How To Fix German Grammar

Summary

Why will the German Language die ?

• Globalisation is occurring: Ever more Internet, satellite TV, cheap telephony, aviation, trade, tourism, & working abroad.
• Not just goods compete. Not just countries; But languages too.
  Some languages will die sooner, some later. First it was obscure village & tribal languages eg in Africa etc that went, Cornish has gone (last old lady late in 20th cenury Irecall). The next will be dialects & small area languages such as Bavarian & Welsh; then the smaller national languages, Swedish, Dutch, Portuguese; Then bigger national languages: German, then French, then Spanish, then will come the final competition of Chinese & English. It might take a few centuries to get that far, but as global communication accelerates, maybe it'll be far quicker. With old, ill educated, & marginalised folk speaking just local.
• People will keep their local languages for local use for a while,
  Some languages will not quite die ( Latin hasn't entirely died yet, but neither is it significant) People will globally communicate in big languages. Example: Already English is the language of choice for Germans who don't speak Spanish in South America.
• The international English that's coming won't be quite the English of England, or America etc,
  which will both become subset dialects of International English, an ad hoc internationally agreed language defined by peoples whose first languages mostly won't even be English, people trying to simply communicate with each other ( & discarding some of the illogicalities & inconsistencies of English).
• Most of those deciders will be traders & consumers,
  Not the linguists & academics appointed by politicians who currently define languages. Not the translators & interpreters who are happy to get paid because people can't communicate together without them - currently. (Would you go back to the middle ages, & pay a scribe to write or read a letter ? ... A translator/interpreter is the modern equivalent of a scribe - an expensive delay, unaffordable for many. Of course all those educated professionals, politicians, academics, linguists, translators interpreters don't want People to be able to communicate without the paid professionals, that would undermine their power base, & the people might learn other poloitical ideas & economic markets than the one their local language confines them in.
• China lurks in the wings,
  • The world's booming & eventual number one market.
  • Not using the Latin/ Roman character set.
  • In international business, Europeans, eg Germans, French, Swedish etc, have a choice
    • Cling to local divided languages, with weird national extensions to the Roman character set (French cedilla, German umlauts, Swedish O with a line through it etc), that not even their European neighbours know how to handle. ... OR
    • Consolidate & adopt a form of simplified rationalised form of English ( but not the progressively Germanicised English of Internet language jokes), & also bolster use of a common subset of Roman characters (the ASCII A-Z subset The British, Americans, Australians, & some Europeans (Dutch & Italians etc) use, omitting the troublesome extra national glyphs/chars/letters/accents of Germany France Spain etc. (Expansion rules exist for German Umlauts, similar could exist or be invented for other languages)
    • • If there's not a cohesive Western grouping of Europe, America etc, using a common English with (ASCII) Roman character subset, Roman/Latin font & English may eventually come under more competitive pressure from China ?
      • A Chinese resident in California, (Sin-Yaw Wang) wrote in his blog "Bi-lingual readers, did you notice my Chinese posts are always shorter?"
      • German is 15 or 20% less efficient than English (measure the thickness of any computer text book),
      • So just as English is more competitive than German language, could Chinese script threaten Latin/Roman font set some day ?
• Progressive marginalisation: Unite & rule, Divide & fall.
  • The world owes no living to those who deliberately use inefficient tools.
    Languages & written character sets (eg A-Z) are tools worthy of improvement for better efficiency. Preserving unchanged fossilised iconic cultural icons makes no real sense when it hinders our wider efficient communication & trade.
  • We don't benefit from awkward languages, they just give advantage to others, eg: Europe maintains it's plethora of divergent languages, many people not adopting much English at work even in international industries like computing. In EU government it's a nightmare of languages.
  • Many Europeans not unifying on English, gives commercial advantage to North America: a unified market with mobility of labour of 250+ Million all speaking just English (& a bit of Spanish).
  • The world is not going to switch to trading & communicating in eg French or German - that boat has long gone. The lingua franca is English.

• Put spaces back between words.
• Dump Umlauts eg swap 'ü' to 'ue' etc.

