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Nadpis na youtube	Is German as bad as people say?
Url	https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VcekIrFjwe0
Stav	hotovo
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Súhrn	This video details Mark Twain's amusing critique of the German language, highlighting its lengthy words, complex grammar, and offering some playful reform suggestions.
Bloky súhrnu	00:00:00 - 00:05:00: This video explores Mark Twain’s critique of the German language, particularly its famously long words, questioning whether they truly make German “awful.” It examines examples like "Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz" and discusses a potential solution Twain proposed. 00:05:00 - 00:10:00: Incogni removes your data from broker sites, potentially within days, and continues to monitor for new appearances. Get a 60% discount with code ROBWORDS at incogni.com/robwords. The text then humorously critiques German grammar, focusing on its three genders and long, complex sentences. 00:10:00 - 00:15:00: German grammar, according to Mark Twain, presents challenges for English speakers due to verb piling, separable verbs split across sentences, and a complex pronoun system with gendered forms. Twain found these features confusing and even exasperating. 00:15:00 - 00:20:00: Mark Twain admired certain aspects of the German language, praising its capitalized nouns and finding some words exceptionally lovely. He also proposed eight humorous reforms to simplify it.
Prepis	00:00:00 - 00:00:21 00: This is one of my favorite little books. It contains an essay by the American novelist Mark Twain called The Awful German Language. Or in this rather ironic German translation of it, Die schreckliche deutsche Sprache. But is Mark Twain right? Is German truly awful? Let's find out in another Rob Words. 00:00:23 - 00:00:50 00: I've had a couple of German exams this week. I've now been living here in Berlin long enough to apply for German citizenship, but first I have to prove to the Vaterland that I've at least tried to learn the lingo. Mark Twain also spent time learning German over here under great difficulty and annoyance, as he put it, and appears to have concluded that he wasn't a fan. He reckoned a gifted person ought to be able to learn English in 30 hours, French in 30 days, and German... 00:00:51 - 00:01:17 00: in 30 years. However, he also reckoned he knew how to fix the German language, which we will discuss at the end. But what did Twain think was so wrong about German as to render it awful? And he meant awful in a bad way, not some antiquated filling you with awe way. So let's take a look at some of his points and see if German really is awful. Let's start off with criticism number one. 00:01:17 - 00:01:46 00: ludicrously long words. German is famous for its long words and with good reason. The way in which the language generates terms for new concepts by stitching together other terms to create monstrous mega-nouns is well documented. Perhaps you've heard tell of the fabled Donau-Dampfschifffahrts-Elektricitäten-Hauptbetriebswerkbau unter Beamten-Gesellschaft, the Association for Subordinate Officials of the Main Maintenance Building of the Danube Steamboat Company, which... 00:01:46 - 00:02:11 00: actually didn't exist. But the Danau Dampf Schifffahrtsgesellschaft really did. Then there's the notorious Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz, which was an actual law in one of the German states governing the labelling of beef that was in force until 2013. And these are just extreme examples of an everyday phenomenon here. Just today I was having to get my head around the Künstlersozialsversicherungsgesetz. 00:02:11 - 00:02:27 00: It doesn't matter what it means. And Mark Twain picks out even more examples of this in his little essay, like Waffenstillstandsunterhandlungen, which refers to ceasefire negotiations, and Generalstaatsverordnetenversammlung, which is a general state assembly. Twain's take is that... 00:02:27 - 00:02:47 00: these things are not words they are alphabetical processions he says that any learner encountering one of these monstrosities for the first time cannot crawl under it or climb over it or tunnel through it so he resorts to the dictionary for help but there is no help there and he is right you won't find many of these 00:02:47 - 00:03:09 00: really stupidly long words in a German dictionary because often they've just been coined in the moment to serve a specific purpose. It's like if I right now describe a never-before-said-because-I've-just-invented-it word, I've just invented that massive multi-hyphenated monstrosity of an adjective. So you're not going to find it in a dictionary, are you? And German words... 00:03:09 - 00:03:27 00: basically work like that but without the hyphens. Twain has a go at portraying what an English newspaper would look like if our language adopted the German approach and comes up with this. In the day before yesterday, shortly after 11 o'clock night, the in-this-town-standing-tavern-good-the-wagoner was downbert. 00:03:27 - 00:03:47 00: And he's really only slightly exaggerating. But what his English example shows us is something that you do need to bear in mind and that he doesn't really mention. And that's that these long German words are not difficult for Germans to read or German speakers. To us, they look like long jumbles of letters. But like day before yesterday, shortly after 11 o'clock... 