@@insectoid_creature Ok, if we talk about how things actually are (which is fair), just google "standard Latin alphabet" - W will be shown as a part of it, but ü, ö, ä, ß will not be. We don't have to go deeper than that in my opinion, because my point in that part of the video was that the English simply agreed that both "u" and "ü" sounds can be represented by the letter u, whereas the Germans can't stand pronunciation ambiguity and so they insist on using "ue"/"ü" where needed.
Add another thing, english doesn't need the letters "c", "j", "q", "x" and "y" But it would need the letters "þ", "ð", "ȝ" and "ƿ" Because the way things are now, english has no pronounciation consistency. It all depends on where you grew up. Basically the local english dialect in your part of Britain, Ireland, New Zealand, India, South Africa, Australia, or North America. But english can't even commit to just going with the flow. If it did, then it could really be written however you want. On the other hand, nobody has an accent in english. They just speak their own local english dialect from a region where english is not natively spoken.
Pretty good for a school assignment. Needs a LOT of work before publishing. Some good points, and a lot of doubtful chaff.. 1. (Britsh) English DOES have an extra letter, the conflated A+E. I would also make the case that "th" is effectively a new letter, we didn't bother to steal the rune when we borrowed it from Norse but it is one of the few clusters that is consistent in pronunciation (and source of misery for 90% of all non-native speakers). 2. English spelling is so ropy because there was no co-ordination between which dialect form became standard (we spell words according to one dialect, and pronounce to another). Then there are the US/British differences, which usually break down to, spell as pronounced, or so we can see which language we took the word from. 3. English split just as it was getting "big" and neither branch has ever had anything like the French Academy to force regulation. Which is one reason why English can have 50 shades of grey (or gray, or at least 50 different words for it). 4. Other than getting the adjectives in the right order (which almost any native speaker, just KNOWS through some magic). There aren't too many laws how to order things. BUT, those comas are a big thing for keeping your meaning clear (the "Eats shoots and leaves" problem). 5. English and the Norse are both related to German, and both lost almost all the fancy conjugations (English probably learned this from Norse). 6. German compounds are often so unwieldy, that even Germans abbreviate them (which kind of defeats the purpose, if not as badly as say "rhyming slang") English (especially American) goes in big for Anagrams. Thus PanzerKampfwaggen (which is the SHORT form, check out the WWI version) becomes AFV (and "tank" is a sub-type). 7. English's other party trick is to make "foreign" words into similar-sounding combos of more familiar ones. Such as "Buckeroo" being nothing more than "Vaquero" run through a dozen Texas accents. Or about half the things Americans call "Dutch" actually being "Deutsch".
Yeah, throw out the letters, c, j, q, x and y and bring back þ, ð, ȝ and ƿ And it's not just British and North American English. There is also South African English, Irish English, Indian English, Australian English and New Zealand English. And yes, we do shorten things as well, which is why people say "Panzer" and "Auto", and "Laden" and "Handy" (and the last of these is even a translation quirk where the english adjective became a german noun with a vaguely adjecent meaning) oh, and the german abbreviation for AFV would be PzKW, not to be confused with PKW, which means "Personenkraftwagen" ;)
@@HappyBeezerStudios You can also re-purpose y to replace þ, as is already done in pseudo-archaic names ("ye olde"). Maybe also do the same for the other old letters.
The subreddit mentioned is cringe since subreddits aren't that big in Germany and have only grown quite a bit recently. They are not in any way relevant in actually shaping the everyday language (of younger people). Heck, pr0gram was likely more relevant when it was big. And nowadays it would be TikTok.
@HappyBeezerStudios i get why you would want to have commas. But always during english exams i was scared where to place them. Because german is my first language
@HappyBeezerStudios i get why you would want to have commas. But always during english exams i was scared where to place them. Because german is my first language. And on top of that i dont know where to put comas in german
It's just that you don't say "I sciere that that means", or you don't study for your knowism test. The word only explains itself, if you know its roots.
A lot of "German is so pragmatic" up until you hit gender, then suddenly it's the Englishman dropping unnecessary stuff that's pragmatic and the German with tables of arbitrary declinations you 'just have to know' that's the weird one. I guess the moral of the story is that people in power like making rules to standardise those below them into tight little groups but individuals are consistently and unavoidably playful & messy, and the standardness of any one thing is just the current expression of the equation between those two poles.
You know.. because german actually has something called "conjugation". Adding an s is really barely conjugation at all. Then agaain, english is even barely a language at all as well. It is a conglomerate of different languages, boiled to its smallest common denominator.
@@wasweiich9991 you know, as a Russian language native speaker, I am kinda familiar with the concept of conjugation. I am also familiar with the concept of suffixes and prefixes, but in German for whatever reason, it seems that they change meaning of the word even more than in Russian.
I'd argue german has freer word order than english English doesn't even let you have adjectives in the wrong order but with german the sentence is still right if you move the object to the front it just sounds a bit weird you cant do that in english
but german uses that different word orders to express different things.
Exactly. English has an analytical grammar and is therefor stricter when it comes to word order, but the rules are relatively simple. German has a fusional, inflecting grammar that gives freer word order but needs more complicated rules. This obviously doesn’t fit fully into the narrative of the strict German versus English winging it on the fly, just like the habitual meaning in English makes it less free and productive in terms of constructing words, because to stay intelligible you have to follow the habits those around you, wich basically forces English to import loan words instead of making new compound words. But this all fits into the space empire vs traditionalist tribe narrative. English has simple, strict rules for sentence structure and word order, but the words themselves could easily be replaced by anything. In German the rules are convoluted and chaotic, but the words, suffixes and prefixes have inherent meaning and summon the sentence’s meaning like an alchemistic formula.
English vs German when portuguese appears
This video is not about grammar, it's about mocking German. Don't bother
True
English is ease of communication/speaking focused while german is ease of understanding/listening focused. Which is why nouns are descriptions, verbs have endings and articles are extensive to ensure the listener understood what you tried to convey very well
English sentence structure is free and German is fixed? What? "You saw I" vs "Dich sah ich", one is valid, the other is not and it's not the one it should be according to you ('you' is the object, the one being seen, here).
Or "Mir geht's nicht gut" (object verb subject negator adverb) vs. "geht's mir nicht gut" (verb subject object negator adverb) vs. "gut geht's mir nicht" (adverb verb subject object negator), note that the grammatical subject is 's (es/it) here. Slightly different meaning or emphasis, but the point still stands. Can't really use the translation ("I don't feel well", literally "It goes not good to me" ("to me" being a crutch for dative case)), because they are too different.
Another one (*xxxx* means emphasized): "*Gesehen* hab' ich dich, aber *gehört* hab' ich ihn" ("Seen have I you, but heard have I him"), which puts emphasis on the lexical verbs (i.e. not 'have' in this case), but I don't think that really works in English even if you fix the word order (which is freer than German, right?) to "Seen I have you, but heard I have him". At least to my non-native ears the only way to properly convey the same meaning in English is "I *saw* you, but I *heard* him" (I changed tense, because in colloquial German perfect is the standard tense for (the concept of) simple past while in English it's not). You can also do the same in restrictive German "Ich hab' dich *gesehen*, aber [ich hab'] (the repetition of "ich hab'" is not necessary in German and I wouldn't do it here, but it's not wrong per se) ihn *gehört*".
I was with you for about 3/4 of the video, but I really don't see how you came to the conclusion that German has a word order that is more fixed than English.
Also to the "no idea why there are cases and genders" point: There are several studies that showed that there are less misunderstandings under noisy conditions in German than in English. Cases and grammatical genders give the language more redundancy, so you can better grasp what is being said even if you don't understand every word that is spoken.
The only really fixed part in german word order is that the verb comes at second place.
And if the werb comes at the end, which is very common in the language, you put an auxillary verb at second place.
“You saw I” and “seen have I you, but heard have I him” are grammatically correct English sentences. You wouldn’t find people talking like that in everyday speech, but such constructions are common in poetry and flowery prose
you picked one of the few sentences with free word order for your example
@@tumblerinamoe No and please learn to count.
@@mharley3791 Who sees whom in "You saw I"?
Small correction to the part about „kucken“ vs „gucken“ at roughly 10:00 minutes.
„kucken“ and „gucken“ are both variants of the same word. The one with k in the beginning is more predominantly used in Nothern Germany and the variant with g in the South. This already stands in a Duden dictionary from 1951. And since g comes before k in the dictionary, you have one explanation, why the variant „gucken“ was found first allthough the Nothern pronunciation „kucken“ was heard more, because the Northern German variants were the basis for the so-called „Bühnendeutsch“ - stage german.
Yeah, there's alot of aprocryphal nonsense in this. The exact thing the narrator accuses English of is also done in German. Particularly with lone words. Take the seperable verb Skifahren, meaning the ski, where ski is pronounced shee. Or,
@@frakturfreak Fair enough, but in NRW at least you were always made fun of if you accidentally spelled it with a k :D
Ironic since kucken is High German
@@goodnesswithfistsand in the Netherlands we use kijken which stems from this word.