German grammar is a nightmare, stacking a cascade of verbs & a nicht (Not) at the end, & male, female & neuter nouns (worse than & inconsistent with French genders), & capitalising single nouns (a discarded habit of old English a few hundred years back), & inverted couplets in the number sequences, &
Worst of all: German grammar rams nouns together, discarding spaces (OK English also does that a bit too but much less.

It makes German harder to look up in dictionaries & learn. Examples:
Germans sometime have fun trying to make sentences out of single words rammed together)
Try this:

• Typically, a Brit new in Germany doesn't realise "Rotkreuzplatz" is Rot- Kreuz- Platz - just too long a blur to recognise.
• Rothschild in Britain gets pronounced as "Roth's Child", as no one has a clue it derives from a German immigrant named "Rot- Schild" (Red Shield) & not "Roths- Child".
• Another ludicrous word to fail to look up in a dictionary is Urinsekt One might wrongly guess that meant Urin- Sekt (Pissy Champagne ?) - But No, one might eventually guess Ur- Insekt (Ancient less evolved Insect )
• The 2 German Rechts- schreib- reforms around 2000 (1996 & ? ) could have (but failed to) put spaces back, & (they only half dumped Scharf Ess = Eszett = ss = ß , & they retained umlauts ä ö ü. (That's my crude take on it, I invites someone to create a web page about it). PS lucky Switzerland eradicated it between 1906 & 2006 .
• There is a "rule" in the "official governmental ruleset" that suggests using the hyphen, just as it has been done 500 years ago, to indicate a word gap. But it's hard to find out where exactly to apply it.
  
  

  Autobahnraststätte
  Autobahn-Raststätte
  Auto-Bahnraststätte
  Autobahnrast-Stätte
  Autobahn-Rast-Stätte
  Auto-Bahn-Raststätte
  Auto-Bahn-Rast-Sstätte
  

• Some examples of reforms:

  kennenlernen	kennen lernen	kennenlernen
  leid tun	Leid tun	leidtun
  zu Hause	zuhause	(but not: nachhause)
  zur Zeit	zurzeit	(but not: zutisch)

• Some questions of inconsistency:
  • Why is "zusammen schreiben" written separatedly, but "auseinanderschreiben" compunded?
  • Why is it "Blut saugend", but "blutstillend"?
  (English is also an inconsistent language, but the 2 above worth remembering next time one meets eg fellow Brits enthusing how regular German is.
• Adding spaces & dumping umlauts could have made it Much easier to learn German, (& sort text, without too many variant sorting conventions), & could have avoided stultifying debates on triple S in some cascaded noun horrors.
• Worse, the clowns who messed up Rechtsschreibreform, changed their minds a few years later, & did a 2nd bodge job, causing a 2nd lot of dictionary reprints (& near compulsory purchases for firms & parents ) & confusing the kids & profiting the publishers & language professionals.
• German officialdom blew their chance.
• Germans make mistakes - a page in German: Schreibreform: Fehlergalerie
• German was never an easy language to learn, & they failed to fix the basics.
• It's now down to German speakers individually, to fix the German language to be more learnable: to re-insert spaces & swop out the umlauts for eg AE OE UE. (Whoops! I'm guilty here too! Plenty of my web pages have "proper" singular byte Umlauts (in proper HTML escape sequences) instead of the 2 byte equivalent. I put them in to make my pages look "better" to Germans, forgetting logic demands scrap single byte umlauts. (Actually German language is lucky, apparently some other European languages dont have standard 2 byte sequences to replace weird local-only national characters in their extended Latin font sets).
• Germans should Not feel constrained by the incompetent language professionals who have failed them, its their language to change if they will . (English by contrast doesn't need or have an official body to define or protect it, it evolves, adopting foreign words as needed. Compare that with eg German (as above) pontificated on by academics,, & compare with French, where more modern French people are persecuted by French laws against foreign [English] words in newspapers), & Welsh (with government broadcasting etc subsidies to survive)) Darwinan evolution & "Survival Of The Fitest" is rather patchy on human languages.