Unpopular Opinions

[Archaic Torso of Apollo]

I was referring to the languages. Irish is not in the same family as English; Scottish is, but it's a language of its own, not an English dialect.

Well yeah, I knew that. I was referring to their accents when speaking English (not Scots, Irish or Scottish Gaelic, Ulster Scots, Shetlandic, or for that matter Yola:)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RFl9ptuxd8s

[Florestan]

I was referring to their accents when speaking English

Got it now.

[Jo498]

You are the only person I've met until now who claims that German grammar is simpler than the English one, and you might very well remain the one and only. 

It's not like in that old Jewish joke, that Yiddish was obviously the best language of all because "man farshteyt yedes wort" because I didn't claim that German grammar was easier overall. There is declension of nouns and conjugation of verbs, so the verbs are harder.
I said that the tenses are harder in English because German lacks some distinctions and the usage of tenses is fairly primitive, especiallly colloquially. E.g. Future tense is rarely used in everyday speech. Instead of the correct "Morgen werde ich ins Schwimmbad gehen", most of the time people would just use present tense and say "Morgen gehe ich ins Schwimmbad" because morgen (tomorrow) is enough to indicate the future. (German also lacks the "going to" future English and several romance languages have.) And the three past tenses of formal written German mostly collapse to one (perfect, regardless of perfective aspect). German is really primitive as far as the tenses go, compared to English or the romance languages. There is no real connection to aspects via tenses and it lacks forms like progressives.

[Jo498]

German has the great advantage of deriving almost its entire basic word stock from its ancestral Germanic roots, which makes it easy to figure out the meaning of words you've never seen before. Example: Waffenstillstand = "weapons standing still" = "armistice," a word that has to be explained to English speakers ("Mom, what does 'armistice' mean?"). However, its grammar is needlessly complex.

"needlessly complex" is nonsense, what would be the proper level of complexity? As I said, German is fairly simple compared to romance languages as far as tenses and verb aspects go (the aspects such as perfective, progressive, iterative etc. all have to be expressed by adverbs, context etc.)  Also declensions are easier than in Latin
German(ic) vocabulary is easier in the way you mentioned but it's harder for native speakers of English or romance languages because unlike English it uses more Germanic roots instead of Latin/French ones even in many abstract and technical terms and keeps the latter often for high level technical terms the layman hardly encounters.

[Madiel]

Having sent you all down this rabbit hole, let me observe:

1. All the other Germanic languages have simpler grammar than German itself. And the considerable advantage of not making you wait until the very end of the sentence to find out what the verb is.

2. On the other hand, German spelling and pronunciation is dead simple.

3. English grammar was to a large extent simplified by contact with Norse/the Scandinavian languages. But arguably Danish/Norwegian is even a bit simpler. One single verb form for 1st, 2nd and 3rd person in both singular and plural. I nearly cried with joy.

4. Danish grammar isn't hard, but Danish pronunciation is horrendous. And you won't find a more bizarre counting system anywhere.

5. I'd suggest we all try speaking Norwegian only there isn't even agreement in Norway on what "Norwegian" is. So that's a problem.

[Florestan]

1. All the other Germanic languages have simpler grammar than German itself. And the considerable advantage of not making you wait until the very end of the sentence to find out what the verb is.

Yep.

2. On the other hand, German spelling and pronunciation is dead simple.

Yep.

t Danish pronunciation is horrendous. And you won't find a more bizarre counting system anywhere.

Could you please eleborate on that? The most bizarre counting system I know --- not for numbers, though, but for telling the clock --- is the Dutch one. For instance, 13:35 in Dutch (vijf over half twee) )translates in English as "five past half until two".

[prémont]

Could you please eleborate on that? The most bizarre counting system I know --- not for numbers, though, but for telling the clock --- is the Dutch one. For instance, 13:35 in Dutch (vijf over half twee) )translates in English as "five past half until two".

In principle similarly in Danish:

Fem minutter over halv to = five minutes past half until two.

[prémont]

Actually, there are claims both from musicologists and naive listeners that HIP is making  the old music sound modern by assimilating it to modern music.
Richard Taruskin claimed that some of the earlier HIP (and it seems partly more true of Proto-HIP like Marriner) play Bach like neoclassical Stravinsky was supposed to be played, i.e. metronomically, fast, "dry" and lean.

This may, as you write, to some extent be true of what you name Proto-HIP (in my terminology Pre-HIP), but the later "genuine" HIP (Leonhardt, Harnoncourt and on) invented a new unprecedented style based upon historical evidence combined with artistic imagination, and this style has nothing to do with modern music.

[Jo498]

The clock time is the same in German as in these examples:  "Fünf (Minuten) nach halb zwei" (but one can use also the 24 hour system and say "13 Uhr 35" as would be done at train stations and the like).

I thought modern Icelandic was still quite close to old Norse and grammatically (or at least generally) harder than modern German.