@@goodnesswithfists in writing maybe, since it's not following the spelling rules.
In spoken language, the local form is totally accepted.
On the other hand, just look at the bavarian wikipedia.
This is a nice video, however the statement that German tends to translate foreign words is simply false. It's basically only done for memes and jokes, nobody takes these seriously or actually uses them.
Everyday German is full of English words that were simply adopted 1:1, including even English spelling and pronounciation for the most part. Same with french. German is actually a famous case of a language which tends to simply copy loan words rather than adapt them to its own phonetics (in contrast to, for example, French).
Otherwise good video, but this is harsh misinformation.
Even French sometimes copies loanwords without regard for spelling or phonetics, i.e. “shopping” and “planning”
A nice example is the German sentence: "Ich wollte ein Service kaufen, aber der Service im Laden war schlecht." Here the first "Service" is imported from French, pronounced (approximately) as in French and means a set of dishes, while the second "Service" is imported from English, pronounced (approximately) as in English, and means, well, service.
@__christopher__ Exactly!
Your overall comparison of the two languages is basic but fine. What makes your video rather silly is its messaging toward the end. Your interpretation of what these two languages supposedly stand for is very clearly shaped by post-WW2 notions of Anglosphere and Germanosphere and completely ignores the fact that for most of the time during which the two languages developed apart from each other (i.e. the Middle Ages), Britain was closer to a middle-sized feudal state, while the HRE was variably either the most or second most powerful political entity in Europe across the centuries. This trend had only reversed by the Modern Age, during which Britain emerged as a colonial empire, while the HRE was stuck in the past and slowly falling apart.
But by then, New English and New High German had largely already formed and received their unique character! I hope I don't have to tell you why these circumstances subvert the entire point of your video.
I appreciate a 'Murican actually having a decent German pronunciation, but would suggest you to read more before making plainly inaccurate inferences on the German and English languages (which, to be very clear, I both dearly love).
(On some level, I feel like your video is just Anglo rationalization for the lack of grammatical complexity in his language. Oh well.)
3:20 HI SO MAY I RANT HERE A BIT ABOUT DENGLISCH? ALRIGHT THANK YOU. So, I’m a native German speaker, but I’ve grown up with the internet for almost all of my life and have therefore been influenced quite a bit by native English speakers and their way to express themselves. So, to cut to the point: I find myself using Denglisch sentence structures more and more often, for example: in German, when I want to say “You are free to do xyz”, I would usually say “Du darfst xyz machen” (literal translation meaning “You may do xyz”), but I’ve been saying “du bist frei xyz zu machen” (literal translation meaning the exact English version of “you are free to do xyz”) more and more frequently the more I interact with English speakers. Oh and also, funny anecdote, I am heavily involved with native English speakers IRL too, so I once told someone that “Ja, wir sind auf dem floor geslidet” (“Yes, we slid on the floor”) using neither the German word for floor, “Boden” nor the German word for sliding, “rutschen”. Like, what the fuck is going on with my brain for me to just like not speak German correctly anymore?? But like at the same time, I’m pretty hyped about this since I can watch how language evolves in real time, which is pretty fucken cool tbh.
@mentally.not.stable393 That's so relatable though! I went to a very conservative high school in Germany and I remember being corrected for saying "Das macht Sinn" (= this makes sense) instead of the proper German "Das ergibt Sinn" (= this gives sense)
I also used to listen to lots of Deutschrap, where anglicisms are of course Gang und Gäbe
14:13: "No fixes sentence structure [in English]. In German you have to put words of a certain type in a certain fixed position in the sentence": I doubt that espescialy because of the grammar / word endings. In German you can move your words around because there are extra information due to articles and endings, in English you need word order to get the same information.
Example:
"The dog bit the man" has a different meaning then "The man bit the dog".
In German the first can be written as "Der Hund biss den Mann" (same order as in English) but also as "Den Mann biss der Hund". This is different to the second sentence which would be translated by "Der Mann biss den Hund".
Das wollte ich auch genauso schreiben.
Genau so wollte ich das auch schreiben.
Auch ich wollte das genauso schreiben.
Genau so schreiben wollte ich das auch.
The opposite of "umfahren" is "umfahren".
Ah, yes, the dumbest thing in German. If you have declination you don't need word order. If you have word order, you don't need declination. German has both, and I don't understand why.
@@wasweiich9991 and the opposite of english "inflameable" is "inflameable", so what's up with german "umfahren"?
@@Adoffka Where do you get the Impressionen that there is fixed word order in German? I am a native german speaker and I can assure you that there is much freedim in this regard in German.
However I am not a native english speaker, so this might be a case that then one learns English he is told that English has a fixed order and then another one learns German he is told the same about German.
Wissenschaft = knowledgeship, not wisdomship
wissen is cognate to wise and meant the same thing until wise shifted in meaning very recently
You're not wise to the true meaning of the word
The following is gonna be a non proof-read, hastily thrown together, incoherent rant about your video, you don’t have to read it, I just wanted to get it out there:
You’ve gotta be more informed if you’re gonna be speaking this authoritatively. A lot of the claims you make here and the underlying attitude behind them are pretty nasty. In particular the sentences along the lines of ‘English is this way because they prioritise ease of communication’ make my skin crawl, English is like that because English is like that, nobody dropped the case system because it was too hard, a native old English speaker wouldn’t think they were hard.
Some other notes: most of the big long German words that are so self explanatory as to not require an explanation are like that because they are not words. More accurately, you can call them words, but in that case, you’d also have to call the english ‘gold coin’ a word, the difference is entirely in the way they’re written. There are compound words that really are words in German, but you’ll most likely find it in a dictionary, and English have them too
English grammar is just as complicated as German’s, you can’t see it because it’s not where you expect it to be, an example is the sentence order, which, in English, is not free, at all, it is very strict, and it’s a complicated part of the grammar of the language. The insecure English learner you describe is insecure because they haven’t learned or absorbed the grammar, in this aspect I guess it’s the Germans whose grammar is caveman level
Your adjective order example is bad, a brown leather wallet is not a wallet that is brown and leather, it’s a leather wallet that is brown.
All natural languages are governed by habit. You’ll see this in German too if you look at what “German” is, which is an expansive dialect continuum with no clear edges.
I really would recommend that you don’t make a video like this when you clearly lack a lot of very foundational knowledge. I’m not sure what message this video was actually supposed to communicate, but please don’t take linguistics and twist and morph it into something it’s not to fit your narrative.
The "dialect continuum" point is particularly relevant to the "spelling representing speech" point. The obvious follow-up question is "Whose speech?"
There are benefits and drawbacks to phonetic writing systems, and benefits and drawbacks to logographic writing systems. For any _nominally_ alphabetical writing the question is really to what extent you balance the two. I personally think the most intuitive way to think about the English writing system is to see it as technically a logographic system, where those logographs (words) are constructed of 26 very standardised elements (often containing _incredibly_ strong phonetic hints), and where you can also use those standardised elements (letters) in a secondary phonetic function.
@@zak3744 A good example of how ambiguous english is, is by looking at how letters can have multiple pronounciation.
Why are the two "c" in circus pronounced differently? Because english doesn't need a "c", it's only there because foreign loan words use it.
And the dialect continum is absolutely a thing, even today. I understand dutch better than bavarian, one is supposed to be a foreign language, the other a dialect...
@@HappyBeezerStudios Actually, originally the soft C in English was more akin to a TS sound, but in recent centuries the sound changed to an S sound. You can still fine remnants of this old pronunciation. The word "interference" shows this TS pronunciation. It's just that soft C at the beginnings of syllables changed to S
@@HappyBeezerStudios good point. I actually like c for one reason: you can see the k/s/sh interchange, like in words: music, musician, even tho both of them are latin borrowings. This interchanging will only occur in words of the latin origin tho, and correlate better to other languages. K is a replacement for C when before I or E (king, ket) and in a CK diagraph like in "back". Worse letter G which is always ambiguous, since you can easily tell the pronunciation of the letter C, you can clearly see this in words: "get" and "gem", where the first word is from the germanic origin and the second one from the latin origin. English has so many faults in its writing system, but c is in fact not the worst part, there are many other worse conventions
12:12 about gender of Rhine is nonesense. Genders don't have any meaning in that case, as with most objects. It is also "Die Oder", which is a pretty big river.
It's not referring to the size of the river...
@@marmac83 ... it's how you use it.
well actualy "der Rhein" is quite an outlayer since most Rivers are female. Thinking about it, I do not come up with a single other River that is not female. Could come from the rhetoric figure of the father Rhine from e.g. the "Nibelungenring". [ "Der Po", "Der Nil", "Der Amazonas", "Der Missisippi" ok there are quite some.]
English has way more strict word order rules than German
English sentence structure is demonstrably more rigid than German sentence structure, not less. English has basically no inflection left, so the only way to indicate the relationship beween the constituents of a sentence is to reliably put them in a fixed order, subject-verb-object. Whereas in German you have more freedom to mix things up because the inflectional endings can tell you what's the subject, what's the object and so on. In German I can express "the dog bit the man" as "der Hund biss den Mann" or "den Mann biss der Hund" and the meaning doesn't change. In English, meanwhile, swapping the order of the words also swaps their syntactic roles.