00:03:47 - 00:04:03 00: They're easy to follow if you know the language, because the building blocks that make them up are very simple. It's just like reading a sentence, really. So I'm not convinced German's long words are quite the problem Mr Twain claims them to be, but nevertheless he says he has a solution to them. 00:04:03 - 00:04:29 00: which we'll get onto later in the video. But first, here's another juicy long German word for you. Datenschutzgrundverordnung. That is the German word for GDPR, the EU's big data protection regulation. The thing that means that all websites here in Europe have to ask you if they can collect your data the second you arrive on them. But even despite GDPR and outside of the EU, of course, we are constantly giving up our information when we use the internet. 00:04:29 - 00:04:49 00: But you can take back control of your data with this video's sponsor, Incogni. Companies called data brokers make their money by harvesting your personal information, phone numbers, email addresses, actual addresses, all sorts, then selling it on to whoever's willing to pay for it, meaning you have no control over who ends up with your information. 00:04:49 - 00:05:11 00: Ever wondered why you keep getting those robotic cold calls? How do they keep getting your number? Well, it's data brokers. And cold calling is just the tip of the iceberg of how your data can be misused. However, with Incogni, you can begin to put a stop to it. Incogni will contact dozens of known data brokers on your behalf and send them a request to delete your data. And if the broker objects... 00:05:11 - 00:05:39 00: Incogni will handle that too. After I signed up, Incogni managed to get my data removed by over 30 brokers within just a couple of days. Plus, it's going to keep on requesting removals every time it spots my information popping up somewhere new. Let Incogni do the same for you. Go to incogni.com slash robwords or use the special link in the description of this video and get a 60% discount on Incogni with the coupon code ROBWORDS. There's a 30-day money-back guarantee too, so you may as well give it a go. 00:05:40 - 00:05:43 00: Okay, let's look at another thing that arguably makes German... 00:05:43 - 00:05:47 00: The dreaded three genders. 00:05:47 - 00:06:09 00: German allocates one of three genders to every object. Each animal, vegetable, or mineral is either masculine, feminine, or neuter. And which one something is affects all the words around it. Straight up, it is a nightmare for the English-speaking learner. Because if you happen to guess the gender of something wrongly, a load of other elements in your sentence are going to be wrong as well. 00:06:09 - 00:06:23 00: And a lot of the time, you really are just guessing. As Twain puts it, every noun has a gender and there is no sense or system in the distribution. For example, he says, in German, a young lady has no sex, while a turnip has. 00:06:24 - 00:06:41 00: It's true that the German word for girl is neuter, whereas a turnip is feminine. What's more, though a man is grammatically masculine, his various bits and bobs are an array of all genders. Twain says, in Germany, a man may think he is a man, but when he comes to look into the matter closely... 00:06:41 - 00:06:58 00: he's bound to have his doubts. Twain is quite deliberately, I'm sure, conflating grammatical gender and actual gender. It is not unusual for them not to match up. For example, in Old English, this word for a woman was masculine and this word for one was neuter. Yes. 00:06:58 - 00:07:23 00: Old English had the same three genders as German has now. But English is the perfect example of how you can get rid of grammatical gender without it causing any problems. The only benefit of having it that I can think of is that you can use the same word for two different objects but still tell the difference. Zum Beispiel, for example. In German, the masculine der Leiter means the leader, whereas the feminine die Leiter means the ladder. 00:07:23 - 00:07:48 00: Handy, right? Well, not really. I mean, English shows that you can just duplicate words without the added complication of grammatical gender. My solution to German gender would be to just get rid of it. Doesn't that feel progressive and modern? But our 19th century pal Mark Twain has a different solution, as we'll see later in the video. The next awful aspect of German, to Mark Twain's mind anyway, is its ludicrously long sentences. 00:07:48 - 00:08:10 00: Markey clearly likes a good newspaper, but in late 19th century Germany he struggles to find a good newspaper because he has one big complaint. German journalists are obsessed with writing in the longest sentences possible, with subclause after subclause, parenthesis embedded within parenthesis. A point that Mr Twain makes with 00:08:10 - 00:08:31 00: this ridiculously long sentence. This isn't a problem limited to Mark Twain's time, though. From my experience, there is still a sense among some journalists here that a sign of a good writer is the ability to construct as long a sentence as possible while successfully tying up the loose ends before the full stop. It's not my cup of tea as a way of writing. Brevity is better. But... 00:08:31 - 00:08:48 00: you know whatever but what twain rightly takes particular objection to is the delayed gratification that very often comes with a lengthy german sentence german grammar dictates that if you want to use two verbs together like i want to go 00:08:48 - 00:09:11 00: you have to stick the second of those verbs, in that case to go, not straight after the first one, but right at the far end of the sentence. This means that you can be waiting a disconcertingly long time to find out what the key action someone is referring to actually is. For example, take the English, I would like to thank the old lady downstairs who often feeds my cats and is always so kind to me. 00:09:11 - 00:09:23 00: In German, you could very well write that like this. Ich möchte der alten Dame unten, die gelegentlich meine Katzen futtert und immer so nett zu mir ist, danken. But in the German... 