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Comment by Koshkin | Hacker News Reader

German is an amazing, beautiful language. With not much of the vocabulary borrowed from other languages, words actually make sense. From that perspective, German can be seen as the modern equivalent of Latin, and if I were to choose only one language to remain on the entire planet, it would be German (sorry English, Chinese and Spanish). Its sounds are easier for non-native speakers to pronounce - especially compared to English; it seems to be more resistant to frivolous changes, being sensibly conservative. It’s not perfect, but Latin is a dead language, and we did not have a will to adopt it as a universal language - unlike, for example, Israel which had enough determination to revive a dead language (I find it interesting that they, in fact, also considered German for the role of the national language).

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Despite appearance, German is very illogical language full of idioms and exceptions one has to master. Also, even natives usually don't master the full extent of language and the overbearing nature of language with its need for precise use of words/formulations specific to a given situation often leads to strong reliance on syntax/appearance of complexity. You can see it in typical German philosophy, where the language gets in the way in order to satisfy its constraints, often missing the point, being trapped in its structures, unable to formulate way out due to structural constraints inherent in the language; being overly rational and weakly emotional, suppressing a whole dimension of humaneness. Thanks, but no thanks!

I think this conflates typically verbose academic/philosophical writing with German itself. Many great old philosophers came out of Germany, in a time where writing obtusely to make a point was in vogue (in English, too, not just German), so this may add to the perception of German philosophy needing to be contorted.

I've read refreshingly concise modern works in both and English and German and can assure you that style is the writer's fault, not the language's.

Could you share an example? I'd like to read something while learning German.

I can't say I really found use out of the book I'm about to mention, but Michael Bordt writes a lot of philosophy/self-help books in a concise German style. For example, "Die Kunst, die Eltern zu enttäuschen: Vom Mut zum selbstbestimmten Leben."

Yet, the greatest philosophers after the Greeks were all German-speaking (Hegel, Kant, Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsche, Mach...). Also, physicists, mathematicians.

'The greatest' ?

Slight exaggeration.

Some people blame the tragedy of 20th century on prevailing idealistic trends in German philosophy, including the ones you mentioned.

Santayana's Egotism in German Philosophy is an admirable and very readable history and diagnosis of that story, from Leibniz to the late 19th C. He has a gorgeous style and lovely understated sense of humour. And virtually explains the Nazis, although published in 1915.

In the meantime, weren't there some very important European scientists, mathematicians, philosophers, etc who wrote almost entirely in Latin?

There were certainly plenty of great German speaking physicists and mathematicians. But those philosophers all sucked.

Well, on the other hand, the greatest musician after the Greeks composed the majority of his greatest creations only after he stopped hearing German.

Well played, points for cerebral humor.

With a few minor exceptions, such as Aquinas, Descartes, Voltaire, Locke, Hume, J.S. Mill, Russel..

The idea that language limits or constrains the way people think (the stronger side of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis) is now largely discredited by the majority of linguists.

I've long thought it a real possibility that people are constrained (in certain areas) by their language.

No expert and not disagreeing with you, but I'd be very interested to read any literature you can recommend on the subject.

For an introduction see:

Linguistic relativity

URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity

I speak 8 languages from many separate groups (Germanic, Romance, Slavic, Sino-Tibetan, Japanese), and my impression is that languages truly put constraints on one's ability to formulate thoughts. Of course, mentalese, the unspoken one, is different, independent, but it's rare people retain it to their older age and by then prevailing cultural/linguistic currents shape their thoughts. Sapir-Whorf might be discredited as general hypothesis, but it might correspond to 95% practical state statistically-wise.

Would you please give some examples where you've found "that languages truly put constraints on one's ability to formulate thoughts"?

I don't know what he is referring to. But one interesting things is that there is a language where you can express that someone is doing something without including the time when he is doing it. This is not possible in the languages I know of (De/En/Fr).

I can imagine that this ability makes different thoughts possible.

When looking at programming languages, it is indeed the case that your "lingua franca" limits the imagination of what software architectures are possible to solve the problem.

For a really eccentric example see:

https://aymara.org/biblio/html/igr/igr3.html

Or just use of 無 in (ancient) Chinese for a simple example (in the sense of "unasking the question").

Yet we have a wide variety of programming languages, and switch between them as the need arises for a better fit to the problem domain we're working in. With the wide variety of things like number systems in different languages, wouldn't it make sense that using some languages might be better for mathematical communication, and others maybe not offer the precision required to communicate everything necessary? It would make sense to me if some languages were better for talking about navigation, or weather than others. Or some were better with numbers, or parts of anatomy, etc.