But even this makes English more simple than German. As you may know; any noun can verb if you don't care enough, and I think that this freedom is more liberating than the ability to put the noun where you want it because it grants the ability to make a brand new word by simply changing a different word's position in a sentence.
The sentence structure is very likely less strict in German than you implied: Word order is effectively arbitrary, only that some versions are by conventions more „usual“. For example due to noun declension, „Der Wolf tötete den Hirsch“ (the wolf killed the stag, SVO) is just as correct and means the same as „Den Hirsch tötete der Wolf“ (OVS).
Similarly, adjective orders are likely to be more free than in English („schöner großer Baum“ and „großer schöner Baum“ as a tall beautiful tree work both easily)
Hey, I am currently creating a conlang and the differences between English and German are truly fascinating! I am a native German speaker and the one thing I love about German is compound self-explanitory words - though super-strict rules make this language hard to master. I am finding a balance between these opposites in my conlang and it'll be great!
So many people make fun about the German language, but I sincerely think it is one of the "best" languages out there. German can be very precise and descriptive.
I might be biased since I live in Germany myself, but I do agree!
To my knowledge _girl_ being neuter in German is a result of the term being a diminutive form, literally meaning _little maid._
Fair point, it is from "Mägdchen"
Randall Munroe, creator and author of xkcd, has written a book called "Thing Explainer", in which he explains complex things with just the one thousand most common English words (the ten hundred words, most English number words don't make the list!) One of the 'tricks' he uses is just listing nouns ("up goer five" = the Saturn V rocket, "mouth water maker" = salivary gland etc.), which is awfully similar to the German concept of compound words. Hence, for the German version of the book the 'translators' had to come up with much more complex rules on how to simplify the language -- a simple list of common words was not enough. They had to reduce the usage of compound words, for instance. So the German version of the book is not simply a translation. It's a very different reading experience than the English original.
I wish I knew of this, I would have mentioned it. What a German thing to do from Mr. Munroe!
German has complex grammar and simple words, english has simple grammar and complex words...
12:55 german watching here in this section I want to add that in the whole of Germany there is a discussion if the nut Nougat Creme called Nutella is der die or das Nutella you can speak to one use der and he will correct you to das then you speak to someone else confidentiality use das and the person will say die would be correct and then someone else saying der so if this ever happens to you with Nutella you now know
Same with cola, is it die or das?
@@HappyBeezerStudios gute frage in meinem umkreis an leuten ist es die cola
14:37 Isn’t the sentence structure the other way around? Except the Verb which is either second or last in a sentence all the other words can be anywhere in a german sentence. The first thing I was told in english lesson was that unlike german in english you always have subject - verb - object as a base and when adding stuff like time there are always strict rules.
14:50 is it common to stress the word "adjective" on the 2nd syllable, instead of 1st? Your version sounds very weird.
Yes it is :/ˈædʒɪktɪv/ not:/əˈdʒɛktɪv/
I wouldn’t say the sentence structure is stricter in German. The opposite might be the case. In German, you can change the word order as you like, as long as you don’t break the ‘Satzglieder,’ which are parts of a sentence that can’t be separated.
For example, take a simple sentence:
Das Kind geht in die Schule.
Which means:
The child goes to school.
In German, you can say:
• The child goes to school.
• To school goes the child.
If you say:
• Goes the child to school?
• Goes to school the child?
It’s also correct, but now it’s a question. (The second question sounds a little bit like it’s out of an old poem, but it’s not particularly wrong.)
I mean these are features in English which can be understood, but sound archaic. We tend to use "Does" to for questions, which no other Germanic languages do. No one says "Ba Ba Black Sheep, do you have any wool?"
Two points! First, that is not the English flag in your thumbnail.
Second, English did not split off from German in the 5th century. German did not exist in the 5th century. English is probably one or two centuries older than German which dates from around the 7th century.
Thanks for the comment!
1. I picked the American to make clear from the thumbnail that the video is about language, not about the German and English peoples
2. German existed since time immemorial, it was the dialect family spoken by Germans = the Germanic tribes. I don't care if it's "ancient pre-Germanic", it all counts as German to me, and it simply has evolved over time. English split off from German after Hengist and Horsa led the Saxons over the North Sea in the 5th century. Since then English has evolved apart from German, due to geographic separation, but also Frisian, Danish, and later French influence.
@@goodnesswithfists
Frisian is according to your logic a part of the German language though? Not only but also, so the English language was still influenced by German after the "split". Not meant to be mean, just got confused about this one aspect and might not have worded it elegantly 😅
@@goodnesswithfists you are mixing up "German" with "Germanic". English, like German, both come from an earlier Germanic language or group of dialects, to which we attach labels based on time and place in which they were supposedly spoken (proto-germanic, proto-west-germanic, etc). German isnt this original language in question, it has simply evolved frim it, the same way that English isn't Old English but evolved from it.
English can't be older than German any more than German can be older than English. They are both descendants of the same ancestral language.
It seems rather strange to think that different origins of the words in your language are a sigh of a powerful empire considering they were brought with the danish and french invasions. In russia we dont have articles, have much more vague, flexible word order than in english, a lot of words from different cultures and ages, does it make Russia a prospering powerhouse? I like your content and share the admiration of the anglo-saxon institutes, but sometimes linguistics is just linguistics.
P.s. Sorry for any mistakes, im no native speaker, hope the point is clear.
I hold the believe, that in German objects have gender for the purpose of being able to use "Er Sie Es" = "He She It" most often. If words have different genders, you can replace both, but if they share a gender it's ambiguous and you have to repeat the noun. It is impressive how rarely the subject and object of common sentences share the same. I don't have numbers, but it feels significantly less than 1 in 3.
Wow, found a new found appreciation for German.
English has one compound word that can be used in any situation: whatchamacallit.
Bro be cooking. Nice video.
As a German speaker who studied in England this explained something new to me. Often times I was confused why english speakers, who spoke no other German liked to use certain words like "Schadenfreude". Often they would emphasis that its great the Greman has "a word" for that concept. In the beginning I would immediatly reply: "Why don't yoi just say "damage pleasure" " and they would look very strangly at me.😅
Also saying the German has "a word " for it always felt strange to me. Its a compound word, not really just a word
Ich verstehe ehrlich gesagt auch nicht, warum die Angelsachsen in ihrem Sprachgebrauch sich nicht des eigenen Erfindergeistes bedienen
what did thex answer?
@@dorthesanchezz4227 I basically just agreed with the point, I feel like English speakers should have more courage to make up new words from our own language, like the schadenfreude example OP made
"dark pleasure" works in english and actually is more poetic. "I saw him fall and had dark pleasure"
This reminds me of a high school friend who was a bit eccentric and went on to study philosophy in university and suddenly she told me she had to start studying German to really understand German philosophy because of the need to understand the "essence" of each single word in a dense text like "The Phenomenology of Spirit" 😅
Ziemlich viel Vorurteil und Vereinfachung in diesem Beitrag, insbesondere beim Ausflug in die Rechtssysteme. Ein Beispiel für die Überhöhung angelsächsischer Überheblichkeit.
Naja es ist schon mal kein VORurteil, sondern höchstens ein Urteil über meine eigene Sprache. Auch im Rechtssystempart ist es viel mehr ein Urteil in meinem Fall und ich hätte es auch viel ausführlicher belegen können. Aber klar, vieles ist vereinfacht um dem Präsentationsformat eines kurzen UA-camvideos gerecht zu bleiben.
Aber komm ich disse Deutsch und English doch beide ungefähr gleichviel, also soll sich mal keiner beschweren. Mein Ziel war vor allem, dem Durchschnittsamerikaner (zu denen ich mich selbst mittlerweile zähle) den Charme und die Schönheit der deutschen Sprache näherzubringen und verständlicher zu machen.
@@goodnesswithfistsUnabhängig davon, was du mit welcher Motivation auch immer vermitteln willst, das Hauptproblem ist, dass du von deiner Wahrnehmung und deinen Gedanken ausgehst und dann linguistische Konzepte nimmst, um deinen Standpunkt zu unterstreichen.
Ich vermute da gar keine schlechten Absichten, aber sowas führt schnell zu Missinformationen.
Lustigerweise passt das Herangehen tatsächlich ganz gut zur alten idealistischen Philosophie deutscher Schule.
While your assessment on the foundation of the legal systems is most likely correct, I am not so sure if the impact on language was as large as you claimed: Old English had most of the same grammatical features (gender, cases, declension etc) but got rid of them over time, while German is linguistically more conservative. That may be due to some top down influences in the 19th century when French loanwords that had been perfectly established were purged out due to anti French sentiments (camouflage became „Tarnung“), but Germany also had significantly less immigration influencing it: England had both Old Norse and Middle French have a significant impact, while Germans were rather migrating out than other groups migrating in at that time.