00:09:23 - 00:09:44 00: The thanking doesn't get mentioned until the very end. If I were in fact announcing that I didn't want to thank the dear old lady downstairs who feeds my cats, but to kill her, you'd have to wait until the very end of the sentence to discover my evil intentions. Whereas in English, you'd know by the fifth word and probably have called the police by the end of the sentence. 00:09:44 - 00:10:05 00: This, by the way, makes live translating German speeches into English, for example, a nightmare, because the translator has to wait to the end of the German sentence to know how to even start the English one. And German grammar does not just dictate that the second verb you want to use goes to the end, but also any extra verbs you want to throw in. And, from an English speaker's perspective anyway... 00:10:05 - 00:10:29 00: In the reverse order, German is like English in that you're often required to pile verb upon verb if you want to construct a specific tense. So in English, say you've got to cook a big turkey dinner and you need to get the timings right for when to put the potatoes in, when the bird, etc. Well, if someone were to ask you how you were planning to manage your time, you could find yourself saying something like... 00:10:29 - 00:10:54 00: I am going to have to be boiling the sprouts by the time grandma arrives. I am going to have to be boiling. Count the verbs in there. One, two, three, four, five. All in a row. Now imagine four of those verbs coming way down at the other end of the sentence and in reverse order. Now... 00:10:55 - 00:11:17 00: pretty much looking at German. The verbs that we tend to co-opt to build these complex tenses in English are be, have, and will. And in German you have the same with their equivalents, sein, haben, und werden, and their various forms as well. And they just sort of end up piling up at the end of the sentence. This is another of Mark Twain's gripes. He talks about how after 00:11:17 - 00:11:30 00: After the verb, merely by way of ornament as far as I can work out, the writer shovels in harben sind gewesen gehabt, harben geworden sein, or words to that effect, and the monument is finished. 00:11:31 - 00:11:52 00: Now these verbs, and I suspect Mr Twain well knows it, are not ornamental. However, when you eventually get to some of them, it can sort of feel like you have already made your point and that continuing with them isn't necessary. The person you're talking to already gets what you mean. But don't worry, Mr Twain has a plan to fix this one too. 00:11:53 - 00:12:13 00: Stick around to find out. First, let's look at another arguably infuriating characteristic of German. It's separable verbs. German has another strange behaviour that's hard for English speakers to get their heads around. That is putting part of a word at the start of a sentence and the rest of it way down at the other end. 00:12:13 - 00:12:29 00: You can often break German verbs up because they have a bit at the start that is essentially a preposition, a little add-on to the verb that means something the equivalent of off or in or out or whatever. For example, to stand up is Aufstehen, which is literally upstand. 00:12:29 - 00:12:45 00: But sometimes German speakers will rip those two elements asunder and cruelly place them as far apart as possible. As Twain puts it, the wider the two parts of one of them are spread apart, the better the author of the crime is pleased with his performance. 00:12:45 - 00:13:05 00: He gives an example using the German verb Abreisen, which means to depart, but is effectively to away travel. Here you can see how it can be broken up in this bafflingly long German sentence that Twain says he found in a genuine novel, and which he helpfully renders into English for us. The trunks being now ready, he de... 00:13:05 - 00:13:27 00: After kissing his mother and sisters, and once more pressing to his bosom his adored Gretchen, who, dressed in simple white muslin with a single tuberose in the ample folds of her rich brown hair, had tottered feebly down the stairs, still pale from the terror and excitement of the past evening, but longing to lay her poor aching head yet once again upon the breast of him whom she loved more dearly than life itself. 00:13:28 - 00:13:28 00: hearted. 00:13:30 - 00:13:49 00: Now I would have zero chance of knowing which verb I started saying by the time I got to the end of that screed. It does seem bonkers to have, what, 70-odd other words between the beginning of a word and the end of it. Twain says, can anyone conceive of anything more confusing than that? Maybe not. 00:13:49 - 00:14:12 00: Let's look at Twain's next reason for damning Deutsch. It's pronouns. Now, if you think we have a pronoun problem in English, thou ain't seen nothing yet. We at least have a neat set of pronouns for me, distinct pronouns for you, for him, for her, for them, for us, and you can't really get them confused. However, German takes a characteristically more complicated approach. 00:14:12 - 00:14:30 00: Take the German for she, sie. Well, that is also the German for you, if you're being formal. And the German for they, it can also mean her and them and you if you're talking to multiple people as well. And as Mark Twain points out, it can also mean... 00:14:30 - 00:14:47 00: it because if you want to use it in german it has to match up with the gender of the thing that you're referring to if we return to a good lady turnip from earlier in the video in german you wouldn't say i tasted the turnip it was nice you'd say i tasted the turnip 00:14:47 - 00:15:05 00: She was nice. Replacing it with gendered pronouns is perhaps the habit I've struggled most to pick up while learning German. She can be a tricky language. And Twain appears to have struggled a little bit with it as well, because he says, whenever a person says Z to me, I generally try to kill him if a stranger. 