That's a softer form of it which is fairly obviously true; a language with no words for weather will obviously limit discussion of the weather forecast. That's a bit different to whether it limits your ability to think about those things though.

Do you speak more than one natural language? I am an anglophone but took most of my schooling in french. Though I work in english now, I can remember distinctly 'thinking in English' and 'thinking in French' and depending on the problem I was wrestling with, the constructs of the language you frame your thinking in absolutely can give you an advantage or disadvantage.

I always thought it was remarkable how much human thought was imprisoned by language, and it really makes me wonder what a human 'without language' would be capable of thinking.

One other than my native tongue, but not nearly fluently.

To clarify, I don't disagree with what you're saying; I'm not a linguist but from what I know there certainly seems to be some truth in the weaker forms of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (that language affects how you think), but the strong form (that language controls how you think) seems fairly well disproven these days.

And now for the forecast of the local atmosphere state: In the morning, the yellow ball in the sky will be hidden by areas of water aerosol. Around noon, water will fall from the sky.

I've always felt quite a bit of emotion contained in German, in a way that falls flat for me in English. Most American English writing has this simple form like "Fact. Fact. Fact. The end.". So much for emotional impact or nuance, but this could be a difference felt for your native language vs others acquired later on.

>You can see it in typical German philosophy, where the language gets in the way in order to satisfy its constraints, often missing the point, being trapped in its structures, unable to formulate way out due to structural constraints inherent in the language

To be fair that could describe a lot of philosophy in just about every language.

Fascinating. If you were to pick an optimal global language - which would it be?

Korean certainly.

Very well modernized, from the already simple chinese language (not the writing, just the spoken language), transported into simple and regular syllables. Extremely easy to learn for foreigners or aliens from other planets. The shape of the letters mimic how you speak them, the three major families - | or O. horizontal, vertical or round, like in chinese earth-water paintings.

It's much more regular than separating vowels and consonants into single letters.

A good language is not necessarily one that is easy to learn. The difficulty may be due, for example, to a fine-grained vocabulary, the power to concisely express nuances, or the rich cultural background. Classical Greek, for example, is not the easiest language to learn from scratch, but it is no doubt one of the most subtle and expressive languages known to the mankind.

As a German, allow me to respectfully disagree. I think English is far easier to learn. I often find it easier to express my thoughts in English than in German.

I do agree that German is a beautiful language, though, and highly recommend reading Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra to anyone who does or does not agree with me on this one.

One thing that I have noticed about English is that it seems to be more concise. There are things that can be expressed much more elegantly and with fewer word in English, while saying the same thing in German may require a mid-sized sentence.

> One thing that I have noticed about English is that it seems to be more concise. There are things that can be expressed much more elegantly and with fewer word in English, while saying the same thing in German may require a mid-sized sentence.

As a native German speaker, I disagree. German allows a really concise nominal style that is hard to express in English.

As a native speaker of English and a speaker of German, I find that some things are more concise in one language and other things are more concise in the other. I don't know if this inconsistency is due to limits in my own knowledge or limits in each language, but I suspect it's a bit of both. Where things appear more concise to native speakers also probably has to do with both tacit knowledge of idioms and amount of time spent composing a deliberately aphoristic statement.

>As a native speaker of English and a speaker of German, I find that some things are more concise in one language and other things are more concise in the other.

I'm reminded of my former neighbors, who would switch between English and Spanish mid-sentence. I asked them about it once and they expressed a sentiment similar to yours.

As an English and German speaker, my kids would tell you I sometimes do the same thing. Bad drivers get yelled at in German ;-D

German is more concise and can specialize the nouns much better than in english.

But on the other hand that makes german much longer. Translations into german (e.g. SW or movie subtitles) are the longest in german than in any other major language. You need much more room to express the same. E.g. in SW translations this conciseness strikes back, the english original form is often preferred, as it is easier to understand and not as baroque as the german form.

In Japanese forced with the same problem of having to import many new foreign terms ("lehnworte"), they chose a better way, Katakana, which is almost as well modernized as Korean. In German it backfired, and instead of chosing modern shorter and more precise forms, they want for the longer nouns, adding to it.

> But on the other hand that makes german much longer. Translations into german (e.g. SW or movie subtitles) are the longest in german than in any other major language.

I can believe that if you translate texts that are written in idiomatic English into German, they get longer. On the other hand, if you have a concisely written scientific text in German, translating it into English leads to something between gibberish and something barely readable. So you often have to completely rewrite/reexpress large parts of the text so that it looks like idiomatic English.