Note also that the English vocabulary is specifically designed to „keep the peasants out“, since most specific vocabulary in law and science etc. is derived from Latin which the peasants did not speak, while only very few of these words in German are rooted in Latin - they are kind of self explanatory to a German speaker at a significantly higher degree.
"But the universe speaks English."
Now we know how physics went to shit following all the easy stuff having been done.
📖 Love your video! Though you might want to update the part about German gender after reading this - the whole "things look masculine/feminine" theory has a much more logical historical explanation:
Fun fact about German's der/die/das system - it actually has nothing to do with making things "masculine" or "feminine"! It's an ancient system for categorizing words based on their meaning and function.
The basic category (what we now call "masculine" with "der") was always the standard way to mark regular concepts. Over time, two specialized categories were added:
• "das" (neuter) to mark things that are the result of an action (like "das Gemälde" - a painting, which is the result of painting)
• "die" (feminine) to indicate abstract concepts (like "die Liebe" - love) and collections of things. This is why all plural forms in German use "die" - they represent the abstract concept of multiplicity!
So when German speakers use der/die/das, their brains aren't thinking "this chair looks manly" - they're unconsciously following these ancient patterns of organizing words. It's basically like having three different filing cabinets for organizing vocabulary!
That's why trying to guess a German word's "gender" based on what the object looks like never works - because it was never about gender in the first place! 😊
Thank you, and that's a very charming way to think about it!
If you want to read more in-depth about this topic and the German language in general, check out this German blog ‘Deutsch für Dichter und Denker - Genus’.
Sprechgesang is an interesting word, because on the one hand it could mean rap, but it also holds the schönbergian connotation of sprechgesang, which is far more nerdy
The "confidence" example shows an interesting feature of German: very nuanced meanings. It has an inherent precision in describing things or ideas.
There's a crucial detail missed in the spelling rules section, that being that german spelling, in its effort to be "written as it is said" does become based on habit because german is not only pronounced in one way, for example "gucken" where I live is still consistently pronounced as "gucken" and not as "kucken". Another example is "Rad" meaning wheel which is by most pronounced as "Rat" but it by others still pronounced as "Rad" and keeps this spelling despite it being incongruent with the majority as it helps understand morphological patterns suchs as "Rad" becoming "Räder" in the plural. English in contrast is also more rules based than one might think, the rules have more layers however due to becoming comprised of different languages and spelling systems so people struggle to parse them. In german this happens too when dealing with french loan words where the "v" which is generally pronounced as an "f" becomes a french "v" which has to be parsed by understanding the french origin of the word. This is a parallel to how understanding that a word is french can help you know if the "ch" in a word is like a "ch" or like a "sh" such as in "chauffeur" which mirrors the french spelling and approximates its pronunciation. Spelling in languages, especially languages that have strong foreign influence being fixed serves to provide clarity of the origin of words which helps understand how they should be used and other useful morphological aspects of the word. Taut and taught are indeed said the same but taught's ght ending clues me into it being morphologically related to teach since they follow similar spelling rules. These rules depending on how attentive one is and how much one cares can be more or less worthwhile and useful. But they do serve a purpose in many cases.
I think it is a bit reductive to sum up english spelling as habitual and german spelling as descriptive when they both incoporate these aspects but in different quatities.
German has grammatical gender
Tables are not male, they are masculine, there's a crucial importance in not confusing the two.
grammatical gender is made on the basis of the words shape and does not reflect any particular aspect of the word in many cases.
Nothing make "Forschung" female, it is feminine because the ending, the "ung" makes it feminine. Research is not feminine as a concept. German has many rules that force certain words to take on a gender based on endings and these do not reflect any aspect of its meaning.
Mädchen being neuter, not neutral, will still refer to a girl (female) and some people will even go as far as referring to the Mädchen with "sie" (equivalent to english she), but others may use the more grammatically correct "es" (more or less equivalent to it) simply because that is what the grammar would dictate and not a reflection of the person's view on gender, sex or views on the history of the word.
French similarly also has grammatical gender, split into masculine and feminine, these sometimes overlap with real world sex, such as femme (meaning woman) being feminine but also often don't such as bite (meaning penis) being feminine despite it being a male body part. Danish has grammatical gender too, it splits words into common and neuter. It is not a comment on any aspect of a word in 99% of cases besides grammatical rules. German has a plethora of rules which dictate the gender of a word based on its ending. It also has many which are undefined, such as "Nutella" not having a clear gender with people switching between masculine, feminine, and neuter based on area and dialect.
In some cases gender is used to differentiate between similar words. Like in french which differentiates between "la partie" the party or group, and "le parti" the political party. Or italian which differentiates between "il frutto" the scientific fruit, and "la fruta" which denotes a more vague idea of fruits sometimes in a culinary sense. "German differentiates
Grammatical cases and article declensions are used to clarify the purpose of a word in a sentence. In german which used to have less fixed sentence structure and which still allows and often requires you to move words around, having a marker for what is the subject and what is the object helps to clarify who is doing what to whom. English has remnants of this systems in some pronouns. (Who, whose, whom. He, his, him. etc.) and while it is by no means necessary in english due to its now very fixed sentence structure which allows the role of a word to be inferred from its position in a sentence, this cannot always be said for german. "Dich schlage ich" and "Ich schlage dich" mean "I hit you" but the order of the words is different, this can be done with pronouns in english but in german this can be done with most words to some extent and is useful not only in poetry but also to emphasise different parts of the sentence, "den Ente habe ich gefangen" (I caught the duck) puts emphasis on the duck whereas, "Ich habe den Ente gefangen" puts emphasis on me who has caught the duck despite meaning the same thing.
On the matter of sentence structure, german has quite free and open sentence structure, having declensions means words can move around much more in a sentence than in english. English having lost declensions relies on syntax, the order of words, to communicate the role of a word. English does allow one to play around with the sentence structure to some extent but is much more limiting by all accounts. The reason natives all speak in similar sentence orders is because it is grammatically required. Learners often mix up the order of words which makes them sound strange, but this is usually in sentences where the meaning can still be parsed from the words and context anyways. As sentences get more complex, it becomes increasingly necessary to follow syntactic rules for fear of confusing the listener/reader. English being understandable when spoken incorrectly should not be misunderstood as english having free syntax.
Punctuation in english has a long history and does have rules. However they are rules largely based on reflecting speech and the rhythm of sentences. The commas exist of course to divide items in lists (one, two, three, and four) or to make comments (the boy, despite his young age, did this and that). The comma however also is used to divide sentence parts to follow distinctions that might be made in speech (eat that boy vs eat that, boy). Commas most importantly divide sentences up, giving clear indicators of where one clause ends and another begins. Commas in german fulfil a more perscribed role as they must follow after certain words and sentence structures and the rules are more clearly defined and understood throughout the german speaking world such as needing a comma to mark a subordinate clause (Ich denke, dass das nicht gut ist) here the "dass" marks the start of the subordinate clause and require a comma before it. German still can use commas to divide sentences and make comments just like in english.
Honestly, the point on german being designed to "ward off normies" or being "not optimal for communication" is just strange. German having verbs at the end of the clause does not have to do with any semblance of optimal communication it is simply a remnant of older subject object verb sentence structures which used to be common throughout europe. German is usually subject verb object nowadays however, in spoken speech where people do not have the luxury of time especially, people often go against the grammar which might ask one to place active verb at the end of a sentence when an auxiliary is present and simply place the verbs at the start for clarity. German placing a verb at the ending is not any more hard to understand than the approximately 40% of languages worldwide which use subject object verb word order for the majority of sentences including, latin, japanese, korean, mongolian, turkish, quechua and which happens to be the most common word order in the world. In europe it is relatively rare having been superseeded by subject verb object but this is simply a matter of circumstance and not a proof that one is more or less viable for communication.
English being lingua franca has very little to do with america's status as a major power and far more to do with rampant colonialism in europe, which Britain, with its overwhelming navy, was by far the most succesful at. Britain would nearly always force english to be spoken to in regions it had colonised and this caused it to become lingua franca in many parts of the world. America's importance as a superpower does help, but it only strengthens the foundation that was built by the british. There are many other languages which are equally if not more influential in other parts of the world which act as regional lingua francas such as chinese languages throughout china and the states surrounding it, french in most of central africa, arabic in the arab world. One should not overstate the presence of english nor should one attempt to diminish its admittedly quite complex grammar which while quite easy to understand for english speakers and speakers of other indo-european languages is completely alien to many languages all over the world and by no means simplistic.German has many varieties and people are good at making out what people mean even if the grammar isn't entirely in line with one's own grammar, whether that be through error or simple dialectal difference. English is very similar and due to its influence being so vast, it has also taught english speakers to try to read between the lines and infer meaning where grammar does not suffice. This is by no means unique to english, it is a result of people trying to understand each other.
After writing all this I am considering that this may all have been a thinly disguised shitpost but allas I have fallen for this one.
Keep it coming!
