petrify
it. Personal pronouns and adjectives are a fruitful nuisance in this
language, and should have been left out. For instance, the same sound,
SIE, means YOU, and it means SHE, and it means HER, and it means IT,
and it means THEY, and it means THEM. Think of the ragged poverty of
a language which has to make one word do the work of six--and a poor
little weak thing of only three letters at that. But mainly, think of
the exasperation of never knowing which of these meanings the speaker is
trying to convey. This explains why, whenever a person says SIE to me, I
generally try to kill him, if a stranger.

Now observe the Adjective. Here was a case where simplicity would have
been an advantage; therefore, for no other reason, the inventor of this
language complicated it all he could. When we wish to speak of our "good
friend or friends," in our enlightened tongue, we stick to the one form
and have no trouble or hard feeling about it; but with the German
tongue it is different. When a German gets his hands on an adjective,
he declines it, and keeps on declining it until the common sense is all
declined out of it. It is as bad as Latin. He says, for instance:

SINGULAR

Nominative--Mein gutER Freund, my good friend. Genitives--MeinES GutEN
FreundES, of my good friend. Dative--MeinEM gutEN Freund, to my good
friend. Accusative--MeinEN gutEN Freund, my good friend.

PLURAL

N.--MeinE gutEN FreundE, my good friends. G.--MeinER gutEN FreundE,
of my good friends. D.--MeinEN gutEN FreundEN, to my good friends.
A.--MeinE gutEN FreundE, my good friends.

Now let the candidate for the asylum try to memorize those variations,
and see how soon he will be elected. One might better go without friends
in Germany than take all this trouble about them. I have shown what a
bother it is to decline a good (male) friend; well this is only a third
of the work, for there is a variety of new distortions of the adjective
to be learned when the object is feminine, and still another when the
object is neuter. Now there are more adjectives in this language than
there are black cats in Switzerland, and they must all be as
elaborately declined as the examples above suggested.
Difficult?--troublesome?--these words cannot describe it. I heard a
Californian student in Heidelberg say, in one of his calmest moods, that
he would rather decline two drinks than one German adjective.

The inventor of the language seems to have taken pleasure in
compl