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German for Programmers

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Re: German for Programmers

#131

Post by wolfgke »

mk89 wrote: post #71
levosmetalo wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I agree. Probably it's good to know that it doesn't matter, just so that you feel less fearful and tend to speak more, even wrong....

> Probably it's good to know that it doesn't matter, just so that you feel less fearful and tend to speak more, even wrong....

Native German speaker here: I disagree with all the sentiment of "less fear". Better concentrate on your ability to formulate grammatically correct sentences.

In school, I often felt that the German grammar works somewhat like a mathematical proof system (and asked myself why German grammar is not part of math classes). When studying mathematics, you first have to learn to write correct proofs. It makes no sense to try learn something more deep in mathematics if you have difficulties writing elementary proofs.

For German, it is the same: first learn the internal structure (grammar) of the language (just like predicate logic in mathematics) and just like thinking how to express something that you want to prove in predicate logic, find out how to formulate something in German's grammatical structure.

Only after this elementary step, you can begin with more complicated things.

Re: German for Programmers

#132

Post by datdata »

simias wrote: post #119
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…

>Unlike French, there are very few words where changing the gender has a different meaning Being French myself I'm curious what makes you say that. I can't think of many nouns that change meaning if you swap their gender. They exist but I never thought that it was common enough to cause issues. For the most part I can understand strangers just fine even if get the genders wrong. "J'ai mis la téléphone dans le voiture…

What about if I say 'J'ai mis la téléphone dans la peau" instead of 'j'ai mis le téléphone dans le pot"?! I find in french that there is always another meaning behind a noun and it is easy to slip up.

Re: German for Programmers

#133

Post by chousuke »

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 ;)

I find this interesting because my native tongue, Finnish, is quite good about accepting neologisms.

People do use English terms, but it's also very common that there exists a native word and people will use that. Calling computers "kompuutteri" would sound hilariously old-timey compared to "tietokone" (or "tietsikka"). The same goes for "telefooni" vs. "puhelin", though curiously enough I'm perfectly fine using both "pointteri" and "osoitin" when speaking about programming.

I guess part of it is because Finnish is not Germanic so direct loans sound bad... Often they get nativized so that eg a laptop in colloquial speech becomes "läppäri"

Re: German for Programmers

#134

Post by wolfgke »

Semaphor wrote: post #130
usrusr wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good examples for some of the different ways gender can be derived. Going deeper into blog, people who still remember "weblog" as the full form of "blog" will call it "das Blog" (because "das Log" is a well established German term, gendered from "das Logbuch" perhaps), whereas people who were introduced to "blog" when it already felt like a standalone term will tend to use "der Blog", perhaps for to phonetic similari…

That's funny because I'd say "das Blog" precisely because I remember weblogs and I'd say "das Log". Duden agrees with me [0] Oh and "Das Logbuch" has nothing to do with "log" but everything with "Buch". When you have compound words only the last word matters for gender. [0]: https://www.duden.de/rechtschreibung/Log_Logdatei_EDV

> Oh and "Das Logbuch" has nothing to do with "log" but everything with "Buch".

"das Log" is a device for measuring the speed of vessels:

> https://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Log_(Messger%C3%A...

So of course a "Logbuch" has a lot to do with a "Log".

Re: German for Programmers

#135

Post by onli »

EdwardDiego wrote: post #97
onli wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What happens often here is that a word has a clear gender that just feels right to basically all germans. But an alternative gender gets used by a group that does not trust its language feel and instead relies on logic to derive the gender. Blog is a good example: It's obviously "Der Blog", but because some people think "blog is short for weblog, and log is neutral" they use "das Blog", though that just sounds wrong…

Don't loanwords auf Deutsch tend to end up with "das" as the prefix? Das Restaurant etc. I figured blog would be a loanword in German also?

The moment a word is used as a german word by a german it does not really matter anymore where it's from, the usual mechanisms that specify gender apply. Which are the few fixed rules, then mostly "how do others speak", maybe a bit "how does the word sound". That's how foreign words become german words.

There is no rule that loanwords end up as neutrum: Die Allee, die Paella, der Computer, der Laptop are just a few counter examples.