Also the rule base and word creation tendency is shared by German with many other Euro languages. Besides, modern German has become very uncreative and just fills up on English, which has also made German spelling confusing as it incorporates English spelling now.
Bro it’s crazy how aggressive you sound as you’re trying to justify why German doesn’t sound aggressive 😂
*Der Kommentarbereich wurde von der deutschen Bundesrepublik für den englischen Sprachverkehr freigegeben!*
The changing of order with the object is a cool advantage. You could say “Ich bin über die Autobahn gefahren“ (I was driving on the Autobahn) or “Gefahren bin ich über die Autobahn“ (Driving was I on the Autobahn) and its still a valid sentence
In german as in a lot of languages with genders the gender of the word is mostly conditioned by the ending of the word. As a gendered language speaker you just "feel" it. If a word in german ends with an "e" (pronounced like a in apple) you just feel that it's feminine. A lot of girls' names end with an e. It's just the way it is. -Er is mostly masculine, -schaft is feminine, -um is neutral. It is so in a lot of languages. In my native one if a word ends with an "a" (pronounced like a in car) it's very unlikely it would be masculine
Your example of the Oxford comma could be better - it doesn't tell the reader if Lloyd and Marian are your parents or not. I offer this as a better example: "I'd like to thank my parents, Donald Trump, and Madonna". There are three distinct entities being thanked in this sentence. Without the Oxford comma after Trump, the speaker's parentage is highly suspect! 😂😂😂
Spelling in German is not always logically consistent. The only language I know where spelling is strictly kept to the way a word is pronounced, is Italian.
As an English speaker learning German, I've come to see the sense of descriptive nouns - krankenwagen is better than ambulance - and the value of spelling as pronounced or v.v. Against that is the needless gender ascription to nouns, adjectives, and possessive pronouns. I can't really see the gain here. While the native German adult has no problem, both foreigners and young German children have to be corrected/taught. An inconsistency in the much vaunted German logic? In the rare cases where confusion might be avoided, surely ambiguity is easily clarified otherwise. The matrix of articles, pronouns etc could be dispensed with. I am impressed with the German ability to reform spelling and generate native equivalents of foreign words (self-descriptive, of course!) I wish English would update its medieval spelling to match modern pronunciations, but sadly most attempts haven't gained traction. An interesting video, thanks!
When it comes to pronunciation, you're discounting just how consistent Spanish is. The only inconsistency I can think of is whether c makes a "k" sound or a "s" sound. Even then, you can usually infer what it sounds like from practice. Por ejemplo: conversación
La consonante C se pronuncia de 2 formas distintas en español: se corresponde con el sonido /Ɵ/ delante de las vocales E - I (cerilla, cien) y, con el sonido /k/ delante de A - O - U (casa, coche, cuadrado), delante de consonante: L o R (clase, cráneo) y al final de sílaba (bloc).
So spanish has the same inconsistency as english with that letter.
Why is it "circus" and not "cirkus", or "sircus", or like in german "zirkus"
Basically the result of loanwords. English already has "s" and "k" for those sounds, but latin loanwords would come with a c, so english got a c.
Same with "q", "y" and "j", they don't need to exist in english, but loanwords, mostly latin and french use them.
And there are other letters that used to exist and would make sense to be brought back. Especially since they represent distinct sounds that don't have their own letters now.
Ðat ƿaȝ iou kould ƿrite perfektlȝ fine english ƿiþout using ƿeird foreign letters, instead iou use english letters.
@@HappyBeezerStudios It is close to 100% consistent. If you know the rule and read a word, you know how to pronounce it.
Regarding gender and articles in German.
The article does not always denote the gender of a specific thing.
Especially regarding objects which are rationally neutral but may have masculine or feminine articles.
Regarding the word Mädchen:
When we add the suffix „-chen“ it is the cute or small version to the thing.
So „das Mädchen“ which is „the (neutral) girl“ came from „die (feminine) Magd“, which means woman or female servant.
Not to forget animals where the generic might be gendered.
generic cat is feminine
generic dog is masculine
Very well done.
2:56 You say that Selbstbewusstsein means self-consciousness as in knowing oneself. But self-consciousness doesn't mean knowing oneself! It means being aware of oneself, but not aware as in aware of your own character, but aware as in having your attention directed onto that thing in the current moment (whether you know it well or not). That's why self-consciousness is generally negative: it's probably good and comforting to have knowledge of yourself, but it's not normally comforting to be the centre of attention, to have everyone staring at you. (Although maybe that's the difference, Germans famously like staring, do they also like being stared at? 😂)
German here lol, do we like being stared at? (I can only answer for myself ofc):
There's different kinds of stares. When I was on good terms with my crush at school, she'd stare (back lol) at me lovingly, smiling.
When things got rough, her stares we're neutral.
Later, they were angry.
So it really depends whether you like stares on what expression the stare carries 😄.
Spanish is even more beautifully phonetic, and they incorporate English words by adapting the spelling:
Football = fútbol
Sweater = suéter
Czech too
Football = Fotbal
Sweater = Svetr
Very well put, my good man!
In terms of word order, Modern English is much more strict than German. In English, every sentence is subject-verb-object.
"_I have_ recently _bought_ flowers for my mother at the store" has a key structure that can't change: "_I have bought_ flowers". I can emphasize aspects of this sentence by putting them at the front, as a sort of pretense: "At the store, _I have_ recently _bought_ flowers for my mother." or "Recently, _I have bought_ flowers for my mother at the store." or "For my mother, _I have_ recently _bought_ flowers at the store."
In German, you can freely switch between subject, object and other parts of speech due to the declension of nouns and conjugation of verbs. The only fixed part of speech is the verb, which does follow one rule: Verbzweitstellung, which means the verb is at the second position (in main clauses*). If the verb consits of multiple parts, only the main part stays at the second position and all other parts are put at the end of the sentence. "have bought" is "habe gekauft" in German.
"_Ich habe_ letztens meiner Mutter Blumen im Laden _gekauft_." can become:
"Letztens _habe ich_ meiner Mutter Blumen im Laden _gekauft_."
"Im Laden _habe ich_ meiner Mutter letztens Blumen _gekauft_."
"Im Laden _habe ich_ letztens meiner Mutter Blumen _gekauft_."
We can also switch the place of "meine(r) Mutter" and "Blumen", if we adjust the articles:
"_Ich habe_ letztens im Laden Blumen für meine Mutter _gekauft_.", etc.
However, the combination "Letztens _habe ich_ im Laden meiner Mutter Blumen _gekauft_" could be ambiguous, as "im Laden meiner Mutter" can both mean "at the store, for my mother" or "at my mother's store" - if German articles were more different in declension, we could get rid of this ambiguity and have even freer word order.
*In subclauses, the verb is always at the end: "The store, where _I have bought_ flowers for my mother once, is open" becomes: "Der Laden, wo ich einmal meiner Mutter Blumen _gekauft habe_, ist geöffnet."
This is actually a feature that English also had, which you can see in Shakespeare's texts. "The store is open, where once flowers for my mother _I have bought_." was a correct way of saying it in ye olden times.
11:18 Why are car brands used with the maskuline gender? My explanation:
unspecified car/automobile -> Das Auto
Der BMW, Mercedes, Toyota, ... -> Der Wagen (especially: Der VW: Volkswagen)
Die BMW, Kawasaki, Ducati, ... -> Die Maschine ('engine', these are all motorcycles, differentiated by the article.)
This 'rule' also extends to loanwords like Der Truck (Lastwagen), Der Computer (Rechner), Das Smartphone/Android/iPhone (Telefon), Das Katana (Schwert), etc.
i.e. find the German categorization or translation and use its article.
... still haven't found out why Die File (Datei) sounds wrong, as I am used to Das File (Programm?) / Der Folder (Ordner)
Never heard File being used either way. It was always just Datei or Programm. So it'd be the same phenomenon as with Nutella, if File has become a loanword. Maybe Duden knows? Folder is also rare to hear
Duden says das or der. Having the grammatical gender derived off of "Aktenordner" as translation for the English word file for the masculine article or the other meaning "Aktenbündel" for the neutral article. Though the entry also talks about the origin of the English word in French, but that's beside the point of the gender of the anglicism File in German
It gets extra funny when you take english loanwords, but work at them with german grammar rules.
Is it "downgeloaded" or "gedownloaded"?
It's a side effect of working in IT with partly international teams.
It gets even worse on projects in special fields, we decided to leave business terms ("Amtsdeutsch") in our program code as is and use English only for the technical stuff...
@@HappyBeezerStudios Would you say "Ich downloade" oder "ich loade down"? I suspect the former. Therefore the "ge" has to go at the beginning, "gedownloaded".
The thing about having verbs near the end of dependent clauses in German is what I hate the most about it as an English speaker. I have looked at other languages, such as Swedish and Norwegian and they don't do this. I also speak spanish also and it also doesn't do that. I mean you can, but that's more of a stylistic thing. I put also too many times. Oh well. Anyway, holding so much info about a noun, its properties, and any other nouns in my head before I get to find out what happens to it isn't always easy. You get used to it, but it's tough. I most noticed it when I was reading a german text and live translating it into english on the phone for someone. I had to read entire sentences before I could say it in english, because I didn't always know what the nouns were doing, and the english sentence needs a verb almost always before the german version needs it. You get my point. But anyway, great video and thanks for the discussion about this fascinating topic
Japanese is the same. Most nouns are descriptions of the object.
