German, What the hell?

[Drudgelmir]

'Ello there folks.
So I recently started learning German so I can read various books in the original language but there's something that is bothering me. Why is it you have two words which mean eat (Esse and Isst) but they never seem to follow any logic?

On a related note, does anyone know of any other weird things in other languages?

Captcha "how quaint" I expect this might be a reaction from a few of you.

 

[geK0]

We have multiple words meaning "eat" as well

eat
consume
devour
dine
feast
feed
partake of
snack

I think most languages have synonyms...

 

[Chromatic Aberration]

Why is it you have two words which mean eat (Esse and Isst) but they never seem to follow any logic?

They are not different words, they are conjugations of the same word in the same way that "eat" has conjugations depending on who does them, like

He eats
they eat
etc.

In this case the infinitive would be "essen"

Ich esse
Du isst
Er/Sie/Es isst
Sie essen
Wir essen
Ihr esst

I suspect you might want to take a look at the corresponding Wikipedia page [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_conjugation] for more information. You should also be aware that there is also a noun "Das Essen" roughly standing for food or dinner.

 

[Quaxar]

Essen and isst are the same word only in different gramatical settings. Eat and ate aren't independent either...

And how is there no logic? "Essen" is the infinitive, "isst" is third person singular present tense.

 

[DoPo]

What Dajosch and Quaxar said. It's the same word, pretty much " eat" and "[he] eats" (although English is largely spared from those). I suck at German, but I thought that was basic knowledge.

Other weird things, though...I don't know. I mean I don't know what you'd consider weird. The English spelling of some words is quite abnormal, I'd say.

 

[purplecactus]

A lot of languages have multiple words for a lot of things, to put a not-so-fine point on it. I'm not going to go over the grammatical thing that's been explained above, the others have covered it far better than I could. It just isn't unusual, that's all.