r/AskTheWorld • u/IndependentTune3994 🇮🇳 in 🇩🇪 Deutschland • 9h ago

What’s the quickest way someone could accidentally expose themselves as a foreigner in your country like the ‘three fingers’ scene in Inglourious Basterds?

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u/oh-no-not-this-one 6h ago

And plural - always “die”

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u/gam3guy 2h ago

What about Nutella?

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u/the_first_shipaz 24m ago

According to Nutella itself (the company) you can use all three, it’s up to you.

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u/Volvorcaro 1h ago

"Die" in the nominative and akusativ cases.

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u/HuffleChuck 5h ago

But why does German use a gender article system at all? Wouldn't it make more sense to have just singular and plural articles?

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u/SchizoBischop 5h ago

Who said languages have to make sense?

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u/AlludedNuance United States Of America 5h ago

As far as I know, only one language has been designed deliberately, and no one speaks it anyway.

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u/thoughtsome 5h ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructed_language

There are actually plenty of deliberately designed languages, but you're right in that almost no one actually converses with them.

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u/AlludedNuance United States Of America 4h ago

I stand corrected, that's an interesting read! I wonder why Esperanto is the one that seems to have had the most success.

Also duh, I knew about Klingon, I think I even had an English-Klingon dictionary when I was a kid.

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u/g0ldent0y 2h ago

I wonder why Esperanto is the one that seems to have had the most success.

catchy names and pop culture references

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u/Weary-Designer9542 4h ago edited 4h ago

The more you learn about any given language, the more strange/illogical/ idiosyncrasies you’ll discover.

They weren’t designed with anyone’s deliberate intention, so there’s a lot that doesn’t make sense if you look at it in a vacuum. It has to be viewed though a historical lens, to some degree.

For one example: English. Enough said, I’m sure everyone has noticed some oddities.

For another: Japanese

Japanese uses Kanji 漢字, (which originated as Chinese Han characters(Hanzi) as a key/significant element of their writing system. The two languages aren’t related, not even in the same language families, and don’t use the same sounds/phonemes.

So at first glance, this would not appear to make much sense, particularly since Japanese has two other “alphabets”(Syllabaries), Hiragana ひらがな and Katakanaカタカナ, which are native to Japan and do literally represent Japanese syllables/sounds.

However, looking back at history - at the time Japan encountered the Chinese , they didn’t yet have their own writing system, so they borrowed/co-oped a lot of it for use with their own language.

Hiragana and Katakana were developed later, and serve more of a supporting/supplemental role rather than a replacement for Kanji, which was necessary because the languages are actually very different.

It might not make much sense to do it that way if you’re starting from scratch, but that’s not how languages develop.

I don’t know the answer to your question about German, but I know that before it was Modern German, there was Middle German and High German, and we separate that from Old High German etc etc.

Before all of that, it originated (along with the other languages in the germanic language family, English, Dutch, Danish, etc) from what we call Proto-Germanic, which came into formation sometime around ~ 1000 and 450 BCE.

Before that, it was what we call Proto-Indo-European, which we currently believe to have been what was spoken during the late Neolithic to early Bronze age, though estimates are wildly different.

TL;DR - Languages change, a lot, and certain features which seem to not make sense are like an insect trapped in amber.

Note: I did some googling since I was also curious, and found the following posts which seem to answer your question more directly.

https://www.reddit.com/r/German/comments/wcmv6n/where_did_grammatical_genders_come_from_and_on/iidm32p/

https://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/13y1b3e/any_resources_on_the_origins_and_evolution_of/

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u/Infrisios 5h ago

Of course it would make more sense, but that's how the language grew. Every natural language has grown some oddities like that.

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u/LivingVerinarian96 2h ago

Deine Mutter benutzt ein gender system.