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 dig a meaning
out of it.
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