00:15:05 - 00:15:26 00: proportionate. On that rather extreme note, let's try to turn things a little bit more positive. We'll talk about how Twain proposes to solve what he sees as the problems with German in a moment, but first I should point out that he does see some virtues in the way that German does things. For example, he says, in German, all nouns begin with a capital letter. Now that is a good idea. 00:15:26 - 00:15:44 00: It's true. Not just proper nouns, but all nouns in German are capitalised. I'm not totally sure why, but for a learner it is kind of handy when trying to get your head around a long sentence to know where the nouns are. Especially because sometimes a verb and a noun can be the same word, with only the capitalisation separating them. 00:15:44 - 00:16:01 00: Twain thinks it's a good idea too, that's why in this book he goes a little overboard with the capitalising of the nouns himself. So there you go, a win for German in Mark Twain's eyes, even if he does follow up his compliment with, and a good idea in this language is necessarily conspicuous from its lonesomeness. 00:16:02 - 00:16:10 00: charming. But he does pick out one more virtue of German and one that I think is going to surprise you. He thinks German words... 00:16:10 - 00:16:38 00: are lovely. He says there are some German words which are singularly and powerfully effective. For instance, those that describe lowly, peaceful and affectionate home life, those which deal with love in any and all forms, those which deal with outdoor nature in its softest and loveliest aspects. In a word, those which deal with any and all forms of rest, repose and peace. That's right, peace. 00:16:38 - 00:17:00 00: What a difference a century makes. Twain is writing this before the World Wars and before historic events undoubtedly changed attitudes to the German language, made it perceived as angry and authoritarian. I've said on this channel before that people who say German words are ugly are just saying them wrong. Sure, if you pronounce Schmetterling like that it sounds angry but... 00:17:00 - 00:17:20 00: is going to, isn't it? Twain actually argues that some German words are too nice. Would any man want to die in a battle which were called by so tame a term as a Schlacht? And observe the strongest of the several German equivalents for explosion, Ausbruch. Our word toothbrush is more powerful than that. 00:17:20 - 00:17:40 00: So as far as I'm concerned, that's case closed on whether German really is inherently ugly. People just think of it like that because of, well, the Nazis. So after writing that wrong, let's look at Mark Twain's solutions for the aspects of German that he finds rather less endearing. At the end of his essay, he says, I have shown that the German language needs reforming. 00:17:40 - 00:18:10 00: Very well, I am ready to reform it. And here are his eight ways to fix German. In the first place, I would leave out the dative case. Okay, I didn't even mention this one. For English speakers, it's just too confusing. The dative case is a grammatical complication that existed in Old English but doesn't now, and just be thankful for it. In the next place, I would move the verb further to the front. 00:18:10 - 00:18:30 00: thus solving all German to English translators' problems. Thirdly, I would import some strong words from the English tongue. Twain reckons German needs more proper swear words. Most of Germany's worst ones you could still use in front of your grandma. Fourthly, I would reorganize the sexes and distribute them according to the will of the creator. 00:18:30 - 00:18:50 00: It would be helpful if girls were grammatically feminine, it's true. Fifthly, I would do away with those great long compounded words, or require the speaker to deliver them in sections, with intermissions for refreshments. The occasional mid-word breather would be nice. Sixthly, I would require a speaker to stop when he is done, and not hang a string of those useless Habenzin-ge-wezen-ge-habt-haben-gevorden signs to the end of his oration. 00:18:50 - 00:19:00 00: Agreed. Seventhly, I would discard the parenthesis. He means starting something at one end of the sentence and finishing it at the other with various detours in between. He wants to outlaw that. Infractions of this law should be punishable by death. 00:19:10 - 00:19:20 00: Blimey, Mark. And eighth and lastly, I would retain zug and schlag and their pendants and discard the rest of the vocabulary. A bit of an anti-climax, but he's basically arguing for his two favourite words to be the only words in the language, just with suffixes and prefixes. 00:19:20 - 00:19:40 00: I'm not sure he really means that one. He continues, these are perhaps all I could be expected to name for nothing but there are other suggestions which I can and will make in case my proposed application shall result in my being formally employed by the government in the work of reforming the language. 00:19:40 - 00:20:00 00: He never was, but at the very least he gave us this. So what do you reckon? Is German really schrecklich? Is it really awful? Or is Twain's essay just the rantings of a frustrated student? Let me know in the comments and I will see you in whatever you choose to watch next. Maybe this. Take care.
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