I assume that goes for most languages. Except for English.
Do you have the Armageddon instrumental from kollegah as background music ? 😂😂😂
Yes it's all Kollegah beats from beginning to end 😂 As an homage to that master of the German language
@@goodnesswithfists K o doppel l e g a h. Ich dachte mir, komisch irgendwie bekomme ich gerade Nostalgie. Und dann hats klick gemacht 😂
@@SJJKH-x2p Genau der Effekt den ich erzeugen wollte
Sometimes English does it the German way and I love it, but we tend to draw a hard line at compounding more than two words before we just decide to steal it from French or something instead.
Why? I dunno, people decided it sounded cringe in English for some reason.
Old English is a German dialict, l love Old English, but when England was conquered, French was the official language in England, which was changed to French, and stayed that way 300 years. There is a heavy French influence. Originally, English was written in Runes, in which each letter is an image, a meaning, a sound.
Why is there Bossaura from Kollegah at 1:50?
Finally someone comments on the beats! It's all from Kollegah, as an homage to Germany's greatest Sprechgesangskünstler, bei dessen Belletristik selbst Goethe und Schiller sagen würden: "Hut ab!"
Bossaura kann ich natürlich auch nach jahrelangem Aufenthalt in Amerika immer noch auswendig
Einfach fantastisch!
Dankeschön!
It's amusing how German, one of the easiest languages in the world, looks like some kind of epic elven elderspeech, when compared to English :D
Das englischsprachige Raumschiff hat jedoch einen großen Rückspiegel, wo man die Frontscheibe vermuten sollte. Denn man kann ja nie wissen ...
I like these memes that compare romance words, and english with a romance loanword, and a germanic language
ukrainian: zoloto
russian: zoloto
serbian: zlato
english gOlD wooo, wacky
Der Kolle Rettungsschwimmerbeat im Hindergund xD
@@hermannpaschulke1583 Freut mich, dass es jemand bemerkt :D Eine Hommage an den Überboss
German: the definition in the word
Chinese: the definition in the kanji
Why must people speak German extra aggressive? Can they not speak normal?
Es ist schmerzhaft sich von einem Voruteil zu lösen.
Die Amis sind mit Filmen aufgewachsen in denen der Bösewicht erst aggressiv deutsch rumbrüllt um dann in einem grauenhaften Akzent englisch sprechenend einen Grammatikfehler an den anderen zu reihen ..
Die allermeisten erkennen das Klischee nicht und nehmen das Stilmittel als bare Münze!
*NEIN! NEINNEINNEINNEIN!!*
Maybe you should stop getting your idea of German from memes and WW2 movies.
Ironically, everyone does speak German normally. YOU are the problem! The entire rest of the world likes to portray German as an inherently aggressive language solely because of WW2. If you don't believe me you can read Mark Twain's light-hearted book on how German is a comically flabby language (something that many English speakers think about, say, Dutch today).
"I think that a description of any loud, stirring, tumultuous episode must be tamer in German than in English. Our descriptive words of this character have such a deep, strong, resonant sound, while their German equivalents do seem so thin and mild and energyless. Boom, burst, crash, roar, storm, bellow, blow, thunder, explosion; howl, cry, shout, yell, groan; battle, hell. These are magnificent words; the have a force and magnitude of sound befitting the things which they describe. But their German equivalents would be ever so nice to sing the children to sleep with, or else my awe-inspiring ears were made for display and not for superior usefulness in analyzing sounds. Would any man want to die in a battle which was called by so tame a term as a SCHLACHT? Or would not a comsumptive feel too much bundled up, who was about to go out, in a shirt-collar and a seal-ring, into a storm which the bird-song word GEWITTER was employed to describe? And observe the strongest of the several German equivalents for explosion--AUSBRUCH. Our word Toothbrush is more powerful than that. It seems to me that the Germans could do worse than import it into their language to describe particularly tremendous explosions with. The German word for hell--Hölle--sounds more like HELLY than anything else; therefore, how necessary chipper, frivolous, and unimpressive it is. If a man were told in German to go there, could he really rise to thee dignity of feeling insulted?"
-The Awful German Language, Mark Twain
@@enricobianchi4499 Du merkst aber schon, dass genau das auch die Aussage des OP war? Der regt sich über genau das selbe auf wie Du! 🤦♂️
Schwer zu glauben, dass jemand die deutsche Sprache mag... Danke!
Ich liebe die Sprache und vermisse mein Heimatland - darum das Video!
Do think Middle English would be more similar to German in translating and representing speech compared to Modern English? Especially before the vowel shift.
Interestingly middle english is the hardest for me to understand.
I get early modern english just fine, and old english isn't too hard either, it's basically weirdly pronounced german.
English? easier? It isn't. Absolutely not. How is it easier to learn something that only is governed by custom rather than clear rules that apply most of the times? "The universe" also only speaks math. English is what one would consider a pdigin language that was elevated to something more. A mixture.. arbitrarily mixed together to the smllest common denominator and thus it actually is, in my eyes, a learning disability if you have learnt it as a native language, simply because it lacks the concepts that countless other languages share.
Hahah that's a good one: English ="pidgin language that was elevated beyond its station", better than my expression from the video: English = "caveman talk with large vocabulary"
It's easier to learn than German though, in the same way it's easier to acquire a casual habit than to learn mathematical theorems with all their corollaries and lemmas.
Also - you're speaking it.
@@goodnesswithfists I am speaking it because i surrounded myself with it - i would speak any other language just a well if i surrounded myself as much with it. German etc is difficult to learn for ENGLISH SPEAKERS - but say a Frenchspeaker will have much less trouble. Simply because it shares many concepts that english does not. It is always easier to get used to to something primitive, if you are sued to something highly complex, rather than teh other way around.
Not just an elevated pidgin language, but an elevated pidgin language that has continued to evolve, but hasn't updated it's written form in centuries.
Using modern english is basically randomply putting together latin, french, danish, german, and a bit extra-eurpoean, written how the words were pronounced in the middle ages.
This is a great video. Most of the rules only came with the nationalization in the 19th century by the Prussians, before that there was much more uncontrolled growth in the German language. Even sentence structure was still open. Today's standard German is the sum of all German dialects.
18:02 Roman Law is still a part of a German Law Degree
English became the universal language not because it's "easier", but because it was the language spoken by the British Empire and the current world superpower, the USA. Before them, French was the lingua franca, and before French, Latin was.
So saying that English is the global lingua franca because it's "easier" than the other languages sounds a bit disingenuous and doesn't match with the current linguistic consensus (how difficult a language is depends on how close your first language is to the target language, and how much exposure you get from it).
Besides that, I still enjoyed most of the video, and, while I disagree with the conclusion, I still think the video is great.
(Sorry if I sound a little harsh, English isn't my first language so I have some difficulty expressing myself sometimes).
So english is a combination of languages while german is its own thing
Excellent
Is that the English flag then?
I picked the American to make clear from the thumbnail that the video is about language, not about the German and English peoples
@goodnesswithfists English, of or pertaining to England.. Could use the Austrian flag for German next time.. Since many speak it there. Anyway, I'm not as grumpy as I sound but I definitely don't understand your reason but wish you all the best in the adventures of the language the Americans invented😊
Actually for vehicle brand names, the gender also carries meaning:
Der BMW: car
Die BMW: motorcycle
@@__christopher__ I didn't even realize! One would have thought that Das Motorrad would make it Das BMW for the motorcycle.
No the girl is not neuter but the diminutive form -chen.
Fair point, I should have said "small things are of neutral gender"
yeah like window vs Fenster.. uh, what?
Looks like a call for a defenestration. Find the word window in that.
Yeah, the "Windauge" has fallen out of use a long time ago. Unlike the "Bullauge", BTW.
So german is like native american languages where they name things literally lol
how many grammar rules english and german have has nothing to do with law, linguistics is a separate field that evolves essentially arbitrarily. plus, having "more" grammar rules is not a thing, if you say having v2 verb position is a rule I could say not having it is also a rule...
pretty sure "Mädchen" is just the word Maid with the chen suffix and that's why it's neutral gendered (Maid would be female)
Yep. Mädchen is the diminutive of "die Magd," maid in the sense of maiden, not servant. Though Magd isn't used any more and at most Fräulein is used, which is also going out of favour. Because still classifying some women as young and unmarried is not appropriate/needed any more.
@@MrDiarukia no i am pretty sure it's based off the word Maid, not Magd
@@GBlockbreaker Magd is the German word for maid. "Maid" is not a word in German.
@@gokbay3057 Maid is absolutely a word in german, it's not used anymore because Mädchen and Frau have completely replaced it but everyone knows of the term "holde Maid"
@@GBlockbreaker I'll admit that I was mistaken about "Maid" not existing as a German noun after further research.
