"Mark Twain. The Awful German Language (англ.)" - читать интересную книгу автора

stranger.
Now observe the Adjective. Here was a case where simplicity would have
been an advantage; therefore, for no other reason, the inventor of this
language complicated it all he could. When we wish to speak of our "good
friend or friends," in our enlightened tongue, we stick to the one form and
have no trouble or hard feeling about it; but with the German tongue it is
different. When a German gets his hands on an adjective, he declines it, and
keeps on declining it until the common sense is all declined out of it. It
is as bad as Latin. He says, for instance:
SINGULAR
Nominative -- Mein gutER Freund, my good friend.
Genitives -- MeinES GutEN FreundES, of my good friend.
Dative -- MeinEM gutEN Freund, to my good friend.
Accusative -- MeinEN gutEN Freund, my good friend.

PLURAL
N. -- MeinE gutEN FreundE, my good friends.
G. -- MeinER gutEN FreundE, of my good friends.
D. -- MeinEN gutEN FreundEN, to my good friends.
A. -- MeinE gutEN FreundE, my good friends.
Now let the candidate for the asylum try to memorize those variations,
and see how soon he will be elected. One might better go without friends in
Germany than take all this trouble about them. I have shown what a bother it
is to decline a good (male) friend; well this is only a third of the work,
for there is a variety of new distortions of the adjective to be learned
when the object is feminine, and still another when the object is neuter.
Now there are more adjectives in this language than there are black cats in
Switzerland, and they must all be as elaborately declined as the examples
above suggested. Difficult? -- troublesome? -- these words cannot describe
it. I heard a Californian student in Heidelberg say, in one of his calmest
moods, that he would rather decline two drinks than one German adjective.
The inventor of the language seems to have taken pleasure in
complicating it in every way he could think of. For instance, if one is
casually referring to a house, HAUS, or a horse, PFERD, or a dog, HUND, he
spells these words as I have indicated; but if he is referring to them in
the Dative case, he sticks on a foolish and unnecessary E and spells them
HAUSE, PFERDE, HUNDE. So, as an added E often signifies the plural, as the S
does with us, the new student is likely to go on for a month making twins
out of a Dative dog before he discovers his mistake; and on the other hand,
many a new student who could ill afford loss, has bought and paid for two
dogs and only got one of them, because he ignorantly bought that dog in the
Dative singular when he really supposed he was talking plural -- which left
the law on the seller's side, of course, by the strict rules of grammar, and
therefore a suit for recovery could not lie.
In German, all the Nouns begin with a capital letter. Now that is a
good idea; and a good idea, in this language, is necessarily conspicuous
from its lonesomeness. I consider this capitalizing of nouns a good idea,
because by reason of it you are almost always able to tell a noun the minute
you see it. You fall into error occasionally, because you mistake the name
of a person for the name of a thing, and waste a good deal of time trying to