German for Programmers • Hacker News Board

Re: German for Programmers

#261

Post by anoncake » Sat, Feb 09, 2019, 10:38 AM UTC

klmr wrote: post #207

ImaCake wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have asked multiple germans about gendered nouns and other funky grammar points. I often end up getting different answers or confusion when I relate what I learnt from a reliable source elsewhere. Honestly, despite the confusion, I love how diverse the German language is despite the relatively small range and number of speakers, but also considering it came under many of the same forces for "flattening" the rules a…

It really isn’t as diverse as you seem to think. As suggested in another comment, these German speakers you talked to simply didn’t know the correct forms: The German language is generally quite prescriptive, there’s little room for variation outside dialects (which are not “correct/standard German”). (And then there are Platt (= Low German) and Alemannisch/Schwyzerdütsch, both of which are distinct languages from Hi…

> It really isn’t as diverse as you seem to think. As suggested in another comment, these German speakers you talked to simply didn’t know the correct forms: The German language is generally quite prescriptive, there’s little room for variation outside dialects (which are not “correct/standard German”).

Nonsense. If a native speaker uses a form and thinks it's correct, it by definition is.

Re: German for Programmers

#262

Post by reitzensteinm » Sat, Feb 09, 2019, 11:08 AM UTC

madez wrote: post #258

reitzensteinm wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, with patience, persistence and a little bit of Googling you can always work through the issues. But the issues don't exist in the first place in AU/NZ (and presumably UK/US though I can't speak first hand do that). Even if they did, they'd be solved in a much more straightforward manner. I guarantee a similar form here, even though it would never exist, would accept "address pending" as a valid answer. I'm not…

I simply don't understand things to be crazy. Rent a place, have an address, file for residency permit, done. If a landowner wants a residency permit, which I've never seen, then maybe that was an ouvert way of saying no?

I'm not sure if it's possible to explain the difference without living in both countries!

Re: German for Programmers

#263

Post by anoncake » Sat, Feb 09, 2019, 1:10 PM UTC

onli wrote: post #82

adimitrov wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Somehow, they tend to all place the noun in the same gender. That's not generally true, especially for German. I've heard "der Blog, das Blog," "die, das Email" "die, der, das Factory" … etc. Loan words undergo an integration process, which is more of a sociolinguistic concept, I guess. At the end of the integration process, the word becomes an integral part of the language, with a fixed gender. For example, "Manag…

What happens often here is that a word has a clear gender that just feels right to basically all germans. But an alternative gender gets used by a group that does not trust its language feel and instead relies on logic to derive the gender. Blog is a good example: It's obviously "Der Blog", but because some people think "blog is short for weblog, and log is neutral" they use "das Blog", though that just sounds wrong…

Apparently I'm not part of everyone else because "das Blog" sounds perfectly fine to me. And I do trust my language feel.

Re: German for Programmers

#264

Post by allendoerfer » Sat, Feb 09, 2019, 3:43 PM UTC

klmr wrote: post #211

allendoerfer wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, Abitur from which state? Also helps if you had Latin. In Germany the value of high school degrees depends hugely on the state in which you visited school.

You’re probably referring to the fact that the school system differs from state to state rather than being organised at the federal level but I find that quality of education differs a lot more between individual schools than it does between states, and not just because of the tiered system (grammar would be elementary school curriculum anyway).

As someone who went to four high school in three different German states, I can assure you, that the state is a very good indicator. As a child, you live in a world of stress when you move from easy to hard and basically repeat a year, when you move back.

Re: German for Programmers

#265

Post by fluffycat » Mon, Feb 11, 2019, 10:12 AM UTC

xaedes wrote: post #237

fluffycat wrote: post #213

Programmers? 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.

Not necessarily in case of German, What exactly articles give to the meaning? What would it lose if they are removed or consolidated into a single article.

Re: German for Programmers

#266

Post by klmr » Thu, Feb 14, 2019, 10:29 AM UTC

donjoe wrote: post #257

klmr wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is misleading: Dialects exist but they don’t change the rules of standard German grammar. In German, only “die Butter” is correct, regardless of where you are. Upper Bavarians may use “der Butter” but there’s an understanding that this is dialect, and not correct German. It’s fine in daily usage but not in more formal speech or in writing. (A better example is “Mus”, which has multiple correct genders.)…

It depends on the word. Der oder das Radio for example: das Radio(gerät) oder der Radio(empfänger) defines the article. The same can be distinguished for butter: the word's origin might originate from Greek or Latin - depending on which language you choose, you'd get a different article.

That’s not true. Only “das Radio” is correct Standard German. Only “die Butter” is correct Standard German. Other forms may well be common, and accepted as dialect. But they’re not Standard German, which means they’re not taught in school (except by mistake), and are not acceptable in official communications. You may not like that German is so overly prescriptivist (I have issues with it) but it’s a simple fact.

Additionally, your explanation about the origin of the gender of “Butter” is entirely apocryphal: the original Greek/Latin gender has at best an indirect influence on the gender of the modern German word (and in fact both were neuter: βούτυρον vs butyrum).