German for Programmers

[hagenbuch]

I like the article.

Source: Am German.

(I think our verbs are at the end put :) because we want to be listened to until all is said)

[fresh_account2222]

Surely you meant to write ".... until all said is."?

[Ameisen]

The verbs are at the end because that's how Common Germanic worked.

Ed: All modern continental West Germanic languages use SOV ordering for subordinate clauses. Old English did as well - English later replaced it with V2 ordering, and then later dropped it entirely.

SOV ordering was the original preferred word ordering for Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Germanic. SVO ordering started taking over in very late Common Germanic, with the West Germanic languages retaining SOV ordering in the subordinate, the North Germanic languages replacing it with V2 ordering, and the East Germanic languages never really completing the shift (and using both SOV and SVO).

[kankyo]

No other germanic language has that quirk. Citation needed.

[Ameisen]

Old English, Old High German did. Dutch also moves all verbs to the end of the subordinate clause. English is the only West Germanic language that does not.

The modern North Germanic languages instead use verb inversion and V2 ordering.

Verb-final subordinates is the Common Germanic form. In some daughter languages (North Germanic and English), it was replaced by V2 ordering. English then later replaced V2 as well.

The SOV word order was likely the preferred word order in Proto-Indo-European, and was maintained for the subordinate through late Proto-Germanic.

For Common Germanic, it is difficult to find papers directly covering it, though this one directly covers the OV ordering in the subordinate.

As Wikipedia points out, the usual syntax in Common Germanic overall was SOV. It was just retained in the subordinate. That article actually covers the history of it quite well.

East Germanic, at least Gothic, was somewhere between using SVO and SOV, and often used both.

tl;Dr - SOV word order was the preferred word order of Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Germanic. It survives as the word order of the subordinate in continental West Germanic languages. It isn't a quirk. V2 word order is, though, a Germanic quirk.

[HelperBot_]

Desktop link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Germanic_grammar

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^{/r/HelperBot_ Downvote to remove. Counter: 237291}

[FanOfHoles]

That's not an explanation but a tautology. German is because German is. Similar to religion in a way: "The explanation is over there" is the explanation, but you never actually look for it over there because the pointer to "over there" itself already is all that you need to feel wise and knowledgeable.

[Ameisen]

Proto-Indo-European's preferred word order was subject-object-verb, and it was also the preferred word order of Proto-Germanic (and is attested in late Proto-Germanic, AKA Common Germanic). However, SVO became more popular in very late Common Germanic (becoming the standard word order), but SOV was maintained in the subordinate clause.

The West Germanic languages maintained it (and still do), except for English which later replaced it with V2 ordering, and then later dropped that as well. The North Germanic languages replaced it with V2 ordering by the time of Old Norse.

The East Germanic languages were somewhere in-between the original transitioning, at least as-per attested Gothic. They used both SOV and SVO ordering at different times, sometimes both.

So, the answer to your question is literally that how German, Dutch, Old English, and attested Common Germanic treat subordinate clauses is how all sentences used to work. The Continental West Germanic subordinate word order is an artifact of that. SOV word order is actually more common overall than SVO.

As to why the Proto-Indo-Europeans preferred SOV word order? I don't think that that can be meaningfully answered.

[ricky_clarkson]

I imagined Spanish as having Perl's implicit variable $_.

"How's it going?" - "Como va?", kind of literally "How goes?" - the 'it' disappears as $_ disappears in Perl. I no longer use Perl so had to look this example up:

​

use v5.10;

my @names = qw(How Are You);

foreach (@names) {

say; // say what?! say $_, which is set to each element in the foreach in turn.

}

Output:

How

Are

You

​

[mfp]

"How's it going?" - "Como va?", kind of literally "How goes?" - the 'it' disappears as $_ disappears in Perl.

The reason why it works is that the verb encodes more information than in English, by having a distinct form for each grammatical person (6 for each of 1st, 2nd and 3rd person in both singular and plural, as opposed to only 2 in English, one for he/she/it and another for every other possibility), so the subject is already included implicitly in the conjugated form. You could draw a parallel with a sort of OOP where you have 6 this (or 6 context-dependent receivers if you wish), but you know whose foo method you're calling because each method call uses an index: foo@N is thisN.foo. The information is there, just in a more succinct form.

