English also compounds words. We just write them with spaces in between.

"Baseball field" for one. German chooses to put the words together into one, English chooses to put a space in between them.

But either way, spoken-wise, they're a series of nouns all in a row.

When I was learning BASIC, AppleSoft BASIC only had two letters of significance in variable names... this was Apple ][e...

From there I moved on to C and Assembly from there. After I learned Assembly, everything just kind of made sense, because I could tear apart everything in assembly in my head, and know what it was doing. I stuck with C all the way until my professional career which started me in Perl, and then just recently Go.

The more that I've studied German, the more that I have found that they express things in a very particular manner as opposed to English. The smallest example being that in formal English the passive-voice is discouraged, because it obfuscates the agent of the sentence, while in formal German, the passive-voice is encouraged, because it emphasizes on the action, which is often the more important part of the sentence.

Also, the "the left-turning truck" form ("den links abbiegenden LKW") is also very common to the point of "die den Ball mit den Streifen gebende Frau" what English would consider absurd. Basically, much deeper sentence construction than the nearly flat construction that is preferred by English speakers.

I've only now started grasping and feeling the difference... you know, like grokking it rather than just knowing that it's used... it's really cool, and interesting, and I only wish that I had more exposure to German, but with the age of the internet and German television here at home... I suppose, I'm the only one to blame...

I have advanced learning in German as an American native-English speaker.

I now use the subjunctive properly, and a host of other things. My English is perhaps now so proper, that I speak it "better" than my parents...

I think it more helpful to recognize that some dialects of English are sufficiently different from the formal SAE register that teaching it requires teaching people basic language features and areas of grammar that normally only have to be taught to foreign language speakers. (i.e. No one has to explain to kids growing up around English that it is SVO order. They get that all on their own.)

If we recognize that we have to teach written English like a foreign language to some people (very specifically for Deaf people it will always be a foreign language) then perhaps we can work better at getting them to be able to produce it when the audience deems it appropriate.

English was actually degrading before the Norse and Norman invaders...

This is a matter of orthography, not grammar.

Orthography has good rules to follow, tighter than grammatical objections. But at the same time, the spelling of "principle" vs "principal" is entirely arbitrary, and the assignment of denotation is entirely arbitrary. And thus there is no good "rule" between them, except convention.

As per the sibling post, and quoting from a cousin post of mine:

It's called Negative Agreement.

"I don't have any books" is ok, but "*I have any books" is wrong.

"I didn't go anywhere" is ok, but "*I went anywhere" is wrong.

Replacing "any" with "no" to form Negative Agreement doesn't actually change the state of the negation. It just changes the term used to construct Negative Agreement.

It's called Negative Agreement.

"I don't have any books" is ok, but "*I have any books" is wrong.

"I didn't go anywhere" is ok, but "*I went anywhere" is wrong.

Replacing "any" with "no" to form Negative Agreement doesn't actually change the state of the negation. It just changes the term used to construct Negative Agreement.

Indeed! And agreed!

AH YES! The past perfect form... the form that literally says "this happened, but is over now"

"When I was fooled, it was because I wasn't careful enough."

There's a different word between "were" and "was" in the conditionals, and so humans want and desire to create a reason for why they are different. Sometimes, they're just two different ways of saying something.

Indeed, the situation is more nuanced than one pithy little quote can do justice to. It's just a phrase that linguists tend to use, because they are confronted almost constantly by people insisting that some language is just a dialect or some dialect is actually a language. Often, this is for political reasons (which I shortened to reinforcing the "us" vs "them" cultural difference.). I am aware that Moldova has since changed their official language to Romanian, not Moldovan, so there's some recognition coming to the area in the last 10 years since I studied linguistics in college...

But yes, everything you posted here is awesome, thank you for expanding upon my original post.

"mutually intelligible" is unfortunately a continuum, rather than a binary quality. It stands though that Scandinavian languages are closer to each other than some Spanishs or Arabics.

I wouldn't because I don't know "redneck" dialect well enough. But if two people speaking a common dialect wish to celebrate a contract in a dialect other than the formal register of the country in which they live, then I say, go for it!

Contracts, resumes, etc, are all written in a certain register (smaller than a dialect) because that is the appropriate register for the audience. However, would you walk into an urban depressed neighborhood and go around using the Received Pronunciation register? No, it's not appropriate, because of audience mismatch.

But punishing a group of people just because the formal register of power in their country is significantly more different from that spoken by a privileged class that need not learn the hojillion needling rules... that's not right.