How To Fix German Grammar

Summary

Why will the German Language die ?

• Globalisation is occurring ever more Internet, satellite TV, cheap telephony, aviation, trade, tourism, & working abroad.
• Not just goods compete. Not just countries; But languages too.
  Some languages will die sooner, some later. First it was obscure village & tribal languages eg in Africa etc that went, The next will be dialects & small area languages such as Bavarian & Welsh; then the smaller national languages, Swedish, Dutch, Portuguese; Then bigger national languages: German, then French, then Spanish, then will come the final competition of Chinese, English.
• People will keep their local languages for local use for a while,
  Some languages will not quite die ( Latin hasn't entirely died yet, but neither is it significant) People will globaly communicate in big languages. Example: Already English is the language of choice for Germans who don't speak Spanish in South America.
• The international English that's coming won't be quite the English of England, or America etc,
  which will become subset dialects of International English, an ad hoc internationally agreed language defined by peoples whose first languages mostly won't even be English, people trying to simply communicate with each other ( & discarding some of the illogicalities & inconsistencies of English).
• Most of those deciders will be traders & consumers,
  Not the linguists & academics appointed by politicians who currently define languages. Not the translators & interpreters who are happy to get paid because people can't communicate together. (Would you go back to the middle ages, & pay a scribe to write a letter ? ... A translator/interpreter is the modern equivalent of a scribe. Of course all those educated professionals, politicians, academics, linguists, translators interpreters don't want People to be able to communicate without the paid professionals, that would undermine their power base.
• China lurks in the wings,
  • The world's booming & eventual number one market.
  • Not using the Roman character set.
  • In international business, Europeans, eg Germans, French, Swedish etc, have a choice
    • Cling to local divided languages, with weird national extensions to the Roman character set (French cedilla, German umlauts, Swedish O with a line through it etc), that not even their European neighbours know how to handle. ... OR
    • Consolidate & adopt a form of simplified rationalised (not Germanicised, subtle difference!) form of English, & also bolster use of a common subset of Roman characters (the ASCII A-Z subset, not the weird national extras .
  • If there's not a cohesive Western grouping of Europe, America etc, using a common English with (ASCII) Roman character subset, they may later come under more competitive pressure from China ?
  • A Chinese resident in California, (Sin-Yaw Wang) wrote in his blog "Bi-lingual readers, did you notice my Chinese posts are always shorter?"
  • German is 15 or 20% less efficient than English (measure the thickness of any computer text book),
• Progressive marginalisation: Unite & rule, Divide & fall.
  • The world owes no living to those who deliberately use inefficient tools.
    Languages & written character sets (eg A-Z) are tools worthy of improvement for better efficiency. Preserving unchanged fossilised iconic cultural icons makes no real sense when it hinders our wider efficient communication & trade.
  • We dont benefit from awkward languages, they just give advantage to others, eg: Europe maintains it's plethora of divergent languages, many people not adopting much English at work even in international industries like computing. In EU government it's a nightmare of languages.
  • Many Europeans not unifying on English, gives commercial advantage to North America: a unified market with mobility of labour of 250+ Million all speaking just English (& a bit of Spanish).
  • The world is not going to switch to trading & communicating in eg French or German - that boat has long gone. The lingua franca is English.

• Put spaces back between words.
• Dump Umlauts eg swap 'ü' to 'ue' etc.

German grammar is a nightmare, stacking a cascade of verbs & a nicht (Not) at the end, & male, female & neuter nouns, & capitalising single nouns, & inverted couplets in the numbe sequences, &
Worst of all: German grammar rams nouns together, discarding spaces (OK English also does that a bit too but much less, Germans sometime have fun trying to make sentences out of single words rammed together):

• It makes German harder to look up in dictionaries & learn.
• Typically, eg a Brit new in Germany didn't realise "Rotkreuzplatz" was Rot- Kreuz- Platz - just a long blur to him.
• Rothschild in Britain gets pronounced as "Roth's Child", as no one has a clue it derives from German named immigrant "Rot- Schild" (Red Shield) & not "Rots- Child".
• Another ludicrous word to fail to look up in a dictionary is Urinsekt One might wrongly guess that meant Urin- Sekt (Pissy Champagne ?) - But No, one might eventually guess Ur- Insekt (Ancient less evolved Insect )
• The 2 German Rechts- schreib- reforms around 2000 should have (but failed to) put spaces back, & (they only dumped Sharf Ess, (& that only in theory), & they retained umlauts ä ö ü.

• Those could have made it Much easier to learn German, (& sort text, without too many variant sorting conventions), & could have avoided stupid debates on how many S Should be in Dampfschiffsfahrt & other cascaded noun horrors. Worse, the idiots who messed up Rechtsschreibreform, changed their minds a few years later, & did a 2nd bodge job, causing a 2nd lot of dictionary reprints (& near compulsory purchases for firms & parents ) & confusing the kids & profiting the publishers & language professionals.
• German officialdom blew their chance.
• German was never an easy language to learn, & they failed to fix the basics.
• It's now down to German speakers individually, to fix the German language to be more learnable: to re-insert spaces & swop out the umlauts for eg AE OE UE.
• Germans should Not feel constrained by the incompetent language professionals who have failed them, its their language to change at will. (English by contrast doesn't need or have an official body to define or protect it, it evolves, adopting foreign words as needed. Compare that with eg German (as above), French (laws against foreign words in newspapers) Welsh (government subsidies to survive))