For those of you who don't know me, I grew up in America, but often times I spoke German with family when I went to visit relatives overseas at a very young age. Growing up speaking two languages, I now speak them both fluently and without an accent. It's a great ability to have, and I encourage teaching children at young ages like 5-6 to start learning a 2nd language. I'm lucky to have had this chance, my two younger sisters weren't exposed to the foreign language as much, and neither of them is fluent in German now, even after both having taken 3 years of high school classes.
Anyway, these circumstances have really raised my awareness to many of the nuances in the English language. German has some nuances too, but not nearly as many, and almost no spelling nuances. Many of the spelling irregularities in German are from the modern English words like Computer, Downloaded, or Internet. English has this same problem with French words from the time when France occupied Britain centuries ago. So it would seem that modern English is going to slightly degrade the quality of German spelling syntax in the same way that French has degraded English (depot, restaurant, garage, buffet, etc.)
To start off my rant, my friend Chris just pointed out that in English we "take" things. We take "showers", "pisses", "breaks", "rides in cars", "a nap", "for granted", "a shit", "it easy", etc. In German we "make" things. Like "mach's gut" which directly translates to "make it good" which is basically means "take it easy." Waddya know, Americans take things and Germans make things...Germany was the number one world exporter a few years back (2008?) while America has been the number one importer for as long as I can remember. Is there a correlation here??
Maybe someday we'll construct a new language that becomes widely accepted and takes all the best qualities of every language and combines them together. I believe this was attempted before with Lojban, but it failed. I will need to read more about it.
I will be posting many more of these discoveries as time goes on, so stay tuned!
-MasterHD
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