'Line of Separation' and learning German

[watervole]

 If you want a recommendation for a really good German-language (with subtitles) TV programme, then try this recommendation by londonkds.

The drama is called 'Line of Separation' and is on channel 4 iplayer.

It's set just at the end of WW2 and it's pretty harrowing.  Definitely not for children.  Well acted.

My grandparents lived through being bombed, but they never had to live through occupation - for which I am very grateful.

I'm teaching myself a little German at the moment, partly because I'm not too well at present (costochondritis).  I tire easily and can only do a limited amount of computer work before my ribs start hurting.

There's only so much TV one can watch before brain rot sets in - sitting down with board game rules in German, and a dictionary and grammar to hand, at least ensures that the brain is engaged.

There's nothing quite like trying to work out the correct ending for an adjective when used before a feminine noun in the accusative case to force you to have to think...

And if anyone can tell me why it's "keinen Dank"  - Ah, just got it.  Dank is spelt the same whether it's singlar or plural (half the online dictionaries don't tell you what the plural is, which is a right pain).  Thus, "no thanks" and keinen  with 'en' is correct for mixed declension plural before a masculine noun.  (I wanted something to distract me from stress, there's nothing like tables of endings...)

Why, why, why do languages have genders?  
What's the point?

English is good in that regard, but has its own quirks.  eg. "I hit him"  - is that present or past tense?  I never noticed before, until I was looking for simple sentences to translate and realised that I didn't know what tense to use in German.

Comments

[damerell]

I've read that informal German is increasingly dispensing with the whole mess, but this may be coming too late to help us - in another hundred years it may all be forgotten.

[espresso_addict]

Why, why, why do languages have genders?

It allows you to have multiple distinct nouns per string of letters? I'm currently learning Scottish Gaelic, which only has 18 letters and consequently a lot of overused letter strings.

[watervole]

Not convinced. German just goes for really long words when it needs new ones. They're usually made by sticking short ones together. I remember lieblingfilmschauspieler from when I was at school - favourite film actor...

[espresso_addict]

I don't think it applies to modern German, no. I gather genders (and much of the case system) disappeared in English sometime between Old English and Middle English, but I don't know anything about why.

[igenlode]

Basically even the experts don't know why, although they can trace the process: http://www.wordorigins.org/index.php/site/comments/loss_of_gender_in_english/

[watervole]

Interesting article. I wonder if it had to do with the absorption of different languages into English. Would the Danelaw have had an influence as languages collided? I notice from the article that the Norman Conquest was a part of the process (though not the start of it).

[igenlode]

My initial assumption was that the process was probably the result of the collision of Norman French and Anglo-Saxon (which both have gendered nouns, but don't necessarily agree on the gender of a given object), but that article was the first one I came across when looking for confirmation, and it debunked the guess :-(

[espresso_addict]

Thanks for this link -- fascinating! I've been working on a Wikipedia article for Durham, a poem that straddles Old & Middle English (draft here, though far from finished) and encountering all this for the first time. I'd vaguely assumed that it was the suppression of Anglo-Saxon culture after the Conquest that did the trick, but obviously ordinary people continued to speak the language uninterrupted during the written record grows thin. I wish I knew more about Old English, but I guess one language at a time :)

[watervole]

Really strange. One would expect languages to start simple and get complex, and yet the reverse seems to be true.

[eledonecirrhosa]

Presumably there was a simple stage, but it is buried somewhere back in evolutionary history, long before humans were Homo sapiens.

I've seen scientific papers saying our ancestors substituted social grooming (picking ticks out of each other's hair) for social gossip when we lost our fur. That was way back when we were Homo erectus - about 1.8 million years ago.

[word_geek]

Most people learning English are driven to despair by the two forms of every tense. German, like most other languages in Europe*, does not distinguish between I do and I am doing, and that's why it's such a common error. That said, we barely use the subjunctive, so that was an unpleasant intro to A level German - here, this tense is super common, and you will barely have used it. Good luck.

Plus, our spellings are bonkers because we borrowed from so many languages.

H
*cannot speak for non-European languages

[watervole]

Heck I don't even know what a subjunctive is. (though I've just looked it up on Wikipedia, so I now know that I do occasionally use it in English)

Blame Dr Johnson. He liked to use the spelling to match the language of origin, rather than phonetic spelling.

[word_geek]

The first lesson in A level German was our teacher first teaching us that this tense existed, and then teaching it in German, and telling us that while we might not find ourselves using it much in our written work (you don't tend to use the bits of a new language that are not common to your own until you have *really* internalised it), we would now start seeing it in work we were expected to translate.

It was a bit of a shock after a fairly easy slide into GCSE (as in, I found all the concepts easy, I just lacked confidence in spoken German).

I did find it an excellent way to get bonus points in essays in German, though.

H

[igenlode]

Genders are among the oldest features of all Indo-European languages - oddly enough human language seems to have started off very grammatically complex and to have gradually lost elements along the way (such as the concept of different endings for 'dual' nouns, for example: a case of plural where there are specifically only two items involved). English is in an advanced state of decay relative to most of the rest of Europe, having lost most of its verb endings (only two present-tense forms of most verbs: 3rd person ("he stands") and all the rest ("I stand", "we stand", "you stand", they stand" etc.)), the concept of vocative, imperative, subjunctive etc., almost all its noun and adjective endings save for the distinction between he/him, the distinction between second-person formal, familiar, singular and plural, and probably more things as well that I can't immediately think of. This state of affairs is not actually normal ;-p

The result is to make it theoretically easier to create sentences (although in practice, having discarded all linguistic guides to context, English is very heavily dependent on the subtleties of idiom and word order, which I imagine actually make it harder to construct a phrase correctly as a native speaker would say it) and harder to identify the function of different parts of sentences presented to you. In English, for example, you can't tell which noun in a simple phrase is the subject and which is the object other than by word order.

