If anyone needs brain exercise…

[Snarky]

49 minutes ago, Luminara said:

 

Everything.

 

Alles.

 

Is the light bulb flickering yet?

Das ist gut.

[PeregrineFalcon]

50 minutes ago, Luminara said:

 

Everything.

 

Alles.

 

Is the light bulb flickering yet?

I am so dumb sometimes.  😟

[srmalloy]

1 hour ago, PeregrineFalcon said:

It doesn't really work that way. Here's just one example: Schadenfreude. Taking a gloating satisfaction in the misery and/or pain of others. English doesn't have a word for this. Most languages don't have a word for this. German does.

'Epicaricacy' would like to take exception to your declaration. It’s recorded in several old works, including Nathan Bailey’s An Universal Etymological English Dictionary of 1721, though in the spelling epicharikaky. It is recorded even earlier in the original Greek spelling in Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy of 1621.

[Techwright]

9 hours ago, Captain Fabulous said:

All the German I know is from Nightcrawler, Golden Age comics, and Hogan's Heroes. Ach nein! Gott in Himmel! Liebchen! Schnell!

 

Don't forget "Iknownuthing!"

 

What? That isn't German?  But Shultz said it a lot. 

 

4 hours ago, PeregrineFalcon said:

It doesn't really work that way. Here's just one example: Schadenfreude. Taking a gloating satisfaction in the misery and/or pain of others. English doesn't have a word for this. Most languages don't have a word for this. German does.

 

"Sadistic" doesn't cover it?  Granted, the word has broadened in use over the years.

 

4 hours ago, PeregrineFalcon said:

German has a formalized system that allows one to make new words. So German either already has a word for something or you can make a new word with that system and everyone will automatically understand what that word means.

As I don't speak it, mind clarifying "formalized system"?  I had a late friend, a German teacher, once tell me German can push words together in a chain to create one long word.  Is that what you're describing?

[Snarky]

1 hour ago, Techwright said:

 

Don't forget "Iknownuthing!"

 

What? That isn't German?  But Shultz said it a lot. 

 

"Sadistic" doesn't cover it?  Granted, the word has broadened in use over the years.

 

As I don't speak it, mind clarifying "formalized system"?  I had a late friend, a German teacher, once tell me German can push words together in a chain to create one long word.  Is that what you're describing?

To my (admittedly untrained) ear most fluent german speakers utter their sentences in unbroken chains.  Given that German grammar allows (whole sections) of sentences to move around in ways english never would….  The (whole section) sometimes (again, to my ear) becomes one long spoken word.  That may have naturally given rise to using “run on compound words” to become a regular part of the vocabulary.  No idea, German language history is a long way off in my meager studies 

[PeregrineFalcon]

4 hours ago, Techwright said:

As I don't speak it, mind clarifying "formalized system"?  I had a late friend, a German teacher, once tell me German can push words together in a chain to create one long word.  Is that what you're describing?

Yes, but there's also rules to it, this makes it a formalized system.

 

In English I can say "Company that provides legal insurance." (like malpractice insurance for example)

 

In German I can say "Rechtsschutzversicherungsgesellschaften." (Legal-defense-insurance-corporation) One single word.

 

[Sanguinesun]

On 11/23/2023 at 9:26 AM, Snarky said:

I hear that Japanese is especially tough for foreigners.  From what I understood all Japanese conversations are related to social status and hierarchy.  And an outsider has a harder time choosing how to properly say something in the correct social context 

 

In gaming terms, Japanese is ranked as one of the S tier languages in difficulty to learn for multiple reasons (category 4 or 5 depending on the linguistic ranking system you look at but always in the top difficulty group).  Japanese is a high context language and due to the social stratification, extremely nuanced. English is considered linguistically to be a low context(well more low-med) context language by comparison.

 

A foreigner living in Japan can pick up enough (if they study etc) to deal with most daily conversation level needs within a year, but passing the JLPT 1 (top test score level/near native level) with proficiency in all aspects of the language really, takes years of extreme study and living in the language for most all seeking to pass at that level.   JLPT 3 or 4 is easy enough to pass in the first year but the jump to 2 and 1 is significantly longer for most.  It may be controversial to say for some, but you can't really master Japanese(or many different languages) without living in the language. People think almost always and only in terms of listening, speaking, and writing but to the detriment of forgetting the intricate web of cultural context and aspects of linguistic relativity in these regards.

 

Edited November 26, 2023 by Sanguinesun

[Gulbasaur]

8 hours ago, Snarky said:

That may have naturally given rise to using “run on compound words” to become a regular part of the vocabulary.  No idea, German language history is a long way off in my meager studies 

Occasional German speaker with a degree in linguistics and another degree which involved the use of Old English* here - it's arguably the other way round. English used to have grammar that's very, very similar to modern German. German didn't really develop them; English lost them. Or both. It's probably a bit of both because nothing in life, love or linguistics is ever simple.

