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The Awful German Language (1880)

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Re: The Awful German Language (1880)

#291

Post by vsl »

davidgh wrote: post #242
zvrba wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've never understood the need for noun genders As a native speaker of Slavic language, I've never understood the need for differentiating between "THE table" and "A table". It's useless and clear from the context what is meant (note that both are different from "THIS/THAT table", which I do NOT deem useless.) For English and Norwegian, I've learned grammatical rules that cover ca 80% of use-cases, the rest is gues…

> As a native speaker of Slavic language, I've never understood the need for differentiating between "THE table" and "A table" This was a common sentiment I heard from Russian students when teaching them English. The concept of articles is absolutely maddening, I think, when your native language does not have it. I recall trying to teach it with a simple explanation. “I heard a dog walking outside. The dog pushed the…

> I came to the realization that some of these elements of language while seemingly “useless” (meaning, you could clearly make a language work without them) are what add subtle richness to a language.

That’s a great way of putting it.

Re: The Awful German Language (1880)

#292

Post by vsl »

mh-cx wrote: post #222
zvrba wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've never understood the need for noun genders As a native speaker of Slavic language, I've never understood the need for differentiating between "THE table" and "A table". It's useless and clear from the context what is meant (note that both are different from "THIS/THAT table", which I do NOT deem useless.) For English and Norwegian, I've learned grammatical rules that cover ca 80% of use-cases, the rest is gues…

I'm a German learning czech and have the opposite problem: the czech (and probably other slavic languages) still have those articles but mostly leave them away. I'm never really sure, when you still need to use them: * ten/ta/to = der/die/das (the) * nějaký/nějaká/nějaké = (irgend-)ein/eine/ein (a, some) In my course there's the example “nějaká paní se ptá na cestu" (A woman asks for the way). Not sure what is differ…

These examples map to English well:

* ten/ta/to = that, not “the”; I.e. literally or figuratively pointing (including e.g. referencing previously mentioned object and not wanting to repeat it)

* nějaký etc. - some, not “a”, i.e. explicitly strongly expressing vagueness. “A” in English is automatic grammar construct, “some” is explicitly expressing uncertainess. That sentence would correctly be translated as “SOME woman asks for directions” - I.e. a woman you don’t know, some rando that walked in the shop for example. A more real sentence: “some woman is asking for you” (you don’t know her, never seen her, she just walked in and asked for your colleguae), “nějaká paní se po tobě ptá”. You would use “a” in English here, it warrants clarifying the situation with “some” - and in Czech, that’s the only situation when you need these, when you are pointing to/referencing something or expressing vagueness.

Re: The Awful German Language (1880)

#293

Post by lolc »

FabHK wrote: post #209
liftbigweights wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It amazes me how many people claim English is easy to learn People think english is simple because we don't have the gender+conjugation+declension system of many languages. So initially, english appears simple. A boat is a boat is a boat. But everywhere else - from spelling to grammar to phonetics, english is irregular and has so many exceptions that it really requires effort to become native or even fluent. One co…

I've seen this quote attributed to G B Shaw: "English is one of the easiest languages to speak badly, but one of the most difficult to speak well"; however, I can't find a reliable citation. At any rate, I think it captures something about English. As you say, languages like German and French take more effort to learn initially (conjugation and (in German) declension), but then there are only a few ways of expressing…

> English has so many synonyms with slightly different connotations and idiomatic nuances that it is hard to master.

At some point I accepted that this is true for every language. First there's training basic grammar and initial vocabulary (a few months' study) and then there's mastering the long tail of idiomatic expressions (years of study). The first gives you the ability to talk about any topic. Only the second gives you effortless communication.

Re: The Awful German Language (1880)

#294

Post by lolc »

posterboy wrote: post #262
lolc wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not being too much of a linguist but ever ready to expound on the concept of economy in speech: We have a strong pressure to minimize communication effort both for speakers and for listeners. I would assume that genders help disambiguate and aid the listener discern words with higher certainty without increasing the syllable count. Our mind builds hypotheses of the words to follow while listening to a sentence. Witho…

> In the midst of a German sentence, some nouns will be precluded because they would be impossible due to gendered articles and adjectives. This lessens the cognitive load (of the trained listener) or conversely allows omitting words when the gender narrows down the selection enough. This is an example for OP's notion of hard to parse foreign speaker English. I'm not sure what you are trying to say. No offense. I als…

Regarding the first of the two sentences you quoted: While the two conjunctions do make it hard to parse, I don't see why there should be a definitive article in it.

I'll reword it for you: While we're listening to a German sentence, the choice of the next noun can be restricted by gendered articles and adjectives.

Re: The Awful German Language (1880)

#295

Post by zvrba »

klodolph wrote: post #270
zvrba wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm curious how you can figure out from context whether you can figure out something from context. Erm, memory? You remember whether something has been introduced or not. Take a hypothetical phone conversation, an example that nobody has managed to explain to me satisfactorily: A: "Where are you?" B: "I'm in [the/a/(nothing)] shower." People tell me that "the" is the correct thing to use. But A is none the wiser; B…

> Erm, memory? You remember whether something has been introduced or not. This doesn't work in English, because both speakers are not assumed to have the same knowledge of context. The "the"/"a" distinguishes between something that describes and something that also determines. Alice: Did you see any of those movies? Bob: I saw the good one. In this sentence, Bob is saying that "good one" can be figured out from conte…

Ah, finally an example where "the" does convey some extra information. However,

> Bob: I saw the good one.