Re: German for Programmers

#136

Post by onli »

ascar wrote: post #102
onli wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What happens often here is that a word has a clear gender that just feels right to basically all germans. But an alternative gender gets used by a group that does not trust its language feel and instead relies on logic to derive the gender. Blog is a good example: It's obviously "Der Blog", but because some people think "blog is short for weblog, and log is neutral" they use "das Blog", though that just sounds wrong…

Funny enough I always use "der Log" and not das. Though Das is usually the go to gender for foreign words that don't feel German enough, when you say them in a German sentence. In my experience that feeling largely depends on your expectation to be understood. I.e. mixing German with tech terms with a tech coworker is far more acceptable than mixing it with a coworker from accounting.

> Funny enough I always use "der Log" and not das.

People are nice to you if they don't correct that :) Das Log is pretty universal a neutrum. "Ich schreib das mal ins Log", if you are used to der Log that must be an individual mistake or a dialect far removed from Hochdeutsch.

Re: German for Programmers

#137

Post by wolfgke »

EdwardDiego wrote: post #97
onli wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What happens often here is that a word has a clear gender that just feels right to basically all germans. But an alternative gender gets used by a group that does not trust its language feel and instead relies on logic to derive the gender. Blog is a good example: It's obviously "Der Blog", but because some people think "blog is short for weblog, and log is neutral" they use "das Blog", though that just sounds wrong…

Don't loanwords auf Deutsch tend to end up with "das" as the prefix? Das Restaurant etc. I figured blog would be a loanword in German also?

> Don't loanwords auf Deutsch tend to end up with "das" as the prefix? Das Restaurant etc.

No. For example "Kiwi" originally comes from Maori language. In German, it is "der Kiwi" (the bird) and "die Kiwi" (the fruit). No neutral genus.

In this case, the genus even has importance what the word means - it is not uncommon in German that using different genera for the same noun is there to distinguish different meanings. On the website https://www.cafe-lingua.de/deutsche-grammatik/nomen-mit-mehr... some further examples for this are listed. So always learn the genus properly.

Re: German for Programmers

#138

Post by onli »

wolfgke wrote: post #134
Semaphor wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's funny because I'd say "das Blog" precisely because I remember weblogs and I'd say "das Log". Duden agrees with me [0] Oh and "Das Logbuch" has nothing to do with "log" but everything with "Buch". When you have compound words only the last word matters for gender. [0]: https://www.duden.de/rechtschreibung/Log_Logdatei_EDV

> Oh and "Das Logbuch" has nothing to do with "log" but everything with "Buch". "das Log" is a device for measuring the speed of vessels: > https://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Log_(Messger%C3%A... So of course a "Logbuch" has a lot to do with a "Log".

Not with the gender of the word. The last noun counts.

Re: German for Programmers

#139

Post by madez »

floqqi wrote: post #128
pantalaimon wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

As a native speaker: Generally no, but it depends. The "t" in "Rat" is pronounced much harder than the "d" in "Rad" is. BUT: The more and more you go into the north of Germany, lets say Hamburg for example, they have a very similar pronouncing of "t" and "d". Both often sound very hard (more like an "t"). Whereas people in the south tend to pronounce both letters more soft, like a "d". But in general they are pronoun…

in standard high German, which you'll find for example in Hanover, Rad and Rat are phonetically completely identical.

In dialects they may be pronounced differently.

Re: German for Programmers

#140

Post by chousuke »

repsilat wrote: post #20
aasasd wrote: post #11

> Prepositions claim different areas of ‘cognitive space’ in English and German The thing about pre/postpositions is, their use is almost entirely idiomatic in modern language, i.e. it doesn't follow from the meaning of individual parts and thus doesn't translate without reconstruction. In English, afaict, practically all adpositions signify relations in space or time, plus there are ‘of’ and ‘for.’ However, once you…

Right. In HTTP on TCP over IP? Speaking "on" English doesn't seem so strange if we can talk over (i.e. through) the radio. And English gets so much less reasonable. "Put up" is to house, "put down" is to insult, "put up with " is to suffer, "put through" is to test, "put around" is to spread, "put in" to contribute, "put out" to have sex or produce, "put over" either to delay or to decieve, "put past" to offer, "put…

As a non-native speaker, over the radio makes sense to me because in that case the radio is the medium that carries your speech. It's "in" English because that's the "encoding" of your message. You would then transmit it possibly on a vehicle at some physical location.

so... HTTP over TCP over IP sounds most natural to me, though I guess HTTP on TCP works too.

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