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How the brain processes German and Arabic

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Re: How the brain processes German and Arabic

#91

Post by expertentipp »

MichaelRo wrote: post #87
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?

> Nahrungsmittelunverträglichkeit Vermögenszuordnungszuständigkeitsübertragungsverordnung Rindfleischetikettierungsueberwachungsaufgabenuebertragungsgesetz?

Yeah apparently this is a two years auto renewing contract, cancellation only by registered letter 3 months in advance by the end of the contract duration. Payment is 180 EUR monthly. You actually said clearly you don't want it but didn't do it in writing so now you can watch monthly Lastschrift on the bank statements (yup, statements arriving by fucking letter as well). Two exact copies of full terms and conditions are on their way in two separate letters because fuck you. Don't even try asking for help, it's all your fault.

Re: How the brain processes German and Arabic

#92

Post by bloak »

BrandoElFollito wrote: post #75
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…

French is even more gendered and attempts to introduce a neutral pronoun basically failed. Now - English is for us a very different language that does not have declination so whatever construct there is inside is taken at face value. This is maybe why there are no particular problems using they/them for a single person. Maybe that the closer distance between German and English is one of the reasons for what you descr…

There is at least one fully specified proposal for gender-neutral German: geschlechtsneutral.net.

I don't know whether there's anything like that for French.

In both languages there's a lot more to it than just personal pronouns: there are also other gendered pronouns (relative, demonstrative, interogative, ...), nouns and adjectives.

At least in German the endings on adjectives and nouns are fairly distinct so you can specify them separately. In French the ending can be fused with the root, so you have, for example:

* Je suis nouveau (I am new; masculine speaker)

* Je suis nouvelle (I am new; feminine speaker)

The first-person pronoun "je" is the same for both genders, but the adjective is modified in a semi-regular way. What does a non-binary speaker say? If someone can point me at a fully specified proposal I'll have something to read this weekend! (Just joking: I already have lots to read.)

Re: How the brain processes German and Arabic

#94

Post by butokai »

ElMocambo_x4 wrote: post #58

These studies seem to confirm intuitions that many people have expressed in many ways, especially regarding German philosophers who cannot easily be translated in other languages because of the "analytical" properties of that language. As someone who speaks several languages it is also very apparent that somehow the infrastructure in the brain must be slightly different for different languages. For instance, to pick…

This need for "caching", because of verbs being often very far in the sentence structure, is also very common in Latin. That is supposedly why in Italy for a very long time Latin was the main subject in scientific high school (things seem to have changed starting around the mid 2010s, with the introduction of a latin-less scientific school).

On the other side, I was convinced by the research and statements of Andrea Moro (see e.g. https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/noam-chomsky-and-andrea-m...) that anti-universalist claims about language should be taken with more than a grain of salt.

Re: How the brain processes German and Arabic

#95

Post by hnbad »

boringuser2 wrote: post #51
hnbad wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since race is not a scientifically meaningful concept, I assume you mean ethnicity?

[flagged]

Race is only a sensible concept in science when it comes to the social category (i.e. it's a thing because we all act like it is a thing and some people ascribe certain meanings to it and act on those meanings).

Since the study is about biological functions of the brain, "controlling for race" seems like a category error. If you're looking for biological differences, ethnicity (or clines, I guess?) seem the more appropriate distinction. I'm not even sure how the study would meaningfully assign race given that Germans generally don't share the same definitions of racial categories as Americans (anything other than "white" and "Black" is messy and even those categories don't match as neatly as you might expect).

Heck, even ethnic groups are fuzzy ("ethnic German" being a particular problem because there is no cohesive concept of German identity prior to the 19th century and even if you only go back that far things remain confusing).

Re: How the brain processes German and Arabic

#96

Post by myth2018 »

tharkun__ wrote: post #31
myth2018 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haha thanks for bringing this quote. That reminds me of a german friend listening to an announcement in a train station. He raised his hand signing he couldn't be disturbed and seemed to hold his breath during that fairly long speech. And at the end he told me "this language is so messed up, I had to listen it all up to the end to figure out whether we should wait some more minutes or leave and take a bus".

Like "Ladies and Gentlemen. Train XYZ 123 from Hamburg Hauptbahnhof to Hamburg Harburg, originally arriving on track 12. This train is going to be late by 3 hours. Please take bus 112 instead"? And yes this is how they would say it, just literally translated to English. Seriously, which part here is language related vs. just structuring your announcements in a way where all information you need is presented in the wa…

Unfortunately I didn't bother to ask my friend for the specifics. But the need to hear attentively and wait for the end of the sentence had something to do with the verb describing what happened to the train. It could be either a minor, temporary problem quickly fixable, or a more severe incident which would require more time to work out. The difference would be determined by the verb prefix at the end and, by its turn, would determine our course of action.

Re: How the brain processes German and Arabic

#98

Post by WastingMyTime89 »

bloak wrote: post #86
WastingMyTime89 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 gen…

I'm French and I have yet to meet someone who consciensiously distinguish between a thing and the word designing it. It's just that we are used to things having randomly assigned gender. That's how it is. A bit like how native English speakers are used to English pronunciation being divorced from how words are written.

Re: How the brain processes German and Arabic

#99

Post by felixg3 »

expertentipp wrote: post #91
MichaelRo wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nahrungsmittelunverträglichkeit Vermögenszuordnungszuständigkeitsübertragungsverordnung Rindfleischetikettierungsueberwachungsaufgabenuebertragungsgesetz?

> Nahrungsmittelunverträglichkeit Vermögenszuordnungszuständigkeitsübertragungsverordnung Rindfleischetikettierungsueberwachungsaufgabenuebertragungsgesetz? Yeah apparently this is a two years auto renewing contract, cancellation only by registered letter 3 months in advance by the end of the contract duration. Payment is 180 EUR monthly. You actually said clearly you don't want it but didn't do it in writing so now…

This is scarily relatable.

Re: How the brain processes German and Arabic

#100

Post by felixg3 »

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…

As someone who belongs to the described group, not in Berlin but in the liberal city Heidelberg and roughly 30, I can recognize that. There is no natural equivalent for they/them in the German language. Hence, I usually try to avoid using gendered language with people who request that. But I wouldn’t change the rules of grammar or standards of eloquent language to follow social fads.
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