One example:

"Don't always make this about you!"

There is no exactly matching equivalent in German. You might say something like 'this isn't about you', but there is no term for calling someone out on it so beautifully and bluntly.

But to me it makes no sense to make absolute statements on conciseness. In my opinion societies are concise in language on topics on which a great common focus lies upon.

> "Don't always make this about you!"

German: Es geht nicht immer nur um dich!

Not a 100% word for word translation, but what I would yell when I meant to say something similar to the English version. Instead of "make it (about you)" I switch to something that reverse-translated ends up more like "it is not about you" because trying to use the "make" part in a 100% word for word translation does not seem to lead to anything I as a German might say. Still, I'd say my version actually is an accurate translation, so I would dispute your claim that "there is no exactly matching equivalent in German".

Having been involved in writing internationalised software, you can get into trouble if you don't leave enough space for your labels, button captions, messages etc to be translated into another language which may requires 10-50% more space.

An example: https://medium.com/dropbox-design/design-for-internationaliz...

From what I can see guidance is that Finnish and German are typically quite a bit longer than English...

This is partly a consequence of these languages using the alphabet that was designed to serve a different language. (Another striking example is Vietnamese.)

Latin is a dead language, and we did not have a will to adopt it as a universal language

I'm not sure what you mean by this. I used to believe that "Latin is a dead language" - until I learnt more about the subject. It was spoken everywhere in the Roman Empire, and the local differences evolved into the Romance languages. They are what Latin is today. And it (the relatively fixed 'classical' version anyway) was a universal language for a long time....until the 19th C in maths and the sciences. Thousands of years is a long time in language-years, and nothing stays still for that long, but changes totally. Latin's dead in the sense every language must be after thousands of years of evolution. English will be dead in that same sense in another 2000 years, and so will every other language of today.

> Romance languages. They are what Latin is today

That’s the same as looking at a tree and saying, “This is what I will be in a hundred years.”

How is it 'the same'? I can't see it. If somehow the tree was made from your molecules, sure, there's a sense that it would be true, but how that's 'the same' or anything similar to the continuous evolution of Latin into the Romance languages, I don't know.

It's more like, say, there was jazz in the 1920s, there are many types of jazz today, evolved from that early jazz but all very different from it, and different from each other.

Well, strictly speaking, Romance languages are not the evolution of Latin - each is a mix of (the Vulgar) Latin and a local language. For example, French has been heavily influenced by Frankish, so much so, in fact, that English, not even being a Romance language, seems closer to Latin than French does - simply because it imported so many words directly from Latin. (The closest example of a continuous and mostly unadulterated evolution of a now dead language into a modern one is Greek.)

Latin is still spoken today, on the radio of all things. The Finnish national broadcaster broadcasts Nuntii Latini, or the News in Latin.

The interesting part is they do not invent new words but find existing Latin expressions and combine existing words. That alone speaks a lot of how universal the language was and perhaps still is.

Link: https://areena.yle.fi/1-1931339

An example of the Indonesian tsunami catastrophy: "Plus mille quadringenti homines perierunt, cum fluctus tsunami ex motu terrae ortus in insulam Sulawesi Indonesiae (28.9.) incidisset. Magistratus timent, ne numerus victimarum in multa milia ascendat. Maxime afflicta est urbs Palu et proxima illi Donggala. In regione motui terrae et fluctui exposita circiter sescenta milia hominum habitant."

Thanks for the link - it's a good resource for those who would like to read and hear Latin being used in a modern setting. I only wish the voice were less mechanical-sounding, but the effort in trying to keep a dead language alive can only go so far... Also, the Finnish accent is not too bad - especially compared with the way Latin can be heard from the English or the French (or even the Italians).

The absence of foreign loans in German is not due to being "resistant to frivolous changes". It's due to an explicit reform effort to root out ubiquitous Latinate loans. You can do the same in any language, limited only by how much control the government has over the way people talk.

If you want, you can try Anglish. :)

The last time I was in Germany I noticed explicitly anti-English-language grassroot campaign signs on bus stops. They are definitely worried about losing their language and perhaps the cultural identity it confers.

I alternately love and hate German. Sometimes I have to fight through sentences with 5 clauses, and sometimes you get a beautiful and concise statement.

> They are definitely worried about losing their language and perhaps the cultural identity it confers.

