study: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S105381192...
Thank you for linking directly to the relevant study! Definitely helps us all. :)
How the brain processes German and Arabic
101–110 of 115 posts
Re: How the brain processes German and Arabic
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
-Ish I guess :) Uns ist in alten mæren wunders vil geseit von helden lobebæren, von grôzer arebeit, von freuden, hôchgezîten, von weinen und von klagen, von küener recken strîten muget ír nu wunder hœren sagen A "mær" (as Maer - imagine an a umlaut) does exist still but the word is so antiquated that I don't expect kids these days to know it. "wunders"? No idea. Something about "wonder"? "vil" sure, viel (a lot). "ge…
> A "mær" (as Maer - imagine an a umlaut) does exist still but the word is so antiquated that I don't expect kids these days to know it. The word [die] Mär/die Märe [the lore, myth] (in modern German one would rather use "die Kunde" (not to be confused with "der Kunde" [the customer])) is used regularly in modern German in the diminutive form: "das Märchen" (the fairly tale). So, a Märchen [fairy tale] is a small lor…
used regularly in modern German in the diminutive form: "das Märchen"
lobebæren
You can immediately see the relationship to the noun "[das] Lob"
The word "der Recke" [valiant] is a (slightly old-fashioned) word that does exist in modern German.
If you are used to the lyrics of the Lohengrin opera
As for using Streit as a noun, yes, no problem there, though the fact that there's no proper capitalization in the Niebelungenlied text does not help to figure that out. I immediately read it as "streiten" the verb only.
Re: How the brain processes German and Arabic
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
-Ish I guess :) Uns ist in alten mæren wunders vil geseit von helden lobebæren, von grôzer arebeit, von freuden, hôchgezîten, von weinen und von klagen, von küener recken strîten muget ír nu wunder hœren sagen A "mær" (as Maer - imagine an a umlaut) does exist still but the word is so antiquated that I don't expect kids these days to know it. "wunders"? No idea. Something about "wonder"? "vil" sure, viel (a lot). "ge…
> If anything, except for spelling mistakes like syd vs. syde, I think that's actually more consistent than modern English. I.e. I'd say syd for side is perfect. A y by itself makes the "why" sound. So syd is exactly how I'd write it if I was told to write it just from hearing the word once and knowing the alphabet. Because it used to be pronounced with the e, not unlike Seite, but has long since been dropped. In the…
That is awesome info! Very interesting that English used to be more like German in that regard then, i.e. being able to actually kinda write things like you say them (or vice versa).
Do you know if this is more of an exceptional case or was it common for many words?
Re: How the brain processes German and Arabic
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 tu…
It's unfortunately very necessary to know the exact sentence to be able to understand what your friend was experiencing there. I very much doubt that it's an unfixably ingrained part of the German language based on sentence structure and rather a specific message he heard.
Unlike the numbers below 100, e.g. 24 = "Vierundzwanzig" and not "Zwanzigvier" like in English.
Re: How the brain processes German and Arabic
#105Nietzsche 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.
I was taught Latin as Caesar spoke it the same way--Caear victory upon the hill beside the trees won.
Re: How the brain processes German and Arabic
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If anything, except for spelling mistakes like syd vs. syde, I think that's actually more consistent than modern English. I.e. I'd say syd for side is perfect. A y by itself makes the "why" sound. So syd is exactly how I'd write it if I was told to write it just from hearing the word once and knowing the alphabet. Because it used to be pronounced with the e, not unlike Seite, but has long since been dropped. In the…
That is awesome info! Very interesting that English used to be more like German in that regard then, i.e. being able to actually kinda write things like you say them (or vice versa). Do you know if this is more of an exceptional case or was it common for many words?
I'm no expert on the subject, but I'm to understand things were somewhat cleaner in the past. A critical problem is that, like many languages, English's pronunciation shifted over the years, but the spelling did not. In truth, I think the spelling was somewhat unstable. It was somewhat subjective back then.
But the spelling became exceptionally bad after the printing press with movable type (i.e. Gutenberg's printing press). The printers decided for themselves on certain spellings and the spellings really froze in place based on the choices the printers made. This was also the period of rapid changes in pronunciation, particularly vowels. But English never really had a spelling reform except Webster's small one in early USA. And yet the spelling was locked in place. Whoops!
Re: How the brain processes German and Arabic
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 c…
What I meant is that in German there is die, der and das (neutral) which at least gives an idea of something neither masculine nor feminine.
In French we indeed have "je" (I) and "tu" (you) that is non-gendered but as you noted the sentence still holds the genre.
The idea to introduce "iel" (and contraction of "il" (he) and "elle" (she)) did not catch and I think I never saw it being used in practice. Now, your last point is very interesting - there is no way to say "I am new" in a non-gendered way in French (I have not seen anyone discussing this, actually)
Re: How the brain processes German and Arabic
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
That’s horrendous and seems like bad form in any language. I was taught to write English as I speak it. If you need to pause, use a comma. If you need to breathe, use a period. But don’t run on sentences if you wouldn’t speak it out loud the same way.
> I was taught to write English as I speak it. [...] But don’t run on sentences if you wouldn’t speak it out loud the same way. This is no contradiction. In particular in formal public speaks in German it is not uncommon to use complicated sentence constructions - and the audience is expected to understand it. In other words: the difference is rather in the mentality. - The English mentality rather seems to be to avo…
That’s interesting but I would still expect a German to take a breath.
To your point, both the UK and US had melting pot scenarios. The former is where the vast majority of the language was defined.
You may have guessed correctly that I’m American, but I speak nearly identically to my ancestors in 1776. Likely only losing some colloquialisms and picking up others. Perhaps losing Scottish, Dutch, French, German and Swiss accents.
In my family, my g-great grandfather from Munich or Mecklenburg (both apply but I don’t recall which ancestor this was offhand), forbade children from speaking English at the dinner table. He thought they were making fun of him. Sometimes language is less melted and simply dies off.
Re: How the brain processes German and Arabic
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
[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 appr…
This is a tedious post that isn't worth dealing with in-depth because I am skeptical that you even fully understand the issues in question. I'll bullet a response to you so you have the potential to possibly open your thinking.
1. Just because blue and purple are proximal on the color wheel, does not mean that blue and purple do not exist. i.e. The notion that a gradient exists does not invalidate the difference between proximal colors.
2. Even granted, there is a large geographic component to genetic distance clustering determined via SNP variation.
3. There have been specific studies that assess the American definition of race as comporting to genetic admixture. Individuals identified as black or white had perfect correlation to European or African ancestry.
4. The motivation to deconstruct race clearly pollutes this discussion. Everything can be deconstructed similarly. In fact, there is no real reason to have a sense of self at all given that your notion of being a distinct entity is a social construct.
5. The idea that races would have obvious phenotypic differences and similarities but could not possibly have other cognitive differences is inconsistent with basic reason and very metaphysical in thinking. There is absolutely no reason to think that evolution has no effect on the brain.