Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2021 September 21

= September 21 =

German and German-like capitalisation
When German young adults and teenagers use text-speak on their phones, do they tend to capitalise their nouns like normal written German? I imagine the popularity of borrowed English slang and abbreviations has made most colloquial German seemingly unsuitable for text-speak, partially thanks to the eagerness of the German language to create long compound words (for example "sry" vs. "Entschuldigung sie" or "cya" vs. "Tschüß"). Does German text slang even exist? (silly question I know, it most probably does exist, I mean to ask if it exists in a uniform or widely-known state. For example, if you speak English, you most likely know what "lmao" or "gtfo" means)

On a related train of thought, I remember reading some years ago that apparently other Germanic languages used to have the habit of capitalising most nouns just like German does, mostly English, Danish, and Norwegian. Were there other languages that did this practice at one point or another, such as Anglo-Saxon/Old English or Frisian? I know the orthography of early Germanic texts were extremely inconsistent since they were just translations of Latin works written by monks. So did those languages start doing that around the same time German did for similar reasons (if I remember correctly, late 1400's to 1500's between the time of the printing press's introduction and Martin Luther's works, initially to recognise things and actions related to God and Christianity, but it wasn't until 1700 that capitalisation for all nouns regardless of meaning was a uniform practice), or was it more of a fad to copy that style of writing as more printing presses were made based on the German model and distributed around, or for added emphasis, or some other reason (aside from an internet fad propagated by Homestuck to do that on one's comments, I think that's just an overwhelming lack of understanding of what a proper noun is)? When did these languages stop doing so (I guess for English, it stopped around when 1800's dictionary standarisation happened), and was it sudden or gradual? (for example, in English titles, the usual convention would be to capitalise every "major" word, compared to Dutch, where only the first letter of a title is capitalised) --72.234.12.37 (talk) 13:48, 21 September 2021 (UTC)
 * Abbreviations found in SMS language are also used in German, see de:Liste von Abkürzungen (Netzjargon). For your second line of thought, there are hints in Capitalization. --Pp.paul.4 (talk) 14:12, 21 September 2021 (UTC)
 * Also in de:Großschreibung, which gives (an offline) reference for the origins in German: Das Barock hat in die deutsche Rechtschreibung die Majuskel eingebürgert.“ Walter Benjamin: Gesammelte Schriften. Frankfurt am Main 1980, Band 1, S. 382. 70.67.193.176 (talk) 16:48, 21 September 2021 (UTC)
 * I think you'll find that English legalese still follows the practice of capitalizing nouns. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 16:14, 21 September 2021 (UTC)
 * Nope. The Rambling Man (Keep wearing the mask...) 16:56, 21 September 2021 (UTC)
 * Agreed (assuming you meant English; Capitalization in English says that the habit lasted longest in America, citing Emily Dickinson as one of its last exponents. Alansplodge (talk) 17:45, 21 September 2021 (UTC)
 * Well, let's see... Should I believe you? Or should I believe the actual wording of actual legal documents in my own family? ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 20:30, 21 September 2021 (UTC)
 * I don't think that's particularly true; I find that legalese tends to define an arbitrarily capitalised term (e.g., Bank, Provider) so that it's easier to pick out through the print, and that it has a stipulative definition attached to it. — Tenryuu 🐲 ( 💬 • 📝 ) 17:46, 21 September 2021 (UTC)

My late momma, born in the 1920s in rural Tennessee, still capitalized her nouns to her dying day in letters to me. We never discussed why, and heaven knows she was never exposed to any Germanic languages other than English. -- Orange Mike &#124;  Talk  18:02, 21 September 2021 (UTC)
 * Bugs should have said American court document legalese, and it does not capitalize all nouns but rather very specific nouns that are most germane to the case. Here is an explanation of the general practice. Cullen328  Let's discuss it  02:15, 22 September 2021 (UTC)


 * In my experience Germans capitalize nouns in very informal internet contexts like memeing. It looks tryhard to me but I guess it's automatic. Occasionally at the lowest levels of formality on computer (no autocorrect on PC) someone might go no caps at all. Temerarius (talk) 18:17, 23 September 2021 (UTC)

Complication of the English Language
Hello! So I've always wondered but what about English makes it such a complicated language? I know some things like silent letters attribute to that but what exactly makes it so complicated and how did it get this way? ― Blaze The WolfTalkBlaze Wolf#0001 18:42, 21 September 2021 (UTC)
 * Hey Blaze the Wolf, here are some articles on the perception that English is hard to learn as a second (or third+) language: Why Is English So Hard to Learn?, Why English Is Such a Difficult Language to Learn, Why Can English Be Difficult To Learn?. Some of the causes mentioned include nonintuitive spelling, unique grammatical constructions, a huge range of idioms, and a large vocabulary that means apparent synonyms often have very subtle differences of meaning and/or grammar. 70.67.193.176 (talk) 22:00, 21 September 2021 (UTC)
 * It's not hard to learn, in fact it's so easy a child could learn it. I did! DuncanHill (talk) 22:03, 21 September 2021 (UTC)