English has a couple of linguistic oddities to it that are easy to overlook if you're a native speaker of the language, particularly when compared with closely related languages. One of them is that it has unusually strict syntax (word order, more or less) for a Germanic language. Another is that is it one of only a handful of languages in its language family to have almost totally lost linguistic gender. The very closely related Scots doesn't have gender, but Frisian (English's next nearest neighbour) does. English and Scots are genderless oddities surrounded by either two- or three-gender systems. Celtic, Romance and most Germanic languages all have gendered nouns.

 

With German specifically, learning which word endings map to which genders helps enormously to the point where it starts to feel natural. That also helps with German plurals which feel quite unpredictable until you realise that it's almost entirely linked to whatever the last syllable is and what gender it is. After that, it's just vibes.

* that's one hell of a noun phrase

[srmalloy]

8 hours ago, Gulbasaur said:

English used to have grammar that's very, very similar to modern German. German didn't really develop them; English lost them. Or both. It's probably a bit of both because nothing in life, love or linguistics is ever simple.

John McWhorter, in his book Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold Story of English, contends that English grammar is the result of a pidgin between Old English and the language spoken by the Norse invaders, who acquired enough of Old English to conduct day-to-day business, with the grammatical structures and tenses that survived being the ones that had cognates in the invaders' language; they continued to use the ones they were already familiar with, and elided the tenses and constructs that didn't fit their existing notions of grammar.

[Gulbasaur]

12 hours ago, srmalloy said:

John McWhorter, in his book Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold Story of English, contends that English grammar is the result of a pidgin between Old English and the language spoken by the Norse invaders, who acquired enough of Old English to conduct day-to-day business, with the grammatical structures and tenses that survived being the ones that had cognates in the invaders' language; they continued to use the ones they were already familiar with, and elided the tenses and constructs that didn't fit their existing notions of grammar.

This theory, sadly, doesn't hold much weight. Partly because pidgin means something *extremely* specific in academic linguistics that Old English and Old Norse contact doesn't even remotely fit the criticia for and partly because the timescale just doesn't match up. The loss of case and gender happened a bit later. People in medieval England moved around a lot for a medieval European society and while dialects coming into contact with one another almost certainly caused the elision, it's not as simple as an Old English and Norse pidgin and, as I said, the timeline doesn't match up with the criteria for a pidgin. It's slightly complicated by the fact that Old Norse speakers left almost no written material in England, but that's more a piece of trivia than anything else.

 

Like I can see why they arrived at that conclusion and if you take the loosest possible definition of *pidgin* then yeah kinda I guess, but it's a fairly niche theory that isn't enormously supported by textual evidence.

 

Tldr: only if you're very loose with your definitions but it's not enormously supported as a theory in its "pure" state

Edited November 27, 2023 by Gulbasaur

[srmalloy]

1 hour ago, Gulbasaur said:

Partly because pidgin means something *extremely* specific in academic linguistics that Old English and Old Norse contact doesn't even remotely fit the criticia for

Please detail how "simplified languages that develop as a means of communication between two or more groups that do not have a language in common" fails to fit. Or is it only a pidgin when one of the cultures involved is significantly less advanced than the other?

 

 

[Gulbasaur]

43 minutes ago, srmalloy said:

Or is it only a pidgin when one of the cultures involved is significantly less advanced than the other?

In the study of linguistics, the word pidgin has a very specific meaning. I get that the general definition is a bit looser (and that's fine), but we're discussing academic linguistic theories here so it makes sense to use the academic definition.

 

It's more to do with social status than advancement and is quite tightly linked to colonialism and enslavement because of the the nature of how languages interact.

 

With a true pidgin, multiple substrate (low status) languages come into interaction with one superstrate (high status) language. They tend to have very unstable grammar and vocabulary.

 

With Old English and Old Norse, there doesn't seem to have been that kind of social stratification and there's no clear substrate-superstrate system. A language that formed from their contact would be a contact language, rather than a pidgin (or creole, which is a pidgin where the grammar has become systematic, typically around the time that the first generation of children start to speak).

 

So, you could argue that it was a contact language but it meets almost none of the conditions to be considered either a pidgin or a creole, but they're different things by definition. It's a fairly outdated theory that has disproportionately high representation on Wikipedia, which is a problem with Wikipedia generally (although it's otherwise very good for linguistics).

 

In the case of late Old English, the elision of endings (which often contained case and gender information) was likely to do with contact between English dialects, rather than English and Norse.