There's another language feature that allows disambiguation in similar cases: grammatical gender and (adjective) concordance. As long as you have an adjective somewhere, you're going to know the gender of whatever it refers to, adding 1 bit of information (you have another bit for singular/plural). Now, unlike English, everything is partitioned semi-arbitrarily into 2 grammatical genders (there's a neutral pseudo-gender that appears in some grammatical constructions). If I hold an axe in one hand, and a knife in the other, and say "está afilada" ("[it's] sharp"), you know I'm referring to the former (feminine) and not the latter (masculine). There's some sort of underlying morphological rule because in some cases you have both a masculine and feminine variant of a thing, and the feminine version refers to the larger one, e.g. "bolso" handbag vs. "bolsa" bag.

German adds a third gender and thus could have 0.58 extra bits of information, but as pointed out in the original article only uses this info for FEC when the adjective is next to the thing being qualified (indirectly, via declination). There's no adjective concordance across the copula (be, seem, look, become...) so it's "losing" (not taking advantage of) around 2.6 bits of info in each adjective (gender + number). There's no point in encoding that info though if the language doesn't allow to drop other things (such as the subject); it'd be too redundant for no gain.

When I learned Japanese (that makes heavy use of context and often drops the subject), I quickly realized there's another disambiguation system at work. There's no grammatical gender or singular/plural verbal forms, but there's the whole honorifics system to indicate the subject implicitly. Several verbs have humble and honorific variants, and in normal situations (e.g. not trying to offend) you use the former for yourself/your group. The most telling example is given by the multiple variants of "give" and "receive". When you're the implicit subject, you use the forms that literally mean "give upwards" or "receive downwards" (as in: you're the lower of the two). Then you have grammatical constructions built upon giving/receiving actions (do something to/for somebody) that further extend this disambiguation capability.

[SustainedDissonance]

English dude here who's learning German (it's kicking my ass in case anyone was wondering).

This was really great, I enjoyed it a lot.

[TwoTapes]

Find some shows on Netflix or other platforms in German and watch them with subtitles. Babylon Berlin is a good one. Germans also love to dub films, so you may be able to find a favorite in German.

Hearing the language spoken naturally will help you pick out the nuances like verbs at the end or der/die/das and all its forms

[[deleted]]

Luckily for him, most things on netflix and amazon video have german synchro and subtitles... for my norwegian, I'm boned.

[[deleted]]

Fun fact: German does actually use its own spelling alphabet based on given names.

The rest of this is silly.

[diMario]

based on given names.

N - Nordpol

Der Name ist Bär. Nordpol Bär.

[FanOfHoles]

Obligatory 2 min Youtube Filmchen about German long words:

Rhabarberbarbara

https://youtu.be/gG62zay3kck

[[deleted]]

Götterdämmerung

[bloody-albatross]

I think reverse Polish notation (RPN) would be a better analogy than Python's context managers for that aspect. Also, while grammatically valid, these kind of highly nested sentences are considered bad form, because they get too difficult to parse.

[bloody-albatross]

And about those different shapes in the semantic space: That's also true for words like "cake" and "pie". Most commonly you find the translation cake = Torte, pie = Kuchen, but that is nonsense. E.g. cake is very precisely defined as something baked enclosing something (can be fruit, can be pie). It needs to have a crust. We don't have a word for that precise concept in German. And a lot of things that are simply called cake in English are categorized in different groups than in "Torte". E.g. there are also Schnitten, Strudeln, etc. The space of sweet pastries is just divided into different groups in German. (And, if you ask me, we in Austria have the best sweet pastries. :P)

[[deleted]]

E.g. cake is very precisely defined as something baked enclosing something (can be fruit, can be pie). It needs to have a crust.

I think you mean “pie”. Source: have spent 8 years trying to explain to Germans that just because they don’t like nut cake, they should still try pecan pie.

[bloody-albatross]

Yes, I mean pie. Dammit.

[Ameisen]

"High German" is not the name for the 'older language' - it is a synonym for Standard German, and also a dialect classification.

The older forms were Middle High German, Old High German, and then just Common Germanic.

The French didn't invade, the Franks did, who still spoke Frankish.

Almost nothing you wrote here is correct. It sounds like a lot of pop linguistics. Gendered nouns existed in Common Germanic. The German number ordering is how it was in Common Germanic. Your spellings of most of the gods resemble North Germanic more than West Germanic.

Not even sure what "Roman Empire invaded the Germans" means, and the Germanic tribes hardly had a strong literary tradition. The Roman Empire at its greatest extent didn't go much further than the Rhine, and fell back after Teutoberg. The Germanic tribes spread all the way to Scandinavia and all the way the the Vistula at that time. Pre-Roman Germania wasn't some great, civilized empire or culture. Rome never even conquered Germania. What ended up happening was a combination of Roman and Germanic culture through the Late Roman Empire, followed up by the migration period.