 * Non-native speakers have told me that the grammar is easy; it's the vocabulary that drives them crazy. That's because the language has such a hodge-podge of sources. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 01:56, 22 September 2021 (UTC)


 * That surprises me a bit; I had the impression that aspect/mood are harder. —Tamfang (talk) 01:40, 24 September 2021 (UTC)


 * Memory tells me that this article provides an excellent summary, but accessing it is now (for me) prohibitively tiresome. Well, which difficulty you face when tackling second language English depends a lot on where you're coming from. Few languages have /θ/ or /ð/. Few have so many distinctive vowel sounds. Many have few or no consonant clusters. Many aren't stress-timed. And that's just the pronunciation. Anyone thinking that English grammar is pretty simple might peruse The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language: the page layout isn't wasteful, the prose isn't verbose, yet it goes on for over 1800 pages. NB I'm not saying that English is more complex than any other language. To continue with grammar, I suspect that the main reason why the large reference grammars of English dwarf those of other languages is not a matter of complexity but instead is financial. -- Hoary (talk) 04:10, 22 September 2021 (UTC)
 * The version of the article linked to does not budge, but here is one that lets you read the full text. --Lambiam 05:56, 22 September 2021 (UTC)


 * There is no objective measure to compare levels of proficiency across languages. If there was one, we could use it to compare the learning curves for second-language learners of various languages and say which ones are particularly hard to learn. I think German is pretty hard to learn too, what with three different word orders (main clauses / subordinate clauses / questions), three genders and four cases. And four is little compared with Finnish and Hungarian with some 15 cases. --Lambiam 05:37, 22 September 2021 (UTC)
 * The pure number of cases is actually not that meaningful. Most of the cases in Hungarian replace constructions that are done with prepositions in languages like German or English. That means that the cases have fairly well-defined purposes (and are quite regular), which may even make it easier to construct fully correct sentences in Hungarian than in German where it often appears somewhat arbitrary which case to use with which preposition. --Wrongfilter (talk) 09:56, 22 September 2021 (UTC)


 * One of the things that I have read that makes English difficult is that it is built out of so many different mostly unrelated languages. It is often humorously referred to as three languages dressed up in a trench coat pretending to be one.  It is classified as a Germanic language, however, as noted at English language, it has vocabulary mostly derived from Romance languages, chiefly French and Latin.  Imagine speaking Chinese, but only if you replaced 60% of the words with Russian words.  Another oft-used aphorism about English is that while other languages borrow words from each other on occasion "English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary."  There's hardly a major world language English doesn't have a number of common words it borrowed from.  All of that being noted, it isn't any harder or easier than any other language for children to learn.  It still follows all of the same basic set of components that all languages have, and as such children learn those rules without direct instruction, and do so just as well as children due in learning other languages.  -- Jayron 32 12:15, 22 September 2021 (UTC)
 * And of course this also is one reason behind the famously irregular spelling of English, a stumbling block not only for learners but for many native English-speakers as well. --184.144.99.72 (talk) 23:05, 22 September 2021 (UTC)
 * And all manner of homonyms or near-homonyms, like its vs. it's, there vs. their vs. they're, affect vs. effect, etc. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 23:57, 22 September 2021 (UTC)
 * Case in point: Jayron32 got into some deep due do. Clarityfiend (talk) 03:53, 23 September 2021 (UTC)
 * Dew tell. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 05:57, 23 September 2021 (UTC)
 * Those puns only work for Americans. Alansplodge (talk) 22:02, 24 September 2021 (UTC)
 * True. I've never heard of a small child complaining that the language their parents speak and which they're being taught to use is too hard and may I please have a different one to speak. Children are masters at learning language, but even they take quite a few years to become fully proficient. Adults who take on a new language expect - unreasonably- to do it much more quickly than that, and typically get surprised and frustrated when it doesn't happen - again unreasonably. Anyone who's ever studied a language at university level for a number of years will attest that it starts off easily and just gets progressively harder. Exactly the opposite of children's experience. --  Jack of Oz   [pleasantries]  22:11, 22 September 2021 (UTC)
 * Those who are truly bilingual usually start with both languages while they're kids, when they're like little sponges and absorb everything. Off the track a little, I was wondering how many aboriginal words have crept into Australian English. Billabong, for example? ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 23:55, 22 September 2021 (UTC)
 * See List of English words of Australian Aboriginal origin, which I suggest is far from complete. --  Jack of Oz   [pleasantries]  00:12, 23 September 2021 (UTC)
 * If you have a list of Australian Aboriginal language families, you can find more loanwords by traversing the trees of the corresponding Wiktionary categories: Category:English terms derived from Yuin-Kuric languages, Category:English terms derived from Pama-Nyungan languages, Category:English terms derived from Central New South Wales languages, ...&thinsp;. --Lambiam 05:55, 23 September 2021 (UTC)
 * As a fairly well educated American, I only recognize six words on that list, all of them common names for animals native to Australia. I do not contest that Australians may well recognize more of them. Cullen328  Let's discuss it  06:17, 23 September 2021 (UTC)
 * As a modestly well-educated Brit with no Australian connections whatever, I recognise 25–30, though a few of them only as animal names without remembering exactly what sort of animal. Probably this reflects Britain having closer cultural links to Australia than I'd guess the USA does: for example, a good many Australian writers of children's and adult fiction, and non-fiction, set in Australia are routinely published in the UK. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 90.200.67.3 (talk) 10:52, 23 September 2021 (UTC)
 * Interestingly, a common name for a type of Australian marsupial, the possum, derived from a very distantly related American animal, the opossum, whose name comes from an native American word of the Powhatan language. -- Jayron 32 15:37, 23 September 2021 (UTC)
 * The only widely known non-animal in List of English words of Australian Aboriginal origin must be boomerang. It's the only I know but I'm Danish. I suspect Cullen328 also knows it. We even use it in WP:BOOMERANG. PrimeHunter (talk) 03:29, 24 September 2021 (UTC)
 * Yes,, you are correct and I recognize seven. I failed to scroll down far enough in the article. American kids liked to play with boomerangs 60 years ago, but I never saw one actually hit a person in the head. Cullen328  Let's discuss it  04:26, 24 September 2021 (UTC)


