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German for Programmers

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Re: German for Programmers

#61

Post by _ph_ »

kara_jade wrote: post #31

The super-complicated LIFO example is, unfortunately, a contrived example: “Ich stimme dem Maler, der die Meinung, dass Rot keine Farbe ist, vertritt, zu.” This sentence can be rewritten in German just as in the English translation: “Ich stimme dem Maler zu, der die Meinung vertritt, dass Rot keine Farbe ist.”

I think the rewrite of the sentence is the way better way to phase it. Just because something is legal German, like in the original example, it doesn't mean it is good German :). (German native speaker).

Re: German for Programmers

#62

Post by Double_a_92 »

adimitrov wrote: post #47
lordnacho wrote: post #34

> The genders of individual nouns and the grammatical rules to decline articles and adjectives using those genders constitute a shared set of rules that the sender and receiver both know. It may not approach the Shannon limit, but German gendered nouns form a weird, organically developed forward error correcting code. This might be a convoluted example, but imagine trying to hear the difference between Rat and Rad ov…

> Somehow, they tend to all place the noun in the same gender. That's not generally true, especially for German. I've heard "der Blog, das Blog," "die, das Email" "die, der, das Factory" … etc. Loan words undergo an integration process, which is more of a sociolinguistic concept, I guess. At the end of the integration process, the word becomes an integral part of the language, with a fixed gender. For example, "Manag…

What I've also noticed in myself and other people is that seemingly weird German genders come from not saying the second part of a compound word.

I.e. "das Factory" which does sound somewhat weird (because I would think of "die Fabrik" instead), comes from "das Factory-Pattern" where "Pattern" ("das Muster") was omitted for brevity.

Re: German for Programmers

#63

Post by swah »

pantalaimon wrote: post #50
Spearchucker wrote: post #40

Got excited when I read the title but. I speak fluent German - like a native. Only after 20 years in London I cannot participate in a hard- or software-related technical discussion in German, because I wasn't exposed to that milieu in a German-speaking environment. And so I excpected something that maybe explains how you might say "inversion of control" or "edge/perimiter network" or "public key cryptography" or "tie…

Just use the English words like everyone else. It seems like there was an effort in the 80ies/90ies to have native German names for concepts in computer science, but today those just sound very dated. Datenfernübertragung died with the 56k Modem ;)

This happens in Portugal vs Brazil. Portuguese have native terms ("mouse" is "rato") and Brazilians just import everything "mouse", "celular", "desktop".

Re: German for Programmers

#64

Post by alexgmcm »

pantalaimon wrote: post #50
Spearchucker wrote: post #40

Got excited when I read the title but. I speak fluent German - like a native. Only after 20 years in London I cannot participate in a hard- or software-related technical discussion in German, because I wasn't exposed to that milieu in a German-speaking environment. And so I excpected something that maybe explains how you might say "inversion of control" or "edge/perimiter network" or "public key cryptography" or "tie…

Just use the English words like everyone else. It seems like there was an effort in the 80ies/90ies to have native German names for concepts in computer science, but today those just sound very dated. Datenfernübertragung died with the 56k Modem ;)

Blinkenlichten :P

Re: German for Programmers

#65

Post by jlangenauer »

Having lived in Germany for 3 years now, and managed to speak German to a half-decent level (B1/B2), I offer the following observations.

1. The genders don't matter nearly as much as non-speakers think they do. If you talk to your bank, it doesn't matter if you ask about "der Konto", "die Konto" or "das Konto" (the last is actually correct), you will be able to communicate quite fine. Unlike French, there are very few words where changing the gender has a different meaning - das Bund/der Bund (the bundle/the association) is the only one I can think of off-hand. Same with adjective declinations - "das verbundenes Konto", "zum verbundene Konto", "ein verbundenen Konto" are all wrong and will grate on the German ear, but will all be understood.

2. I agree absolutely with not trying to map German propositions to English ones. One of the things that improved my German a lot is learning the verb + proposition combinations - "ich denke an...", "ich freue mich auf...", "ich helfe dir bei ..."

3. There is an amazing amount of structure in German words which you start to see after you have basic vocabulary, which makes it easier to guess at the meaning of words you've never come across before. For example: das Mitleid - "mit" means with, and "leid" would be related to the verb "leiden", to suffer. So you'd have "with-suffering", which makes it possible to guess the actual meaning - "compassion" or "pity". This of course gets extended far further with German's compound words.