But that research still indicates that Mädchen most likely derives from Magd (even giving Mägdchen as an obsolete form/historical link between them) rather than Maid.
I posted a comment earlier but removed it because it felt a little too snarky, but I wanted to rephrase my message. This video, while entertaining and at time presenting accurate surface-level information about how German and English function, has quite a few problems with its linguistic assertions and prescriptive conclusions. I want to try to respond point by point here and break down some of my critiques and how it is somewhat problematic to push some of these claims. My response is quite lengthy and essay-like, so if you are turned off by reading long explanations or analysis, this might not be the comment for you. If you think this is ridiculous or unnecessary, I understand (if you need to send a short -worded rebuke, that's fine), but I think constructive criticisms in relation to topics of science or worldly understanding is healthy for furthering interest and accuracy in topics/sciences such as linguistics.
Starting with Krankenwagen and Naturwissenschaft, I think to claim that Krankenwagen or Naturwissenschaft alone can explain how the words themselves are used and their semantics is questionable at best. Take Krankenwagen, which as you mentioned comes from Kranker (a sick person) and Wagen (“wagon” but also “car” and vehicle”), and let’s say hypothetically you have never seen a Krankenwagen or ambulance ever, but you know what a Kranker/sick person is and what a Wagen/vehicle/wagon is. How would you know whether someone is talking about a Wagen that is a car or a wagon? How would you know the purpose of the Wagen is for? How would you know what role the sick person/Kranker has in relation to the Wagen? How would I know it is not a horse-drawn wagon that brings people sick people to their burial pits as much as it would be a gasoline-power red and white truck that brings sick people to a hospital. The answer is I would not without external context or clarification. What about the word Krankenwagen indicates a “gasoline-power truck with a big area in the back filled with various medical equipment driven by specialized paramedics who studied for years at a university, who drive people who are sick/injured/dying to a place called a hospital in order to treat said ailment or injury”? The answer is still nothing, and I would know nothing outside of Wagen and Kranker (assuming I understood all the possible meanings of those in German without knowing of hospitals, paramedics and ambulances).
A similar thing would apply to Naturwissenschaft. Of course we have Natur (which is a 'dreaded' loanword itself) and Wissenschaft deriving from Wissen (to know) and -schaft (-hood/ship). If we looked at the bare semantic meaning of Naturwissenschaft and translated it into English we would get “knowledge of nature”, which is not quite what science/natural science/Naturwissenschaft mean. A lumberjack or hunter might have knowledge of nature however that does not make them natural scientists or auf Deutsch Naturwissenschaftler. Likewise would a German seldom describe a Jäger or Holzfäller being naturwissenschaftlich despite the word etymology itself indicating a plausible connection between the two. Naturwissenschaft and science although stemming from roots relating to “to know” or “wissen” are quite distinct categorically and in their use. Their etymologies indicate their origin and perhaps reasoning why they now are used where they are used, but it is not really helpful at saying what their current definitions or usages may be. Words are not bound by their past and often evolve past what their original meaning might have been. Sometimes, words are only tangentially related to their previous meanings, (Natur)Wissenschaft might be someone related in a semantic context to 'wissen' but it is no longer solely about knowing or knowledge. The google definition of ‘science’ is quite explanatory: “the systematic study of the structure and behavior of the physical and natural world through observation, experimentation, and the testing of theories against the evidence obtained.” As I said, relating to knowing or knowledge, but it itself is neither of those two solely.
I am not fully sure of your “confidence” argument however, as you said, you can say just confidence, self-trust, self-assurance, future-confidence, self-confidence/aplomb, and self-consciousness or self-awareness in relation to Selbstbewusstsein. These are all possible and acceptable words to use in English (in my opinion), and I really do not see how the German ones provide any more innate insight than the English correlates. If the complaint is loanword influence, then do not look at German Selbstsicherheit because sicher itself is an old Germanic loanword from Latin sēcūrus (from the same origin as English “sure”). Is it so much better to say “self-sureness” than “self-assurance”? Both have “sure” in their root, which is a really common word in English. Same with Rap versus Sprechgesang (which also has meanings outside of American “rap” music itself). I really do not have any personal problems with German speakers calqueing or forging new words to describe phenomena, but saying Sprechgesang is somehow better than saying Rap is not really a statement about reality but rather a personal prescription, which is fine, I suppose, but not really anything objective or scientifically grounded.
English speaker form new words all the time as well, but like you said it is frowned upon more, especially in primary/secondary school. English compounding is quite common as in German but usually English speakers do not perceive compounded words as one due to orthography. German: Unabhängigkeitserklärung vs. English: Independence declaration. Sure, you could remove the space or insert a hyphen and say: Independencedeclaration or Independence-declaration, but English speakers while writing tend to prefer the space, just as German speakers could say Unabhängigkeits-Erklärung or Unabhängigkeits Erklärung, but tend to prefer the merged form. Take French where compounding is not grammatically permissible: Déclaration d'indépendance, which is very similar to English: Declaration of independence or German: Erklärung von Unabhängigkeit (though, the German example is quite rare if not odd to hear). However, one can still say “that nation released its independence declaration” as well as “that nation released its declaration of independence”, although the latter would sound quite off in my opinion since I would think of the American Declaration of Independence, aka the specific document, and compounding would be an easy way to distinguish from that document.
I think the spelling part is also quite misleading. German: ä, ö and ü all come from ae, oe and ue with the “e’s” for each initially being written above the letter and then shifting to the two dots likely for ease when writing. Eszett or ß comes from the s (specifally the long s “ſ”) and the “z” merging together, which is much easier to identify when seeing Fraktur letters. English also uses the “W” quite frequently which did not exist in Latin, which derives from the double uu. German also shares the “W”, along with a lot of other European languages, but it is not exist in ancient Latin. “J” is also did not technically exist in Latin and is a spin-off of “i”, but this alteration is not unique to English.
English spelling is pretty phonemically inconsistent, but I would not claim German is phonetically consistent either (it is however much more phonemically consistent). The reason for its lack of phonetic consistency can be seen in the word “Reich”. The phonemes of “Reich” can be broken down as such: [r][ei][ch], three phonemes for three combinations of letters, all of which translate to their phonemes in other contexts. [r]ahm (Rahm), z[ei]t (Zeit) and stor[ch] (Storch). However, these phonemes indicate nothing of how speakers pronounce these phonemes, merely that there are these phonemes. The /r/ could be a velar fricative, uvular fricative, uvular approximant, uvular trill, alveolar tap, alveolar trill or even an alveolar approximant. Seeing the letter “r” alone gives no indication how it might be pronounced. Same could be said for “ch” which has quite a lengthy and complicated history in German and is by no means indicative of any one certain sound. Sure, it could be a palatal fricative (many German have it as such, especially in Standard German), but that by no means indicates uniformity. Many Swiss German speakers lack the palatal fricative and solely use the velar~uvular fricative which is primarily seen in Standard German following back-vowels. German is also well know for having massive geographical differences in how people speak or what it means to speak ‘properly’. Go ask Germans how to pronounce the long “ä” in “während”, and you will get a whole Mischung of “correct” answers.
English “splitting off” from German is also quite linguistically false and misleading. The concept of what we consider German to be did not exist at least til the 700-900s and is long after English split off from Proto-West Germanic. Modern Standard German is even newer, likely beginning in its literary form around the 1500-1600s and arriving in its spoken form during the late 1800s to early 1900s. Saying Proto-West Germanic is German or even Proto-Germanic is German is also quite misleading and false. Proto-Germanic was primarily spoken in modern Scandinavia and some parts of nowadays Northern Germany, so from a geographic standpoint, very German biased. Proto-West Germanic is the ancestor language(s) of of course German, Dutch, Frisian and English, and when you look back at reconstructions of it, it becomes quite clear that it is not Modern German nor does Modern German necessarily resemble it better than any of the other West Germanic languages. It is its own thing.
Also saying German is more complex than English is quite misleading too. It really depends on which areas of grammar one looks. Complexity in one area is not exactly indicative of complexity in every area, and it is easy to cherry-pick complexity within either language. Also saying English has “caveman-level grammar” is quite silly. As previously mentioned, English grammar can be more simplified in some areas and more complex in others. Take the distinction of “I am making” vs “I make”. In German, both can be expressed by “ich mache” and to express the continual aspect either requires context like “jetzt mache ich Kekse” or the adverb “gerade” - “ich mache gerade Kekse”. Either way, this is a pretty concrete example of English having a more complicated aspectal system than German with having separate grammatical forms for the habitual and the continuous. There are more as well for both English and German, but it is quite rash to assume that one is more complex or simplified based on cherry-picked examples.
Also saying English is easier than German is debatable and generally dependent on various factors like income, first-language, exposure to English/German, etc. Someone living in rural Bavaria as a second language speaker will have a much easier time learning German than a Russian speaker learning English solely through primary/secondary school. Language simplicity and grammar is high depended on the aforementioned factors and cannot be singled down to grammar, spelling or pronunciation alone; it’s all dependent on the self and one’s own circumstances.
