Regarding " "M, N, X". (Ham & Eggs!)"... They were being taught English correctly, but were given that 'fun'
variation too, just to sort-of pronounce it right here in AussieLand
Hahahaha, that detail went right over my head the first time! But yes, it's perfect!
I was not previously aware of the reverse... "ei" = "I" and "ie" = "E" for German. Will remember that !
I think our English "I before E, except after C", only has a few exceptions, but only when words are
taken from German names, like 'Epstein' or 'Stein'.
Not really: weird, freight, feint, seize, leisure, feisty, heifer...
(And there are a handful of words with "cie", like science, species, efficient, etc.)
Regarding the 'that that that that that' conundrum, You found it!! Funnily enough, I've never seen it
posted or written before. I figured it out myself once while pondering words.
(And yes, punctuation is important, for readability). Translation could pose a problem !!
Translation just makes it clear what the structure is.
For example, the:
'I said that(1)"that(2) 'that(3)' that(4) that(5) man wrote should have been underlined."'
could translate into German as:
'Ich sagte, dass(1) dieses(2) "dass(3)", das(4) dieser(5) Mann geschrieben hat, sollte unterstrichen sein.'
(Number 3 could be any of the following, since the referent is unknown: das, dass, diese, dieses, dieser, diesen)
IN GENERAL.... Yea, my old German friends had the hardest time in getting me to pronounce their vowels
and consonants correctly, to be understood!! Like "U, V, W" being pronounced like "Oooh, Far, Vow".
And that "VolksWagen" being pronounced like "Folks Vagen". (The people's car).
Yup. What's also funny is how native German speakers overcorrect the difference in English, pronouncing many English V's as W's instead. Like my stepdad saying "wedgetables" for vegetables (even funnier when he tries to say "veggies"!).
My mom is a retired ESL teacher, and one of the things she used to do for words that learners do this to was to refuse to show them the written word before they memorized the pronunciation, because seeing it written would forever corrupt their mental model of it! So she might say "repeat after me: vegetables". And someone would ask "how's it written?" and she would simply tell them "No! If I show you now, you will never pronounce it correctly!"
They'd practice a couple of times until everyone said it correctly, and only then expose the orthography.
Speaking of the People's Car, this reminds me of an infuriating video I encountered recently, on a youtube channel called "How to Switzerland", by a somewhat clueless American girl and her Swiss husband (like... I get what they're trying to do, but she comes off as a bit "fresh off the boat" compared to us veteran
Ausländer, despite her apparently having been here for a while.) It was titled something like "10 brands the Swiss pronounce wrong" (with the word "wrong" specifically), and those "wrong" pronunciations included VW and IKEA.
(Here in Switzerland, those are pronounced "fow veh" and "ee-keh-uh", just like in Germany and Sweden, respectively.) Like... I'm pretty sure that — aside from the fact that brand names often have "local" pronunciations — if one
does have to choose a single authoritative pronunciation, it's that of the company's home country!
I wonder if that girl knows that Maggi, the Swiss seasoning brand that's known worldwide, is not pronounced "maggie" in Switzerland, but "machi"!
And back to the
'descriptive' words, starting with 'Uhr' (for Clock), but a Watch is an 'Armbanduhr'. (Arm band clock).
Not to mention which words are Masculine, Feminine, & Neutral, with no fully set pattern!! (Die, Der, Das).
And that a small child has no gender!!... "Das Kind", whether they are a girl or a boy!!
Complicated more whether you are on "Do" (Du) terms with someone. (Haben Sie, or Hast Du)
I'm getting there.... (Sorry to the O.P. hahaha...).
Yep. Like, a woman is feminine (die Frau) but a girl is neuter (das Mädchen), because Mädchen is a diminutive, and in German, diminutives are always neuter. I remember vividly when I was learning German originally (I was 12) how all of us kid learners, regardless of what our native language was, intuitively wanted to say "
die Mädchen", because
obviously a girl would be feminine!
But Italian is still a smidgen weirder, in that it has a few words
whose gender changes depending on the number! The only ones I know are
egg and
finger, which are masculine in the singular (
l'uovo and
il dito), but feminine in the plural (
le uova and
le dita)!!!
(Apparently, these are the very last traces of a neuter gender that's been almost entirely lost in Italian.)
Speaking of plurals (i.e.
grammatical number), those are also a source of wonderful weirdness. For example, English and German both treat the number zero as a plural, and mark words with a plural marker ("there are zero egg
s in the fridge"/"there is one egg in the fridge"/"there are two+ egg
s in the fridge"). French marks plurals, but treats zero as singular. Many languages (like Japanese and Chinese) use no plural markers at all, while other languages not only have a plural, but also have special markers for the
dual (specifically 2 of something, e.g. Scots Gaelic) and/or
paucal (a few of something, more than 1 but less than many, like 2–4 in Russian and Polish). Some languages apparently have even more complex systems of grammatical number.
I discovered this when working at a software company, where I did the translation of everything, including program text strings, from German to English. So I had to write strings like "There were no errors while formatting the document./There was 1 error while formatting the document./There were [n] errors while formatting the document.", for each number case. Sometimes, where German (by pure chance) had singulars and plurals that were identical, I'd have to have the programmers separate a single string into separate singular and plural (like the right-click menu command "Titel bearbeiten", which in English needed to adapt to "Edit title" or "Edit titles", depending on what's selected).
And then we did a Polish translation... and the Polish translator informed us that the program logic would need to not just select the string by 0/1/2+ , but by 0/1/2–4/5+! (That's when we bought a special library to handle this, which would allow the display logic to vary by language, without needing to have the programmers change the program logic.)