Mark Twain Filed a Formal Complaint About German. Someone Finally Listened.
Mark Twain spent nine weeks studying German in 1880. Then he filed a detailed complaint about the language, along with a proposal for its reform. Nine weeks. Then formal litigation. Against a language. That's not frustration. That's a case study in stubbornness, grammatically speaking.
He was not wrong. And he was not the last.
What Is Alman?
Alman is a simplified dialect and constructed variant of German. The core goal: maintain mutual intelligibility with Standard German while stripping out several of the things that make German a memorization marathon.
Here's what it cut. Grammatical gender: gone, replaced with a single article form for most contexts. Case-based inflections and noun declensions: removed. Gender-specific occupational title forms: eliminated.
That last one matters more than you might think. Standard German produces gendered pairs for job titles. Doctor has a form for men, a form for women. Alman doesn't do that. The job is the job. One word.
Robert Millikan Was Already There
The physicist Robert Millikan was described as speaking "a German which knows no dative, and in which genders are distributed by lot." No dative. Gender assigned by lottery. He was, without meaning to be, an accidental Alman speaker decades before Alman existed.
One possibility is that this is where a lot of people end up anyway. You learn enough vocabulary to communicate. You ditch the cases nobody corrects you on. You guess at gender and move on. Alman takes that natural drift and makes it official policy.
Language Rules Are Game Rules
Word game players know something that other people learn slowly: not all rules are equal. Some rules create structure and fun. Some create friction with no return. The best game designers can tell the difference. So, apparently, can the designers of Alman.
Samuel R. Delany's novel Babel-17 includes a tossed-off bit of trivia about Finnish, mentioned almost as an aside. In a novel where language is the central obsession, even throwaway details carry weight. The argument is that how a language is built changes what you can do inside it. Alman tests that in practice.
Strip the gender system. Remove the case endings. Does mutual intelligibility survive? According to Alman's design: yes. Twain would call that a passing grade.
So What Does This Have to Do With You?
If you play Scrabble or Wordle or any word game, you already live inside a rule system you didn't design. Some of those rules feel arbitrary. Some feel essential. Part of getting good is figuring out which is which, then playing the essential ones hard and not sweating the rest.
Alman is that question applied to an entire language. Keep what works. Cut what doesn't. Preserve the ability to talk to people who still play by the original rules.
Twain filed his complaint in 1880. It took 146 years for someone to address it formally. Slow ruling. But a ruling nonetheless.
Source: Languagehat