Some of the commenters here might be interested in the wonderful essay by Mark Twain: "The Awful German Language":
https://www.cs.utah.edu/~gback/awfgrmlg.html
It is a great read but you really need to understand German to read it.
German for Programmers
231–240 of 266 posts
Re: German for Programmers
#232Earlier quoted context omitted.
Dutch vs Flemish is the same. The dutch use the English word and the Flemish make their own word.
That's not correct. The invented word probably comes from the 'Taalunie'. It might be that the Flemish adhere more to it than the Dutch (I have no statistics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_Language_Union
They make a new word using Dutch spelling whereas the Dutch use the English words one-for-one. Basically all of the words around computing are English words (which actually made it harder to learn Dutch, you need to know when the English words are actually the correct ones).
Re: German for Programmers
#233Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Why is it difficult to believe that there are phonetic collisions? There are even lexical collisions with _different_ phonetics like in Weg vs weg. The rules behind the shift in pronunciation can be looked up by searching for Auslautverhärtung. Isn't this A1-level German?
Because the final consonant is actually pronounced softly in related forms ("Rad/Räder" vs. "Rat/Räte"), German speakers tend to "hear" a difference, purely by association, that isn't there phonetically.
Re: German for Programmers
#234Earlier quoted context omitted.
Kitchen terms are generally crazy. Do other languages also have hundreds of different terms for the last piece of a loaf of bread that is too thin for further slicing, but too thick to be considered a slice?
I just call that the Endstück, have never heard anything else. What other terms are common?
"Der Kanten". German wikipedia on "Kanten" gives many more local variations.
Re: German for Programmers
#235Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's not correct. The invented word probably comes from the 'Taalunie'. It might be that the Flemish adhere more to it than the Dutch (I have no statistics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_Language_Union
They make a new word using Dutch spelling whereas the Dutch use the English words one-for-one. Basically all of the words around computing are English words (which actually made it harder to learn Dutch, you need to know when the English words are actually the correct ones).
I'm Flemish, and I worked in The Netherlands for more than 4 years. The dutch understand "muis" (mouse) "toetsenbord" (keyboard). There are dutch words with different meaning in both regions (like "aftrappen", "precies"). I think the biggest problem learning Dutch for foreigners (except for the rather complicated grammar) is that there are plenty of dialects (especially in Flanders).
Re: German for Programmers
#236Tip for remembering if a noun is male, female or neuter, visualize it as burning/being burnt/blowing up for coding female and freezing for coding male. Of course you can reverse the system if you prefer. Also in my experience, reading text eventually is the most efficient way to learn a language, including the grammatical pecularities. If you come upon the phrase "das kalte Bier", you know that it is "das Bier". At t…
Lots of reading is how my high school English became adequate enough to write a Ph. D. thesis. As soon as I started reading books, the language just clicked. Before that it was just endless amounts of grammar and vocabulary. Also reading something interesting is a bit more engaging than processing endless amounts of meaningless dialogs and other examples from grammar books. The first book you pick up will be a bit of…
My tip for learning and understanding new words from (nearly) any language:
Looking up their etymology.
Seemingly arbitrary words suddenly make sense and the story behind it makes you remember them and connects them to other words. Also it is so much more interesting than just looking up some definition or word-by-word translation.
Re: German for Programmers
#237Programmers? Sure German language needs a nice round of refactoring. Remove all redundancies. It would be a huge changelist with shit ton of lines removed, and still all tests for meaning pass.
Removing all redundancies would require everyone to speak and formulate perfectly. Otherwise the message is lost.
A lot of misunderstanding would happen.
Redundance in language makes it easier, because it really is some kind of error protection.
Re: German for Programmers
#238Earlier quoted context omitted.
> There is a defacto standard Yes, for TV news announcers . > Auslautverhärtung is part of that standard. Says who? Not Wikipedia, which says that that's a regionalism and quotes sources. Where is the standard codified? > What is the ending of the pronunciation of 'und' in your region? Is it 'd' or 't'? This is a trick question: If I answer the same as you pronounce it, you'll say "see, it's standard!", and if I answ…
>> There is a defacto standard > Yes, for TV news announcers. and for everything else on TV, netflix, etc. What else would define a standard?
> What else would define a standard?
Why would there have to be a standard? My point is exactly that there isn't one that captures how actual people actually speak German. There is one for written German that everyone agrees on, but not for spoken German. And that's completely fine.
Re: German for Programmers
#239A somewhat related article is Japanese for Nerds, which among other things provides a Backus-Naur form for Japanese grammar. http://atdt.freeshell.org/k5/story_2004_3_25_32218_1824.html Sadly Kuro5hin is defunct and google only pulls up an archive of part II...the link to part I is broken and I'm not sure whether the promised third part was ever posted.
Btw: Sanskrit is originally defined with similar-to-Backus-Naus-form rules.
From "Backus–Naur form" wikipedia:
The idea of describing the structure of language using rewriting rules can be traced back to at least the work of Pāṇini (ancient Indian Sanskrit grammarian and a revered scholar in Hinduism who lived sometime between the 7th and 4th century BCE). His notation to describe Sanskrit word structure notation is equivalent in power to that of Backus and has many similar properties.
Re: German for Programmers
#240Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have a weak spot with articles, i, a native speaker, have to think for long about "teller" is it "der Teller" or "das Teller". One is my local dialect the other standard German. I know which one to use by imagining how my old neighbor would talk. Another gem is that in my local dialect the word for foot (Fuß) has an extended meaning and denotes the body part of foot and leg. There basically is not a separate word f…
There is also the German word "Gebein" which is the literal translation for bone and probably the origin of the dialect "Bein" you use.
I think I looked it up in an etymological dictionary and the dialectal form is archaic, I.e standard German uses a "mutated" version of the word.
Probably in German both meanings were used alongside for a while and then folks started to attach a "ge-" in front of one meaning to avoid confusion.