What's so bad about the street urchins' influence on language? It is theirs as well as mine. And on the other hand: isn't English the language in which, just by the idea of some crappy advertisement genius, 'night' starts to be spelt 'nite' etc? Is that any better than what could happen in German?
As you may remember, in general I am a fan of English language principles. This doesn't say that I am perfect in it (you may have noticed), but the general procedure of learning English seems a democratic process to me. German is much worse in that, it is an authoritarian style language, because you have to take in a lot of things that have no reason in reality.
For one thing, and speaking from my experience only, the grammar structures of English are quite flat, which means it is quite easy to extend your possibilities gradually once you have learned the basic communications level. This makes a democratic integration of non-native-english immigrants much easier. The grammar of English is also simple enough to allow understanding even if errors in the formation of sentences occur. Catastrophic errors are less frequent than in German.
Additionally, the semantic abundance is very high, with words from several very European language family. So, for many learners, parts of the vocabulary are already present and only may need minor readjustments.
As a summary, I think English allows for people to have an easy start and learn gradually while communication is already going well. Once the beginning has been done, the learning curve can be chosen to be flat without strong restrictions to the learner. The task for the learner will be widening vocabulary. A qualitative learning process isn't really needed anymore, only a quantitative one. Much of English seems to be res extensa.
Of course, English has some weak points also.
The high semantic abundance is ideal for poetry and poetically written prose (and fr political sentences that avoid to have a meaning while still sounding great). However, the same fact means that most speakers of English will only learn a comparatvely small part of the existant vocabulary. The individuals learn new vocabulary mostly during school and university, which means that the degree of education can be inferred from the size of the individual's active vocabulary.
Although this is partly true also for German, the semantic abundance of words is much less than in English, leading to fewer and less obvious language signs of the speaker's social class and educational level than in English. Moreover there is a construction principle for compound words which acts pretty obviously so that new words often can be introduced without having to explicitly define them. Such semantic constructions are understandable to most listeners, depending on their analytical intelligence and phantasy rather than their educational level and language experience.
As to words, German can make a strong case for being a democratic and egalitarian language as compared to English. But oh, for our grammar! That's really awesome. And most people don't get it right through all their lifetime. There you have it, all that social labeling comes in through the backdoor. However, due to the beneficient influence of English, German language sentences that are actually used become simpler and simpler - which renders a subset of German syntax that can claim to be egalitarian again.
If you are out to learn all the nuts and bolts of German syntax, however, you will notice that German grammar tends to come back with a vengeance. All the time. For years.
To me the worst thing about German seems the notion of grammatical gender on the nouns. Although this is true for Spanish and other Latin-based languages too, I have never heard that fact criticized as in German. Not only does it lead to some absurdities (like 'the grammatically correct girl has no gender') it is also the main reason why it is virtually impossible to learn German perfectly even over several years when you are an English native. Even the street urchin will know you, grin at you, deride you for an idiot (notwithstanding whether you are a professor) if you go wrong in the appropriate gender. Barbaric.
As a result: I think while the English language seems more fit to denounce the speaker's (writer's) social class, the German language seems to be more fit to denounce the speaker's (writer's) ethnicity - which is what I hate about German language. |
