AMD 2 : Mark Twain

I've always been a fan of Mark Twain and his dry, witty sense of humor, so when I saw the article about Twain's thoughts of German, I was intrigued. I know Twain had some pretty liberal thoughts regarding spelling and education (for example, he once said, "I don't see any use in having a uniform and arbitrary way of spelling words. We might as well make all clothes alike and cook all dishes alike.") and to see him blissfully poke fun at the German language was pretty funny.

I DO think it was pretty funny that he's poking fun of some of the same things that I find odd about German- the seemingly arbitrary assignation of gender. YES, why IS "maiden" neutral and "wall" feminine? And there really don't seem to be any rules that help someone figure out which gender belongs to which word, you just have to memorize it!

I also loved his thoughts on the German "alphabetical processions." Yes, German words definitely are long. We thought we had it rough with "antidisestablishmentarianism," but a lot more German words do seem to march on far longer than ours (Generalstaatsverordnetenversammlungen?). I don't even know how to go about saying that- after a while I can't really tell where the syllables break apart anymore. The unending words coupled with the unfamiliar vocalizations (I still can't really make my mouth say "sprecht") renders German sort of unspeakable for me as of yet. I know Twain really was quite good at German, and he probably doesn't really consider it to be all that crazy, but the things he said were true. There is truth in humor. That being said, I think I also would have like to have seen him poke fun at the Japanese or Zulu languages to see what he came up with for that.