Who is "they"? As a German who also has one friend (fluent in two other languages and living abroad most of the time and married to a non-German) who is in that camp and who even collected money to give to a local German language society, this is a small minority. The majority of people could not care less. Proof: Use of English words and phrases is ubiquitous, used for shops (even that exact word instead of the German "(der) Laden"), signs, marketing campaigns, everyday language. If it didn't work or if it caused any backlash they would not do that. We even have "fake English" words: "Handy" for mobile phones (and that is the word almost everybody actually uses) :-)

I took 4 years of German in high school, so I'm no expert, but I do disagree about it making sense any more than any other language.

There are at least 3 ways to say "the". Der, die, and das. Which one you use depends on if the object you're talking about is femanine or not. To top that off some geographic areas use "das" for everything.

It also has words that are similar to English; toilette (toilet) and hast (have) as a couple similarities.

Curious, what geographic regions are you referring to?

der, die, das, den, dem, des, all depending on case (likewise for indefinite articles + worse for adjective endings). German grammatical case presents information quite efficiently, often replacing the need for a preposition or other helper word, but it is mostly foreign to English speakers.

The "nouns have gender" stuff isn't quite as weird. It's in many other languages and eventually it isn't too hard to learn the noun as the full "der/die/das ________". Where it gets tricky is when an article (like "der" or "einer") is overloaded and applies to one gender in one case (male, nominative) but to a different gender in another case (female or plural, dative). I wish the mapping were one to one.

It's also worth noting that there are actually two ways to _say_ "the" in English (think "thuh" and "thee"). I would challenge any native English speaker to explain when you use each. ;-)

If referring to phonetics then thee would be for emphasis to a construed subordinate with thuh used generally. Really idiosyncratic.

If referring to written words then use thee if you find yourself in Pennsylvania Dutch country trying to hail a horse drawn taxi or thuh if trying to play dumb while text messaging.

Well, IIRC the "official" rule is that 'thee' is to be used before a vowel and 'thuh' before a consonant.

True. The above was just for fun. But colloquial English these days behaves as if rules are to be made up as you go along. EG, locally I hear 'I'm going to thee Applebees Bar & Grill' as often as 'I'm going to thuh', but then again there isn't an abundance of Rhodes scholars in this neck of the woods.

> It's also worth noting that there are actually two ways to _say_ "the" in English (think "thuh" and "thee"). I would challenge any native English speaker to explain when you use each. ;-)

I'd be surprised if you could find any fluent English speaker who says that either pronunciation is wrong in any context where the other is correct. If I'm understanding the description of the German definite articles correctly, the aren't all valid in the same contexts, which is hardly the same thing. (I don't actually know German, but I know a bit of Spanish and Dutch, and in both of those languages the definite articles are not necessarily interchangeable, which is my understanding of German from the above description)

Seems for casual reader with no knowledge of German you may be oversimplifying a little. Including the plural form and four cases you wind up having to learn 16 forms of the equivalent of 'the' which then serves as a mnemonic for adjectival endings for modifing nouns. Also compound that with gender and idiosyncratic plural forms and you wind up having to learn three aspects for every new vocabulary noun.

some geographic areas use "das" for everything - yeah good point. If you ever tooled around the German-speaking sections of Switzerland you'll still find locals complaining that they have difficulty understanding the dialect of another town only a few km away.

I've been learning Vietnamese for a few years and it seems to just fine without all the complicated tenses and cases etc in the grammar of European languages. I'm not sure if all those baroque rules really buy much.

They don't buy anything, but they don't cause any problems either. If they did, the language would have changed to accommodate it, or died out already. But since you're putting the effort in to learn it as it is, clearly neither applies...

The languages have changed - English used to have a more complex grammar (thee, thine, thou, etc) and I think it had genders, but that died out over time.

Der, die, das makes at least more sense then the difference beteween the and the.

You could say the same thing about Russian. Like German, it doesn't borrow very heavily from other languages; and a lot of the words are simple variations of each other with different prefixes and suffixes. It was even the Lingua Franca (or "Latin") of the Communist bloc.

On the other hand, Russian might be an even harder language to learn than German, given that it's Slavic and uses a different alphabet. There's always Esperanto, which has more than 200,000 articles on Wikipedia; more than Latin even.

Russian doesn't borrow heavily? There's a ton of borrowing from French in Russian.... I hadn't appreciated quite how much until I started learning French.

Lots of borrowings from Turkic languages as well. For example the common word for money "dengi" has the same roots as "denge" (balance) in Turkish and national currency of Kazakhstan "tenge".

> uses a different alphabet

The alphabet is trivial on the way to learning the language, constituting maybe 2% or so (unlike in Chinese).

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