 * "Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue" talks about the many influences on the English hodge-podge, in particular (and perhaps somewhat controversially, at the time, at least) the language(s) of the island Celts. Alanscottwalker (talk) 10:58, 23 September 2021 (UTC)
 * Wikipedia has an article Language complexity that states 'Measuring complexity is considered difficult, and the comparison of whole natural languages as a daunting task.' (under Language complexity)
 * I would assume that part of the issue is not how complex a strange language is, but how strange; ie how dissimilar to one's native tongue. As an English-speaker, I find French has much the same set of sounds and structures, whereas Mandarin has whole ways of carrying meaning (eg tone) that I have never come across in English. Mandarin may not (or may) be more complex than French, but I am already set up with the tools to understand 'how French does things'; I lack those tools for Mandarin.--Verbarson (talk) 19:30, 23 September 2021 (UTC)


 * One thing that makes it complex is that the spelling of the English language was standardised right before big, big changes happened to the way it was pronounced  - I can see you've mentioned "silent letters", but that's only a part of it.
 * The classic example of this is the word "knight" . When Chaucer wrote The Knight's Tale, he would have pronounced "knight" as what would sound to us now like "knish t ".  Over time the k and the sh stopped being pronounced, but were kept in the spelling. And while that was happening, the way the "i" in "knight" was pronounced  also changed: from the "i"-sound in the word "bit", to "oi", then to "eye".  To keep up with how it was pronounced, maybe the spelling should have changed to "nite" " - but it wasn't. Pete AU aka--Shirt58 (talk) 02:19, 24 September 2021 (UTC)


 * "Nite" is often used as a synonym for "Night", so that could cause further confusion. I had understood that the "gh" represented a guttural sound, like the Scottish "ch". Either way, the French taunters in "MPATHG" subtly reference this when they call Arthur's men "kuh-nig-its". ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 03:50, 24 September 2021 (UTC)
 * As far as we know, orthographic ⟨gh⟩ could represent, depending on the context, the voiceless palatal fricative (IPA ) or the voiceless velar fricative (IPA ), just like ⟨ch⟩ today in Scots and in German (for the latter, see Standard German phonology § Ich-Laut and ach-Laut).
 * Pronunciation had been changing long before Chaucer's 14th century: he was writing in the evolving London dialect of Middle English. The earliest attested spelling of the word in a variety of Old English is cniht, but Continental West Germanic forms were usually more gutteral and doubtless occurred in the mutating mosaic of English regional dialects. MPATHG is of course completely anachronistic (as are most extant versions of 'Arthur') and not aimed at authenticity: any real basis for Arthurian legend is perhaps late 5th/early 6th century, and 'Arthur's' people would have spoken Latin or a form of Brythonic, not the North and West Germanic tongues of their invading enemies. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 90.200.67.3 (talk) 09:21, 24 September 2021 (UTC)
 * Sounds like a good time to mention Ghoti - X201 (talk) 09:35, 24 September 2021 (UTC)
 * And the poem The Chaos (link to the full text). --Lambiam 10:00, 24 September 2021 (UTC)


 * Please don't conflate the complexity of a language - or any other property - with that of its writing system. Human languages are spoken or signed: even those few which are customarily written exist independently of the script or scripts which are used for notating them, and it is rare for a script to have any significant influence on the language it is used to write. The complexities of English, such as they are, would be no different if it were written in IPA. Separately, English happens to have a rather baroque system for writing it, and if you try to learn English through writing (a way of learning languages which was almost unknown up to a few centuries ago) then the writing system may add to your difficulty. --ColinFine (talk) 18:17, 24 September 2021 (UTC)