In German you can say "Der Hund beißt den Mann" or you can emphasise it by saying "Den Mann beißt der Hund" (it's the man he bites).

Or you can distinguish between "auf dem Tisch" (dative: location) and "auf den Tisch" (accusative: direction) -- or "auf die Mitte des Tisches" (genitive: possession)!

English requires auxiliary words to make any of these distinctions.

[watervole]

I've noticed that thee and thou have pretty much been forgotten now. I had to explain to my grandaughter what the words of 'Ilkley Moor' meant.

Where hast tha been since I saw thee?

Word order is certainly important in English, but I've no idea if that makes it harder or easier to learn. (Can't tell from the inside). Word order creates questions in German.

"Den Mann beißt der Hund" (it's the man he bites)

I assume that's more emphatic than "The man is bitten by the dog"?

Sounds like your German is a fair way ahead of mine. I tend to dip in and out of it, this is a dip in week. We're trying to buy a house and I badly need the distraction.

[igenlode]

"Den Mann beißt der Hund" (it's the man he bites)

I assume that's more emphatic than "The man is bitten by the dog"?

Less emphatic, I should assume (German also has the passive construction "der Mann wurde von dem Hund gebissen", but I had to look that up; I never really got the hang of passives).
It's sort of the equivalent of changing the sentence stress in English: "The dog bites the man [i.e. not the horse as you suggested]"

But none of that explains why languages have genders in the first place, let alone ones that don't necessarily bear any relation to the actual sex of the creature being talked about (I've just learnt that in Old English, 'woman' is a masculine noun, for instance).
So far as I know, they just do because they always have done since the beginning; it doesn't really contribute anything to understanding, save in the rare cases where two otherwise identical words are distinguished by different genders, i.e. "der See" (a lake) and "die See" (the ocean) -- if you're English it's safer just to use "das Meer" ;-p

I got up to AS-level German in my spare time, but that was some years ago. My German's at the level where I can make out the structure of a sentence and get the gist of its meaning provided it doesn't depend on any pivotal verbs/nouns that I don't know. I can skim this sort of thing, for example: https://www.bernerzeitung.ch/region/bern/mann-von-hunden-gebissen/story/31765873
(A number of dogs suddenly appeared and bit a 66-year-old-man who was out for a walk. He took himself to hospital. Police are appealing for witnesses.)

And I've done quite a bit of translation from German, aided by copious dictionary usage, a skilful grasp of of the English language and a good idea of the subject matter; I can produce a good-quality translation without having a particularly fluent command of the original language.
( https://www.fanfiction.net/s/11303290/23/Imprisoned-by-Fear versus
https://www.fanfiction.net/s/11171047/15/Gefangene-der-Angst )

[eledonecirrhosa]

Who decided they should be called genders? Or rather when did linguists decide it? Is it long enough ago that 'gender' meant something other than male/female/neuter? For instance the word 'engender' doesn't mean to give something a gender...

Could 'gender' just be an old word for 'type'? Maybe we could have ended up calling the categories strange, charmed, down and up, like we do for quarks! :-)

[igenlode]

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word 'engender' is related to the Latin 'generare' (from which we have 'generate') and 'genus' (kind, type or breed).
cf French gendrer, engendrer
It means to produce, and specifically to produce more of your kind.

The word 'gender' also comes from the Latin 'genus', so they are related; in this case 'genus' as in 'sort or variety of'. The English grammatical usage is taken straight from Latin grammar terminology, which took the term from the Greek γένος, which literally 'means race, stock or kin' (according to Liddell & Scott) but was also used figuratively for grouping things in grammatical terms. According to the OED Aristotle dated this usage back to Protagoras, i.e. the 5th century BC - so linguists have been using it for a very long time.

(And yes, it is basically "an old word for 'type'", although the Ancient Greeks thought in terms of family networks rather than quarks!)

[word_geek]

I'm not certain if this is true, but I heard that the demise of thou was partly because of the Quakers. You was the formal, thou was the informal. The Quakers didn't believe in using the formal, because they didn't see that someone's social position was sufficient reason to give them particular respect. So they thou'd everyone. Even God.

People who wanted no part of the shit raining down on the Quakers as a result of this started using you much *more*, and eventually they used it for everyone.

The quakers wrote a LOT of what we now see as traditional English hymns, which is why we now think of it as a term of respect for God.

H

[del]

Old languages don't seem to want to generalise or abstract, so they have different words for everything. You have to remember that many cows is a herd, but many sheep is a flock. Then you have to remember that a baby cow is a calf, but a baby sheep is a lamb. So many unnecessarily different words...

Then we still have some hangups about things that are one and things that are many, unlike Japanese. Mostly we can get away with adding "s" on the end, until you have to remember it's cows, but not sheeps or deers. And it's mice and men and geese and dice, also wives and loaves, not wifes.

We can at least be grateful English has ditched different words to use in the vicinity of things that are feminine like a table, and things that are masculine like a board. And the special form of plural for exactly two and no more, except in very rare examples that I can't think of right now.

[del]

I'm learning old abandoned mental arithetic tricks, which seems quixotic in this age of ubiquitous calculators. Who knew it would be so easy to figure out 251 times 986?

[watervole]

I'm sort of guessing that it has something to do with 986 being only 14 less than 1000 and 50 being half a hundred and working it out in chunks?

I do find mental arithmetic occasionally useful in supermarkets, especially when comparing prices.