Verb to the end only applied to subclauses. In simple clauses or main clauses the direct object tends to go to the end (SPO) "Ich gebe Peter einen Apfel" "I give an apple to Peter". There is no way I could put the verb to the very end here although I have a bit more flexibility in German juggling around the direct (accusative) object and the dative object, e.g. "Peter gebe ich einen Apfel, Paul eine Birne". "Den Apfel gebe ich Peter, die Birne Paul" (In this case one could do the same in English but generally word order is more flexible in German although this is more frequently used in elaborate speech or poetry. Obviously one order stresses the importance of the receivers of the fruit, the other the kind of fruit they get.)
Now what seems hard and not very logical is the position of the pronoun "ich". That has to be before the verb in the first case (otherwise it would be a question: Gebe ich Peter einen Apfel?) and behind in the second case.

[Archaic Torso of Apollo]

"needlessly complex" is nonsense, what would be the proper level of complexity?

I think "needlessly complex" applies to things like the numerous and sometimes unpredictable ways to make plurals, as well as the whole gender thing (which of course is the norm in European languages). But German is less needlessly complex than Polish for instance, with its seven different ways to say "you," and its special plural for masculine individuals.

Slavic languages also have something like 15 different ways to conjugate verbs, which doesn't help.

Re: future tense - actually we rarely use the "will" form colloquially. The norm is to say "I'm going swimming tomorrow," not "I will swim tomorrow," which sounds stilted and formal.

[MusicTurner]

The clock time is the same in German as in these examples:  "Fünf (Minuten) nach halb zwei" (but one can use also the 24 hour system and say "13 Uhr 35" as would be done at train stations and the like).

We do that up here too, one can just as well say "13-35", if one chooses to, say for reasons of clarity (for example when talking to strangers).

[Florestan]

In principle similarly in Danish:

Fem minutter over halv to = five minutes past half until two.

It strikes me as extremely convoluted. Couldn't you just say "one thirty-five", or as in English "twenty-five to two"? In Romanian it's either "one thirty-five" (formal) or "two without twenty-five" (coloquial and most commonly used).

[Madiel]

I don't know what got you all into clock times. I said nothing about clocks. I was talking about regular numbers.

Danish takes the German feature of units before tens, the somewhat French habit of using multiples of 20, the habit of subtracting halves rather than adding them, combines all this and uses shorthand.

93 is "three and half fives". And that's one of the ones I find easier to remember.

[MusicTurner]

I don't know what got you all into clock times. I said nothing about clocks. I was talking about regular numbers.

Danish takes the German feature of units before tens, the somewhat French habit of using multiples of 20, the habit of subtracting halves rather than adding them, combines all this and uses shorthand.

93 is "three and half fives". And that's one of the ones I find easier to remember.

Yes, and there are even deviations, forty just being just fyrre, eighty being firs, whereas fifty is halvtreds ...  The only thing to do is to learn it all by heart. There's been talks of maybe 'importing' the Swedish or English system of counting, where fifty is just five-tens / femtio for example, but it probably won't happen.

[Florestan]

93 is "three and half fives". And that's one of the ones I find easier to remember.

Then 90 must be "half fives". Which fives and what half? 

[Jo498]

I think "needlessly complex" applies to things like the numerous and sometimes unpredictable ways to make plurals, as well as the whole gender thing (which of course is the norm in European languages). But German is less needlessly complex than Polish for instance, with its seven different ways to say "you," and its special plural for masculine individuals.

Slavic languages also have something like 15 different ways to conjugate verbs, which doesn't help.

I have been dabbling with Russian a bit and I thought the verbs were actually not as bad as some other things and the hardest thing about verbs were the aspects that are distinguished by prefixes which German does have in a rudimentary fashion I never realized before, e.g. essen - aufessen, speisen - verspeisen where the second version indicates not merely eating but eating up everything (perfective aspect)).

While it is probably too simple, as I dimly recall it from popular linguistics, proto-Indo-European had EVERYTHING. About 8 cases (nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, ablative, vocative, locative, instrumentalis of which some slavic languages retain 6-7), dual in addition to singular and plural, tons of tenses, participles etc. (I don't know anything about the Indo-Iranian branch and I read that Lithuanian may be closest of all modern languages to the  hypothetical stage 5000 years ago but Classical Greek still has most of the tenses and participles). And that then most languages becames gradually simpler, losing most of the flexion, fusing tenses and all kinds of other complications together.
With the vaning of Latin as a standard language in higher education many Western Europeans (unless they learned a slavic language or Irish) take the rather simple grammar level of English and modern romance languages as typical. Which is not the case for Indo-european in general.

[Jo498]

Then 90 must be "half fives". Which fives and what half? 

4x20 and half of the 5th 20. I would not have thought that counting could get crazier than French (and the Canadians and some French Swiss apparently have a rational variant of counting in French).

[pjme]

For instance, 13:35 in Dutch (vijf over half twee) )translates in English as "five past half until two".

??Can someone explain the "until"?

[Madiel]

Then 90 must be "half fives". Which fives and what half? 

Once upon a time it was originally "half-fifth-times-of-twenty". But most of that has dropped off. Arguably I shouldn't have called it "half fives", etymologically it's more like "half-fifth".

Even Norwegians and Swedes look at Danish counting and think, what the hell are they doing?

[vers la flamme]

??Can someone explain the "until"?

Half (an hour) until; ie. 13:30 is half until 14:00. That's my guess, anyway; I'm no Dutch speaker.