Re: German for Programmers

#66

Post by alpaca128 »

tobltobs wrote: post #60

A bit offtopic but there [1] is a funny list of some really weird details of the German language. After reading those examples I can not understand how some people are able to learn German at all. [1] https://www.watson.ch/spass/digital/724157644-zum-glueck-mue...

Well, you can do that with every single language out there if you look for the most ridiculous examples. The ones in this link are funny but partially so far-fetched that for one comparison I had to take a look in the dictionary, as a native speaker.

Re: German for Programmers

#67

Post by levosmetalo »

jlangenauer wrote: post #65

Having lived in Germany for 3 years now, and managed to speak German to a half-decent level (B1/B2), I offer the following observations. 1. The genders don't matter nearly as much as non-speakers think they do. If you talk to your bank, it doesn't matter if you ask about "der Konto", "die Konto" or "das Konto" (the last is actually correct), you will be able to communicate quite fine. Unlike French, there are very fe…

While it's true that people that want to understand you would understand you, even if you speak wrong, it's not something "not to worry about".

Using the wrong gender or articles quickly gives a hint that you are some lowly educated factory worker living in Germany for 20 years and not caring to learn the language.

Re: German for Programmers

#68

Post by Tomte »

pantalaimon wrote: post #33
madez wrote: post #28

I like the analogies, but I'd like to nitpick, if I may. "While the grammar is mostly regular here, two things make this challenging: the nonsensical assignment of genders to nouns and (...)" The given examples for weird assignment of genders are inadequate because they are explained by common rules. Das Mädchen: Diminutive words are always neutral, and Mädchen is the diminutive of Magd. Die Männlichkeit: Words endin…

> the words Rat and Rad are pronounced identical, thanks to the Auslautverhärtung. Are they though? > Ich habe einen Rat für dich. > Ich habe ein Rad für dich.

Yes, they are pronounced identically.

I couldn't believe it. Neither could my fellow students in Phonetics and Phonology.

But the spectrogram doesn't lie. Looks exactly the same.

Re: German for Programmers

#69

Post by ascar »

adimitrov wrote: post #47
lordnacho wrote: post #34

> The genders of individual nouns and the grammatical rules to decline articles and adjectives using those genders constitute a shared set of rules that the sender and receiver both know. It may not approach the Shannon limit, but German gendered nouns form a weird, organically developed forward error correcting code. This might be a convoluted example, but imagine trying to hear the difference between Rat and Rad ov…

> Somehow, they tend to all place the noun in the same gender. That's not generally true, especially for German. I've heard "der Blog, das Blog," "die, das Email" "die, der, das Factory" … etc. Loan words undergo an integration process, which is more of a sociolinguistic concept, I guess. At the end of the integration process, the word becomes an integral part of the language, with a fixed gender. For example, "Manag…

Some words are also officially recognized with different genders. E.g. it's "der oder das Ketchup". [1] I argued multiple times with my girlfriend that "der Ketchup" doesn't sound right at all, until we looked it up.

My best guess is this comes from different dialects that associate different genders with certain sounds. She comes from Schwaben, while I'm from Franken, which speak very different dialects. I had never heard "der Ketchup" before.

[1] https://www.duden.de/rechtschreibung/Ketchup

Re: German for Programmers

#70

Post by GarvielLoken »

Double_a_92 wrote: post #62
adimitrov wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Somehow, they tend to all place the noun in the same gender. That's not generally true, especially for German. I've heard "der Blog, das Blog," "die, das Email" "die, der, das Factory" … etc. Loan words undergo an integration process, which is more of a sociolinguistic concept, I guess. At the end of the integration process, the word becomes an integral part of the language, with a fixed gender. For example, "Manag…

What I've also noticed in myself and other people is that seemingly weird German genders come from not saying the second part of a compound word. I.e. "das Factory" which does sound somewhat weird (because I would think of "die Fabrik" instead), comes from "das Factory-Pattern" where "Pattern" ("das Muster") was omitted for brevity.

Yeah like in Spanish "la moto", which would make you think that's wrong because moto ends on o and should be masculine. But turns out it is actually a short for "la motocicleta", which ends in an a.
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