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How the brain processes German and Arabic

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Re: How the brain processes German and Arabic

#81

Post by RugnirViking »

pchangr wrote: post #77
bad_alloc wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For instance, to pick German again, when "caching" certain parts of sentences for later processing, which does not exist in other languages. Do you have an example for this?

Gestern bin ich mit dem Freund meiner Mutter, der in dem großen roten Haus im Tal des Berges wohnt, Fußball spielen gegangen. Literal translation: Yesterday, was I with the friend of my mother, who in the big red house on The Valley of the mountain lives, playing football. So you get a lot of context before you actually get what happened.

Seems very similar to English subclauses

Re: How the brain processes German and Arabic

#83

Post by expertentipp »

bravura wrote: post #71

Nietzsche on German: "Das Verb ist der Herr und die anderen Wörter sind die Sklaven." ("The verb is the master and the other words are the slaves.") An personal observation I've noticed from living in Berlin: My German friends over a certain age (roughly 40), who are very liberal, tolerant, totally fluent English speakers, completely refuse to adopt "they/them" pronouns for their non-binary friends and insist until t…

Why Germans listen until you finish speaking? They are waiting for the verb.

Re: How the brain processes German and Arabic

#84

Post by TAfresh010 »

bravura wrote: post #71

Nietzsche on German: "Das Verb ist der Herr und die anderen Wörter sind die Sklaven." ("The verb is the master and the other words are the slaves.") An personal observation I've noticed from living in Berlin: My German friends over a certain age (roughly 40), who are very liberal, tolerant, totally fluent English speakers, completely refuse to adopt "they/them" pronouns for their non-binary friends and insist until t…

[flagged]

Re: How the brain processes German and Arabic

#85

Post by [deleted] »

bravura wrote: post #71

Nietzsche on German: "Das Verb ist der Herr und die anderen Wörter sind die Sklaven." ("The verb is the master and the other words are the slaves.") An personal observation I've noticed from living in Berlin: My German friends over a certain age (roughly 40), who are very liberal, tolerant, totally fluent English speakers, completely refuse to adopt "they/them" pronouns for their non-binary friends and insist until t…

[deleted]

Re: How the brain processes German and Arabic

#86

Post by bloak »

WastingMyTime89 wrote: post #78
bravura wrote: post #71

Nietzsche on German: "Das Verb ist der Herr und die anderen Wörter sind die Sklaven." ("The verb is the master and the other words are the slaves.") An personal observation I've noticed from living in Berlin: My German friends over a certain age (roughly 40), who are very liberal, tolerant, totally fluent English speakers, completely refuse to adopt "they/them" pronouns for their non-binary friends and insist until t…

You have to understand that the whole issue surrounding misgendering is hard to grasp when you live in a language where everything has a random gender. It’s hard to find it important when you use the feminine for a table and the masculine for a desk. The whole thing doesn’t really carry weight. Amusingly I think people make it such a big deal in English because it actually matters so little.

I think perhaps the difference is that while in English it's people that have gender, in German it's the words that have gender rather than the things that the words refer to. Each of these words might refer to the same thing:

* Mench (masculine): human being

* Person (feminine): person

* Geisel (feminine): hostage

* Mädchen (neuter): girl

The pronoun used to refer back to a noun is often the one that matches the gender of the noun rather than the gender of the person that the noun refers to.

(French also has the feminine noun "personne", which I think you can refer back to with the feminine pronoun "elle".)

Re: How the brain processes German and Arabic

#87

Post by MichaelRo »

expertentipp wrote: post #82

Processing the avalanche of letters in German after living in the country for a while will make your brain dead. I'm not even trying to be funny.

Nahrungsmittelunverträglichkeit Vermögenszuordnungszuständigkeitsübertragungsverordnung Rindfleischetikettierungsueberwachungsaufgabenuebertragungsgesetz?

Re: How the brain processes German and Arabic

#88

Post by perlgeek »

redbell wrote: post #13

> Leihst du dir das Buch von deinem Lieblingsschriftsteller aus? Oh, that word! Even in slow motion I couldn’t spell it :)

My father used to do engineering work related to power plants, and he came across an actually used word there, "Frischdampfschnellschlussschieber".

It roughly translates to "fresh steam fast shutting pusher". It's a part that cuts off steam to the generator turbines.

That's quite the mouthful even for native Germans, and became a meme in our small family.

Re: How the brain processes German and Arabic

#89

Post by perlgeek »

It would a really good test if they could make a predictive model that, based on brain scans, classifies subjects as German or Arabic native speakers.

If that had good classification results, we could be very confident that it's a real difference.

Disclaimer: not a neuroscientist, maybe it's convincing for neuroscientists already as is.

Re: How the brain processes German and Arabic

#90

Post by MichaelZuo »

josefrichter wrote: post #70

As someone who learned both German and Arabic, I don’t find the results that surprising. You can definitely feel that each forces you to think slightly differently. It’s also a known fact that speakers of different languages process the world around them differently, because of the language. In fact these are the main reasons why I start learning different languages without needing them - they make you think differen…

It definitely isn't that surprising as the weak linguistic relativism hypothesis is all but confirmed.
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