Nazis spellers had it easy

| Friday, April 8, 2011
Nazis got to write in German. German has a silly system of more or less consistent spelling, except of course some words that they stole from other languages, which isn't a unique problem.

They would be utterly crushed by English. We do, of course, have a consistent system of spelling, excluding the stolen words. There's one problem: the entire language is stolen, shamelessly and horrendously ripped off from any other language in sight. We didn't even stick to German and French. Oh no, we of course had to take Latin, along with half of its spelling and grammar, but not enough to make a consistent system. We went around the world to steal a bit from Japanese and Mandarin. We went halfway and stole from whatever natives we could find in the New World. But back in Europe we went south and grabbed what we could from Africa and the Middle East (didn't have a good boat, so we had to drive around).

There is...
There are...
There are birds outside! Outside, there are birds. Ah yes, our inconsistent sentence structure doesn't help either, putting the verb before the subject, so that we have to conjugate the verb without yet having a sentence. This could easily be fixed by just thinking before we speak, but that's asking a bit much.


koalabear said...

I'm sorry but you are just asking far too much.

Tesh said...

Germans also get to just sort of smoosh words together to make giant compound words. Sure, we get to steal form anywhere and make up new words with reckless abandon, but it might be fun to use "northmainstreetdowntown" or "billionsofblisteringbarnacles" in casual conversation and have it *not* look like a typo.

JoeNavy said...

English it utter poop. Complete and utter poop. Especially for Math minded people.

I remember being told by the school counselor that I was spelling and writing on a 5th grade level and had to take on a tutor to help catch up.
Right after that meeting I made my way to my advanced Calc class....To this day Grammar and sentence structure is something that is frustrating to no end.
/end rant

Klepsacovic said...

@Tesh: I briefly picked up this habit during high school after I took a bit of German. If I didn't know a word I'd mash together as many as I could. It got silly when I carried it over into English.

@Joe: It it indeed. ;)

Ephemeron said...

If it's of any consolation, Russian is five times worse in this regard.

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