People have already critiqued the sentence structure judgement here, and it is not really worth bringing it up. I would say though, that both English and German have equivalent “freedom” in sentence construction, at least freedom to adequately and functionally express oneself. Freedom of the placement of the verb/subject/object/etc can vary between the two, but one can always find restrictions in one and freedom in the other when directly comparing syntactic word order.
Punctuation does not really have to do with spoken language, and it is mostly just a writing preference/style. There is no objective correct way to use punctuation, every writing standard is built upon norms and habit. Whether we believe those norms and habits to be “objective” is up to the individual speaker, but from a scientific perspective there is no correct norms or habits outside of those we tell ourselves.
The legal system argument is… compelling, yet irrelevant unfortunately for linguistic change and overall language use. There just is not sufficient evidence to indicate any legal determinism linguistically. Language usage and evolution existed long before and probably after our modern legal systems. Even prescriptivist institutions like L’Académie Française can only prescribe word spelling and grammar rules which they themselves deem ‘fit’ for proper usage. Unfortunately, they are powerless to broader language change and is evident through their negative framing of current language change like English borrowings, grammar shifts and so on. These institutions also do not realize that language change is driven by human social interaction and upbringing and throwing on regulations and prescriptions top-down does not prevent this from happening. If it did, people would not be griping about anglicisms in both French and German. As for orthographic prescriptions, you are free to spell however you want. You might face social pressure and or backlash, but those are not linguistic restrictions rather social ones. If you want to spell “Rindfleisch” as “rintflaish” or “RinntFlæysc”, more power to you. It is a question of social pressure rather than being some innate feature of the language to uphold linguistic authority prescriptions. Both German and English are still languages “made” from below, because linguistic change and norms generally aren’t driven by scholars or academics but rather everyday people, who might be told how to write or speak, but are at the end of the day ultimately free to choose how they wish to express themselves. Here is also a good Simon Roper video on the subject: ua-cam.com/video/Gp-bsOXbMNY/v-deo.htmlsi=b7oYhONMhq9EJv-Z
If you read all of that, I thank you, especially for a UA-cam comment. As I said, your video is quite entertaining and made me laugh at points. I do not wish this to be insulting either your own knowledge or personal experience, but rather to show my perspective as someone who studies linguistics and is passionate about English and German linguistics specifically. My goal here is ultimately to show my alternative perspective. I thank you for the video regardless and hope you continue on with language content.
Enjoyed that!
Oh yeah what about ski. How do you pronounce ski in German?
Good point... I guess we'll have to wait until this Norwegian loanword is properly eingedeutscht and we say Langflachschlittschuh instead
Why would you not count W as an added letter not from the Romans?
Wdym it's just a double U/double V???
Not really, that’s its origin, but it’s not what it *actually* is, the same way that ß is no longer a ligature of s and z, the same way ä is no longer an a with an e written on top of it, the same way ñ isn’t an n with another n on top of it.
@@insectoid_creature Ok, if we talk about how things actually are (which is fair), just google "standard Latin alphabet" - W will be shown as a part of it, but ü, ö, ä, ß will not be. We don't have to go deeper than that in my opinion, because my point in that part of the video was that the English simply agreed that both "u" and "ü" sounds can be represented by the letter u, whereas the Germans can't stand pronunciation ambiguity and so they insist on using "ue"/"ü" where needed.
Add another thing, english doesn't need the letters "c", "j", "q", "x" and "y"
But it would need the letters "þ", "ð", "ȝ" and "ƿ"
Because the way things are now, english has no pronounciation consistency. It all depends on where you grew up. Basically the local english dialect in your part of Britain, Ireland, New Zealand, India, South Africa, Australia, or North America.
But english can't even commit to just going with the flow. If it did, then it could really be written however you want.
On the other hand, nobody has an accent in english. They just speak their own local english dialect from a region where english is not natively spoken.
this made me relearn german, as a native speaker
I like languages, now I'm learning 🇫🇷🇷🇺🇯🇵😈
SAME
@Sanest_N25_And_DOA_Trio_Fan I learn by doing anki, and inmersion
Pretty good for a school assignment. Needs a LOT of work before publishing. Some good points, and a lot of doubtful chaff..
1. (Britsh) English DOES have an extra letter, the conflated A+E. I would also make the case that "th" is effectively a new letter, we didn't bother to steal the rune when we borrowed it from Norse but it is one of the few clusters that is consistent in pronunciation (and source of misery for 90% of all non-native speakers).
2. English spelling is so ropy because there was no co-ordination between which dialect form became standard (we spell words according to one dialect, and pronounce to another). Then there are the US/British differences, which usually break down to, spell as pronounced, or so we can see which language we took the word from.
3. English split just as it was getting "big" and neither branch has ever had anything like the French Academy to force regulation. Which is one reason why English can have 50 shades of grey (or gray, or at least 50 different words for it).
4. Other than getting the adjectives in the right order (which almost any native speaker, just KNOWS through some magic). There aren't too many laws how to order things. BUT, those comas are a big thing for keeping your meaning clear (the "Eats shoots and leaves" problem).
5. English and the Norse are both related to German, and both lost almost all the fancy conjugations (English probably learned this from Norse).
6. German compounds are often so unwieldy, that even Germans abbreviate them (which kind of defeats the purpose, if not as badly as say "rhyming slang") English (especially American) goes in big for Anagrams. Thus PanzerKampfwaggen (which is the SHORT form, check out the WWI version) becomes AFV (and "tank" is a sub-type).
7. English's other party trick is to make "foreign" words into similar-sounding combos of more familiar ones. Such as "Buckeroo" being nothing more than "Vaquero" run through a dozen Texas accents. Or about half the things Americans call "Dutch" actually being "Deutsch".
Yeah, throw out the letters, c, j, q, x and y and bring back þ, ð, ȝ and ƿ
And it's not just British and North American English. There is also South African English, Irish English, Indian English, Australian English and New Zealand English.
And yes, we do shorten things as well, which is why people say "Panzer" and "Auto", and "Laden" and "Handy" (and the last of these is even a translation quirk where the english adjective became a german noun with a vaguely adjecent meaning)
oh, and the german abbreviation for AFV would be PzKW, not to be confused with PKW, which means "Personenkraftwagen" ;)
@@HappyBeezerStudios You can also re-purpose y to replace þ, as is already done in pseudo-archaic names ("ye olde"). Maybe also do the same for the other old letters.
11:40 that is not quite true. for the most part it is due to the ending of a word. and to the extend, that it is true your wording is misleading.
Would love Ryan wass to see that video haha :D
The subreddit mentioned is cringe since subreddits aren't that big in Germany and have only grown quite a bit recently. They are not in any way relevant in actually shaping the everyday language (of younger people). Heck, pr0gram was likely more relevant when it was big. And nowadays it would be TikTok.
I wonder if German and old English have a common thread lol,
What ?! You don't have to use COMMAS in english???
@HappyBeezerStudios i get why you would want to have commas. But always during english exams i was scared where to place them. Because german is my first language
@HappyBeezerStudios i get why you would want to have commas. But always during english exams i was scared where to place them. Because german is my first language. And on top of that i dont know where to put comas in german
@@SJJKH-x2p just apply the German comma rules to English and it will be right probably 95% of the time.
The dativ is the genetive his death.
Indeed.
But in latin languages, "science" means "know," so the words also explain itself.
It explains itself in Latin and not in English. This is exactly the point of what he said.
That's the point, english is full of literalisms of other languages that english speakers do not understand
It's just that you don't say "I sciere that that means", or you don't study for your knowism test. The word only explains itself, if you know its roots.
A lot of "German is so pragmatic" up until you hit gender, then suddenly it's the Englishman dropping unnecessary stuff that's pragmatic and the German with tables of arbitrary declinations you 'just have to know' that's the weird one. I guess the moral of the story is that people in power like making rules to standardise those below them into tight little groups but individuals are consistently and unavoidably playful & messy, and the standardness of any one thing is just the current expression of the equation between those two poles.
But look at how much more nouns can be replaced by "Er Sie Es" He, She, It than in english.
If English is so easy, why is it so hard to learn for so many?
That's a stupid and hopefully satirical question. Be grateful that so many people speak it at all.
Because so many attempt to learn it in the first place.
While german nouns are a logical beauty, verbs are even more fucked up to memorize than english.
You know.. because german actually has something called "conjugation". Adding an s is really barely conjugation at all. Then agaain, english is even barely a language at all as well. It is a conglomerate of different languages, boiled to its smallest common denominator.
@@wasweiich9991i blame the french
@@wasweiich9991 you know, as a Russian language native speaker, I am kinda familiar with the concept of conjugation. I am also familiar with the concept of suffixes and prefixes, but in German for whatever reason, it seems that they change meaning of the word even more than in Russian.
How is having decent consistency between spoken and written language fuqed up?
@@Adoffka Not really. If you know the meaning of the prefix there are few cases where that is a porblem.
This is satire right? 😭