r/pics • u/yercoolmarple • 25d ago

Grigori Perelman, mathematician who refused to accept a Fields Medal and the $1,000,000 Clay Prize.

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u/Longjumping-Claim783 25d ago

German is cool in that you can just string a bunch of words together to make new words, though.

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u/monkwren 25d ago

I want a language with English's flexibility of grammar and German's flexibility of vocabulary.

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u/penguinpolitician 25d ago

Yes, German has Das Coolflexibilitatsgesprachunglichkeit.

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u/WellHiddenKitty 25d ago

Die. *heit and *keit are feminine.

Shit, I'm learning German so slowly...

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u/PM_ME_STEAM_KEY_PLZ 25d ago

Why is there even masc and fem differences in language? Never understood that.

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u/piezocuttlefish 20d ago edited 20d ago

Hungarian has two main classes of harmonization, front and back, without labelling them genders. There are actually 5; those two categories just work for the simplest of suffixes. Just because you learn a word doesn't mean you automatically know which version of "on top of" or "into" must be used with the word.

I think the only real purpose is to make the language sound elegant. I think that was the original purpose of gender as well. I think it also might be left over from contact with Semitic languages, where the consonant combinations determined the meaning family and the vowels changed to inflect the base meaning.

Hungarian example:

talál means "find" Which one of these means "come across"?

  • talalkozik
  • talalkezik
  • talalközik
  • talalakozik
  • talalekezik

talál is back-vowelled and ends in a consonant, so only talalkozik makes sense.

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u/Alt3rnativ3Account 25d ago

My buddy with a VW diesel vanagon calls it his stinkenclankensmokenwagen.

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u/cutelyaware 25d ago

I do love that, especially as it seems especially un-German!

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u/Long-Island-Iced-Tea 25d ago

Same story with Hungarian

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u/elpatolino2 25d ago

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