'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

[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.