 

The timeline doesn't add up, the geography doesn't add up (attested changes in areas with no or minimal Old Norse linguistic influence) and the cultural interactions don't meet the criteria to fall under the definition of a pidgin.

 

It might be more accurate to say that grammar changes in English may have been accelerated in some parts of England due to contact with Old Norse speakers, but that's not the same it being a pidgin or creole. There is some more acceptance of it as a "semi-creole", but that's not really an agreed upon idea. There was likely a language continuum going on, but that doesn't mean it was a pidgin or creole (or semi-creole).

 

The Talk page of the Middle English Creole Hypothesis is very interesting and highlights a lot of the issues of the theory.

Edited November 27, 2023 by Gulbasaur

[srmalloy]

12 hours ago, Gulbasaur said:

So, you could argue that it was a contact language but it meets almost none of the conditions to be considered either a pidgin or a creole, but they're different things by definition.

McWhorter's assertion was that, given the relative difficulty of adults picking up new languages, that the Norse invaders would have acquired a degree of facility in bad Old English, picking it up solely by ear, with the grammatical constructs that paralleled their own language readily acquired while the ones that didn't make sense got dropped, and their kids grew up hearing bad Old English, spreading it further.

 

McWhorter has one of his pieces about English online — "English is Not Normal" — where he covers this and other oddities of English, and where they may have come from.

[nightroarer]

On 11/22/2023 at 5:09 PM, Luminara said:

I'm fluent in Google Translate.

My family says I'm fluent in Gibberish.

[srmalloy]

On 11/22/2023 at 3:09 PM, Luminara said:

I'm fluent in Google Translate.

Google Translate has some significant corner cases where it falls down, particularly when it encounters colloquialisms. For example, the Russian phrase "Тебя не ебут, ты не подмахивай", a vulgarity that translates, very freely, as 'mind your own business' (I don't want to put the literal translation in a public message on the forums, but it shares the same evocative color associated with many Russian vulgarities), translates poorly in Google Translate.

[lemming]

I can understand German when it's yelled at me.    (German grandparents)

[LegionAlpha]

On 11/22/2023 at 10:15 AM, Snarky said:

or….why are you spending less time in CoH…
 

 

Too busy modding Skyrim SE again to push my processor, torturing myself with Starfield, being disappointed in X-titles in fact today's modern comics, anything geek related so I can also avoid adulting.  

[Snarky]

7 hours ago, lemming said:

I can understand German when it's yelled at me.    (German grandparents)

I am sure when they are yelling at kids it is one of the simpler grammar structures.  The bitch of German is the fluidity of the sentence structure reliant/based on modifiers to nouns for identifying purposes in sentences.  Small word changes everywhere which is truly the key to fluency 

[lemming]

14 hours ago, Snarky said:

I am sure when they are yelling at kids it is one of the simpler grammar structures.  The bitch of German is the fluidity of the sentence structure reliant/based on modifiers to nouns for identifying purposes in sentences.  Small word changes everywhere which is truly the key to fluency 

Yea, I still have the basics.   Just didn't really retain my fluency after high school.  My first words were in german.

[Luminara]

1 hour ago, lemming said:

My first words were in german.

 

Huh.  Most peoples' first words are "momma" or "dada".  Never heard of anyone who said "in german".

[BazookaTwo]

On 11/23/2023 at 1:15 AM, Snarky said:

or….why are you spending less time in CoH…
 

As us vampires get older we tend to stagnate and inevitably fall to ennui.  This can be losing our edge and getting hunted or simply laying in our crypt and not caring to move.  
 

So, around Feb or Mar of this year I decided I needed “brain exercise”.  I decided to learn a language, and chose German.  In those giddy first hours I made my choice thinking German would be better than Spanish due to Spanish having gendered nouns, and English is a Germanic language.  Hmmm, it was a cheerful morning when I set sail. 
 

The storm came in while the shore was still visible. I have been studying on Babbel roughly an hour a day with a few other resources that I sporadically use.  The storm has not yet cleared. German has gendered nouns.  And the entire grammatical structure of the language is based on using the genders to differentiate parts of the sentence structure.  They do this by modifying the “the” words and “verbs”  before each noun. And the way they do it is only comfortable to a very strong German speaker.  
 

I saw my first bits of clear night sky recently. Not saying I am a strong German speaker lol, but I finally can start to understand the complex  lock and key system of German grammar. 
 

So, if you want a brain exercise…..

 

also, if any German speakers want to give me lessons on discord….  We can game while I butcher your Muttersprache!

 

Congrats! Coincidentally, I transitioned to an ESL teaching job. I fully expect German Vampire themes in game soon