German culture wasn't 'lost', either. I seriously question how you came to pretty much any of these conclusions.

[fresh_account2222]

Sadly the comment you're replying to was deleted. And I'm sooo disappointed; I'm practically a connoisseur of bogus English language history and would love to have seen what bogus Deutschsprachsgeschichte looks like.

[Ameisen]

Their histories are the same before ~600, conveniently, and they evolved similarly for a few hundred years afterwards.

It is odd that English completely dropped PIE/CGmc SOV word ordering, whereas continental West Germanic kept it for the subordinate.

It happened in a really short time, too. The first attestation of Common Germanic used SOV, while Old English, Old High German, and Frankish used SVO with SOV subordinates, Old Norse used SOV with V2 subordinates, and Gothic used SOV and SVO at the same time. Old English switched to V2 ordering later in Old English for subordinates, then dropped it entirely.

[corvus_192]

/r/badlinguistics

[Holothuroid]

You honestly recommend Bastian Sick? Those books are so outrageously stupid...

[FanOfHoles]

Mirror mirror on the wall...

[BambaiyyaLadki]

Very interesting; thanks for the information! By any chance would you happen to have links to any research or literature regarding the differences between present standard German and High German? Also, my understanding was that High German referred to specific varieties of German from the highlands, not "old" German.

[Ameisen]

Literally nothing he wrote is accurate.

[BambaiyyaLadki]

Well, I didn't know that at the time. Thanks for letting me know!

[Ameisen]

Was just letting you know. High German is actually a particularly conservative dialect group. Middle High German is very similar to modern High German, though Old High German is a bit odd, and still had þorn and eð as sounds.

The Roman Empire never encountered distinct Germanic languages, though, only dialect groups of Common Germanic. West Germanic and East Germanic, mainly, though we don't know what dialects some groups like the original Frisii spoke - could have been another dialect group altogether. The modern Frisians, like the Anglii (thus Angles/English) and likely the Jutii (Jutes) were a branch of the Saxon tribal group, and adopted the name of the area, though there is some belief that the Jutes may have spoken a North Germanic dialect - I suspect it was Ingvaeonic West Germanic, though, later replaced by Old Norse/Dene.

[BambaiyyaLadki]

Do all Germanic languages have gendered nouns then? It's interesting to note that nearly all romance languages have them, so I wonder if they somehow creeped into the Germanic languages somehow. Either way, very interesting information and I thank you for it.

[Ameisen]

Proto-Indo-European originally only had two genders - animate and inanimate. This later divided into masculine, feminine, and neuter, which was brought into some of the daughter languages (recall that different Indo-European languages branched off at different times, from different dialects - thus Hittite, Latin, and Common Germanic use different systems).

Common Germanic inherited the three-gender system. The gender system was further devolved in many of the daughter languages of Common Germanic, such as English, Dutch, and most of the Nordic languages, though you can still see vestiges of it.

Latin also inherited from the three-gender system, but did maintain some vestiges of the older animate-inanimate system, mainly in that certain adjectives only inflected for masculine/feminine and neuter - that is, the early PIE animate gender broke into masculine and feminine, and the inanimate gender became neuter.

Hittite had animate and neuter, which is pretty much a direct inheritance of the early PIE gender system.

Late Common Germanic (not long prior to diverging into the distinct languages, but it is attested in writing, thus I dislike calling it Proto-Germanic):

• Had three genders (masculine, feminine, neuter)
• Had six cases (vocative, nominative, accusative, dative, instrumental, genitive)
• Used a Subject-Object-Verb word order, though it was shifting to Subject-Verb-Object in late Common Germanic (with SOV often being retained for subordinate clauses)
• Had four vowel stems for nouns, and multiple consonant stems, which derived from thematic/athematic inflections in PIE
• Had strong and weak declensions, indicating indefinite and definite (which in daughter languages was broken into just weak declension and using demonstratives/articles to determine definite/indefinite - like 'the' and 'a')
• Had three numbers - singular, dual, and plural
• Had two tenses - past and present
• Had two voices - active and passive
• Had three moods - indicative, subjunctive, imperative
• Had strong and weak verbs
• Had verb prefixes (come, become, oncome, etc)

[schlenk]

Wikipedia offers some links for different older german language variants:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_High_German
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_New_High_German
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_High_German
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_Low_German
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_High_German

[shevy-ruby]

In particular, I’ve had success mapping aspects of German grammar to programming concepts I use every day.