Weird. Before I read your explanation I interpreted this as Alice and Bob having a prior mutual understanding about which of the movies was good and Alice immediately knows the particular movie he saw. Also, she knows that he decided upfront to watch (only) that movie.

EDIT: last point, if they don't have a prior understanding about which movie is "good", Bob would have to have watched _all_ of them to be able to say "THE good one". (Because, if he only watched a subset, an unwatched movie could be better than those he watched and would make him change his mind about which one is "good").

> she has learned that Bob thinks that there is only one good movie in "those movies".

According to your explanation, she still doesn't know _which_ movie he saw. She knows that only one was good and that it was the movie he saw. But then you could just say "I watched good one".

> "I saw a good one"

.. here, he picked a movie at random and it happened to be good. Yay, "a" does make a difference! :)

Re: The Awful German Language (1880)

#296

Post by zvrba »

vsl wrote: post #290
klodolph wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Erm, memory? You remember whether something has been introduced or not. This doesn't work in English, because both speakers are not assumed to have the same knowledge of context. The "the"/"a" distinguishes between something that describes and something that also determines. Alice: Did you see any of those movies? Bob: I saw the good one. In this sentence, Bob is saying that "good one" can be figured out from conte…

This is an example where it plays a role. In Slavic languages, you would say something like “I saw that good one” (inserting a definitive article substitute) or “the one I saw was good”; in English, you don’t need the latter phrasing with “a”; indeed, it is somewhat artificial example. What the parent post was saying was well described by his examples of where the article is obviously superfluous and doesn’t provide…

Ha, there's a difference between

“I saw that good one” -- translated to Croatian, this wording strongly implies that both knew upfront which movie was good and he watched only that one. But according to the parent's explanation it may not be the case, Alice has only learned that one of the movies was good.

and

"The one I saw was good" (he picked a random movie from the collection and it happened to be good -- which would be "a good one" from the parent's example).

Re: The Awful German Language (1880)

#297

Post by mh-cx »

vsl wrote: post #292
mh-cx wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a German learning czech and have the opposite problem: the czech (and probably other slavic languages) still have those articles but mostly leave them away. I'm never really sure, when you still need to use them: * ten/ta/to = der/die/das (the) * nějaký/nějaká/nějaké = (irgend-)ein/eine/ein (a, some) In my course there's the example “nějaká paní se ptá na cestu" (A woman asks for the way). Not sure what is differ…

These examples map to English well: * ten/ta/to = that , not “the”; I.e. literally or figuratively pointing (including e.g. referencing previously mentioned object and not wanting to repeat it) * nějaký etc. - some , not “a”, i.e. explicitly strongly expressing vagueness. “A” in English is automatic grammar construct, “some” is explicitly expressing uncertainess. That sentence would correctly be translated as “SOME w…

Ah, thanks, I think I got it now. One problem for me was, that German der/die/das can actually translate to both, “the“ and “that“ depending on the emphasis.

Re: The Awful German Language (1880)

#298

Post by xster »

klodolph wrote: post #148
zvrba wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've never understood the need for noun genders As a native speaker of Slavic language, I've never understood the need for differentiating between "THE table" and "A table". It's useless and clear from the context what is meant (note that both are different from "THIS/THAT table", which I do NOT deem useless.) For English and Norwegian, I've learned grammatical rules that cover ca 80% of use-cases, the rest is gues…

For me, "the" and "a" are critical for understanding whether you are introducing something new or assuming that I know what you are talking about from context. If I use "the" then it's something clear from context, if I use "a" it's something new. The languages I know make a big fuss about this so I'm curious how you can figure out from context whether you can figure out something from context.

Linguistically, articles are the exception rather than the rule. Grammatical words are always derived from concrete words and 'the' is just a degeneration of 'that'.

Re: The Awful German Language (1880)

#299

Post by xster »

apo wrote: post #73

English grammar is far simpler than German grammar. Eliminating noun genders, declensions, and cases (as English does) is a great simplification over German. I've never understood the need for noun genders and I scratch my head at a society that makes its members memorize such useless information. That said, German pronunciation is more regular than English pronunciation. Every letter combination is in most cases pro…

English is written how it was pronounced

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift

We just changed how we pronounced

Re: The Awful German Language (1880)

#300

Post by Koshkin »

jnurmine wrote: post #289
yesenadam wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Latin is a dead language, and we did not have a will to adopt it as a universal language I'm not sure what you mean by this. I used to believe that "Latin is a dead language" - until I learnt more about the subject. It was spoken everywhere in the Roman Empire, and the local differences evolved into the Romance languages. They are what Latin is today. And it (the relatively fixed 'classical' version anyway) was a uni…

Latin is still spoken today, on the radio of all things. The Finnish national broadcaster broadcasts Nuntii Latini, or the News in Latin. The interesting part is they do not invent new words but find existing Latin expressions and combine existing words. That alone speaks a lot of how universal the language was and perhaps still is. Link: https://areena.yle.fi/1-1931339 An example of the Indonesian tsunami catastroph…

Thanks for the link - it's a good resource for those who would like to read and hear Latin being used in a modern setting. I only wish the voice were less mechanical-sounding, but the effort in trying to keep a dead language alive can only go so far... Also, the Finnish accent is not too bad - especially compared with the way Latin can be heard from the English or the French (or even the Italians).
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