How the brain processes German and Arabic

> I rather think that the people who you spoke with used a simpler structure of sentences than is common in educated circles because you would otherwise have difficulties understanding them.

I think this is probably true. I mean, it's natural to have a more waxing structure and decorative diction when attempting to express oneself poetically.

I guess it just feels like the ceiling of "acceptably waxing" in German poetic discourse is stratospheric in comparison.

I think the lengthy prepositions on their own would be more tolerable – but when you toss in various obscure inflections on adjectives and nouns, the split verbs, overloaded words like `sie`, it feels like a system that was designed to confound! Or, conversely, to signal intelligence.

It reminds me of the idea that the rules of proper dining etiquette were invented arbitrarily at the court of Louis XIV, mainly as an improvised mechanism for dunking on the aristocrats they didn't like. :)

I imagine it must make for wonderful poetry and literature, though. I'm imagining some young up-and-comer confidently promising "he'll take care of the patrician's daughter while in the palace". But he accidentally uses the wrong "the" for "palace" because it's a word he's not accustomed to using or hearing, forming an ironic double-entendre that he doesn't understand, that makes him look foolish to the patrician and foreshadows some misbehavior to the reader.

On the one hand, it's beautiful that the inflection of one word, can totally invert the meaning of a sentence. But on the other hand you have to be so knowledgeable about the minutiae of the language itself to even catch it when it happens! And in the end, it could have been a typo of the author. Argh :D German.

I think the lines indicate highly connected/weighted network edges. The weights are inferred from white matter tracts, measured using diffusion MRI. Dots are nodes on the network, highly connected nodes are indicated by a pair of large dots.

Sure, but this is unfortunately not really novel work in this area. White matter tract and (3T, typically not more) fMRI-based analyses of language tasks have been done for decades, and simply don't provide much information due to the horrendous resolution inherent to the task.

What is needed in the area is something more similar to EPFL's in silico rat cortex reconstruction, only for humans. I haven't seen a single reference (ever) for single cell resolution information on connectivity in Wernicke's area (arguably the absolute most important and distinguishing cortex in human brain vs non-human primate).

This is what is needed now, rather than extremely ham handed or crude, low resolution correlations across brain structures which are well established in many contexts.

I'm sorry, I think you've misunderstood the point of the Eszett spelling reform.

The goal was to somewhat codify the idea that a single consonant (e.g. the "l" at the end of "Tal") implies that the previous vowel should be long (t-ah-l) while a double consonant (the "ll" at the end of "Ball") implies that the previous vowel should be long (b-a-l). (This was already true most of the time for other consonants, but "s/as/ß" remained an exception.)

Therefore similarly, by analogy, "Fass" has a double consonant at the end of the word, so we know that it is a short vowel (f-a-ss), and "Maß" has a single consonant at the end, so we know it must be long (m-ah-ss).

As an aside, this doesn't explain why we still need ß in the first place - if it's just there to indicate long and short vowels, why not just use a single "s" like with the other consonants? The answer is in pluralisation rules: when you pluralise "Maß -> Maße", you still say a hard "s" sound (m-ah-ss-uh). But if you pluralise, say, "Los -> Lose", the "s" becomes a "z" sound (l-oh-z-uh). In German orthography, it's generally the case that you need to know both the single and plural of a word to be able to spell it correctly.

Even under this new scheme, a lot of short, very common words retain their original spelling, which is why "das", which was an irregular, common word under the old scheme, remains an irregular, common word under the new scheme. So yes, you still need to understand the difference between "das" and "dass", in the same way you need to understand the different between "there" and "they're" in english.

That is fair enough on what their reasons might be (just like there are reasons for all other changes which all sort of make sense in some way except if you look at all of them together and what they did or didn't change it seems like an arbitrary cutoff). Heck isn't Dative nowadays even officially allowed to replace Genetive or is it just that everyone thinks it's snobbish now? Sich des Genetivs zu befleissigen scheint altmodisch.

I get the actual szett. That's not the point of dass vs das after the comma. That's exactly my point. It never was about the szett vs. double s for that rule. The thing that trips people up about that rule wasn't the szett. It's the "can you replace the dass/dasz with 'welche(s)' or not". And they did not make that part easier. But that's what the reform was about. Everything was supposed to make more sense and be easier. Except kids that had learned for 12 years suddenly were supposed to use arbitrary new rules in year 13 which would be their final school year exams (replace with 11/12 in states with 12 instead of 13 years).

Like you say "das" and "dass" really make the same sound. As did "dasz" (instead of making a "dahs" sound).

Side note: just like people not getting das vs dass irks me in German the there and they're really irks me in English. Is it really that hard? (tho on the interwebs we gotta discount half the misspellings nowadays to autocorrect I would presume).