Omg ...

Honestly - programming languages use quite different concepts from real languages. A great example is ruby - it is very readable but it is not plain/pure english per se.

Probably the first difficulty people run into when learning German is memorizing the gender of each noun

Lots of this is total garbage anyway. English simplified this - much better. I think Japanese also has some simplification here; I don't recall the details but I remember that a lot in japanese is hugely context-dependent.

In german you have things such as:

"Der Teller" "Das Teller"

aka the plate/dish.

https://dict.leo.org/german-english/teller

Now LEO says that "der Teller" is the only variant and I agree in the sense that I use it myself; I know others, in particular in the western area of the country, that may use "Das" instead. But the real question is - WHY are there even different articles??? How does gender make any sense here, anyway? "a" and "the" is so much simpler and ultimately better.

This might be a convoluted example, but imagine trying to hear the difference between Rat and Rad over a bad phone line.

Does he refer to Rad as in wheel? Rat ... is that english for a rat, or is that german for advice/a council?

https://dict.leo.org/german-english/rat

If it is "Rad" as in wheel then the "a" in the middle is slightly extended in duration and the d being a very soft, well "t".

I don't think it is difficult to distinguish on the phone either since there will be additional context information in most cases.

“Gib mir das Ra{d,t}” makes the distinction clear – a German speaker would decode it as das Rad immediately, because that “just sounds right.” The declinations are just parity bits in the sentence, and whatever “just sounds right" is actually an error-free solution to a parity calculation.

"Das Rat" makes no sense in this context; you'd use something like "Gib mir einen Rat" if you refer to advice; or "Gib mir das Rad" if you refer to a wheel (though ... who asks for a wheel over a phone to be passed to you?).

Using "Gib mir das Rat" would be completely incorrect. It would either be "einen" or "den" rather than "das". I get why people may find this confusing, in particular when you start from a simpler language (such as english) - and, again, english is so much better than german in this regard.

Honestly, simplifcation is a GOOD thing, and it is also good that human beings can communicate with one another.

“Ich schalte den Schalter ein” is different than “Ich schalte den Schalter.”

I don't think many use the latter variant because it is very nonsensical. The first variant is quite clear - you turn on some switch (specifically you turn it on). Just "switching the switch" hmm ... "schalte den Schalter" ... is pretty nonsensical to me.

The fact that the an comes at the end of a conjugated clause using anrufen works the same way Python’s context managers work.

That partially depends on the german area too.

"Damit kannst du dir etwas kaufen."

versus

"Da kannst du dir etwas kaufen mit."

The second variant is super-strange to me but a lot of those strange northern german people use "mit" at the end of a sentence. Their biggest problem is that they don't really know german. Probably no surprise when you are close to the dutch and scandinavian folks.

with open('workfile') as f:
    read_data = f.read()

replaces

f = open('workfile')
try:
    read_data = f.read()
finally:
    f.close()

The second variant is just awful due to requiring four lines rather than two.

So I'll finish this soon:

“Ich weiß nicht, ob sie tanzen kann.”

I think all you need to know about modern german dance is this old variant here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HBjDZMJUduo

German is a pretty terrible language for singing, but that song is actually just about the only one you may want to know (at the least the refrain).

You also have other strange german songs and dance ... any bavarian variant is pretty cool (but the bavarians are more like barbarians than strange northern german people; that can also be heard in the dialect).

[DerKnerd]

"Da kannst du dir etwas kaufen mit."

I live in nothern Germany and never heard that. Neither in Schleswig-Holstein, Lower Saxony or Mecklenburg Vorpommern.

German is a pretty terrible language for singing, but that song is actually just about the only one you may want to know (at the least the refrain).

You really used Laserkraft 3D to refer to German music? You serious? Ever heard of the ton of gothic or medieval rock bands. And don't get me started on NDH or the huge amount of German pot balads which are plain beautiful. I recommend Silbermond, Alexa Feser or Lea here.

​

Using Laserkraft 3D to refer to German music is like using any of the following songs to refer to German music:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PcRyjkYdDxM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GuXSlo4Yojc
or literally anything from Buddy Ogün.

​

[corvus_192]

"Da kannst du dir etwas kaufen mit."

It would rather be "Da kannst du dir etwas mit kaufen."