Questions tagged [german]
A Germanic language spoken in, among others, Germany, Austria and Switzerland. For non-linguistic questions about the German language, visit our sister site German Language Stack Exchange.
134
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English an Oral, German a Written Culture?
From my perception (native German, lived in UK) German culture is more focused on the written word and values precision and perfection when expressing yourself. English culture on the contrary ...
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2
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What methods do languages use to re-introduce the subject of a passive construction?
In German and Spanish (I think), you use the word for 'from'. In Japanese though, I think they use 'ni' (which can either mean 'to' or 'at'). In English we use the preposition 'by', which is rarely ...
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What is the syntactic function (if there is any) of the prefix in some German verbs?
Consider the following sentence:
"Ich rufe dich an".
It is a very simple Standard German sentence with the verb "anrufen", the unusual thing about it is this prefix that comes ...
4
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Is there a name for this type of language divergence and isolation?
In South Australia there is a region called the Barossa Valley. At some point [after WW2? not sure] it was settled by a lot of German farmers who bought land and started dairy farms. They applied ...
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Why are English and German West Germanic languages while Scandinavian Germanic languages are an own branch
The Germanic languages are according to Wikipedia subdivided into North Germanic languages and West Germanic languages (historically, there also existed East Germanic languages). The most important (...
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Why do “reiß” and “reis” not have the same phonemes although they are pronounced the same?
Reiß and reis are two words that have the same pronunciation in standard German. So why is it that the final phoneme in each word is different? In reiß it is /s/, and in reis it is /z/.
Is there some ...
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3
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Do "wise" and "wissen" share the same root?
A cursory search shows that the English adjective "wise" and the German verb "wissen" descend from the same root: the PIE *weyd- ("to see, to know"). I found this by using Etymonline to search the ...
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"Maybe" in German (vielleicht)
The word maybe is pretty much a direct translation of "may be" in all languages I know, with or without concatenation. Examples: kanske (Swedish), måske (Danish), peut-être (French), может быть (...
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Can one word be classified as two different word classes?
Over at German Language Stack Exchange, the question was asked what the structure of the sentence
Ihr Antrag ist abgelehnt.
is, and what the word abgelehnt can be classified as. Traditional German ...
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German long "o" vs. "au". Is there a rule?
There are common words in Germanic languages that have a long "o" vowel in the stem, and which in modern German seem to be either "o" or "au" randomly.
Examples:
Dutch ROOD, Swedish RÖD, German ROT
...
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How to automatically determine good Charades words?
I want to automatically create a list of words for Charades (in German or English), where one person has to describe, draw or show by pantomime a certain word to the others.
Humans can intuitively ...
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Are there any corpora of informal and unstructured text labelled for Named Entity Recognition?
I have been searching since last week for annotated informal texts (with a lot of misspelled words, slang, etc.) to test some Named Entity Recognition tools for research purposes. For example, it ...
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Resource for German minimal pairs
I recently asked a general question about minimal pairs and got a link to a website that provides a comprehensive list of English minimal pairs.
Is there a similar list for German minimal pairs?
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In German, doesn't using 'von' for agents of passive sentences result in ambiguity?
In German, the agent of a passive construction can be re-introduced using the preposition 'von' (well, 'durch' can be used too, but that's not really relevant).
But what if there's another noun ...
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On an anthropological feature of German etymology (e.g. Pusteblumen)
A curious and nice property of German is that some nouns don't have, say, intrinsic names, but composed (German!) names according to the human use or perception. For instance:
Pusteblume (...
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3
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Case in German Nouns
German has an interesting situation in its noun phrases - articles and adjectives reflect case, but the noun itself does not.
Der große Mann sieht das Haus. ("The big man sees the house," ...
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What is the word class of the first part of a partitive genitive?
I'm trying to determine the part of speech in the following example:
German: Mario Götze ist einer der besten Fußballspieler der Welt. (partitive genitive)
English: Mario Götze is one of the ...
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What is the official/correct orthography for Alsatian / Elsässisch German?
As per the Wikipedia article on the Alsatian language (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alsatian_dialect#Orthography) the orthography
includes the latin letters A,B,C ... X,Y,Z and the following vowels ...
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How to find words to other languages that have no clear translation in English
For a work of fiction, I have a character who speaks Russian, German and Hungarian, none of which I speak. The character wrote a fictional novel that appears only in its English translation, but the ...
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How to get morphological information from Stanford POS tagger?
I'm using the Stanford POS tagger to process German text and I'm interested in assessing the number (singular/plural) of the nouns in the sentence, so that I can classify them accordingly. This is ...
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Does "a little" (en) correspond to the same grammatical class as "ein wenig" (de)?
If you want to say in German, "I speak a little German", you would say,
Ich spreche ein wenig Deutsch.
The phrase "ein wenig" is reminiscent of the English phrase "a little", but what is ...
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"Sei" in German mathematical texts [closed]
I am a native German speaker and one year ago i wrote a mathematical text and gave it to a friend who knows nothing about maths to look for typos. I often used the following or similar formulations:
"...
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Are there any minimal pairs for German lax/tense vowels?
As we know, most German vowels have a 'tense' (or long) pronunciation and a 'lax' (or short) pronunciation.
Most of the time, which pronunciation should be used can be determined by the context that ...
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Natural vs. "Forced" language learning
Would the "natural" way of learning a language (the way we learn our mother tongue) be better even for acquiring second (and third, etc.) languages?
What I mean is:
The "natural" way to learn a ...
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1
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Is it a coincidence that both Italian and German use third person feminine pronouns for formal second-person address?
In both Italian and German, the third person feminine pronouns ("lei" and "Sie," respectively) also serve as the formal second person pronoun.
Etymologically, is it a coincidence ...
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About Subjunctive/Konjunctive
What is the reason for the difference between German dass-Sätze (which are in the indicative mood) and French que-sentences (which are in the subjunctive mood)?
My German understanding is far better ...
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Why did the 'ie' survive through the many German orthography reforms?
German orthography is now much simpler than ever and there are now far less redundancies than there ever was. One thing that has drawn my attention lately is the fact that never after an 'ie' in a ...
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1
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Is the active vs passive voice distinction, a property of the verb or sentence itself?
In English, I have seen some sites explaining active vs passive voice distinction as property of the verb. And, other sites as a property of sentence as a whole. I am learning German, and in that it ...
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Term for omitted pronouns?
In informal German, e.g. spoken conversation or text chat, it is possible to omit certain personal pronouns and sometimes inflected forms of sein ‘to be’, too (similar to Russian).
Ich gehe ...
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History of Preverbs in Indo-European
As you may know, quite some of the IE languages know preverbs, who may modify the meaning of a verbal root. I would like to know more about the interrelation of the various preverbs found in these ...
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Does the voicing of morpheme-initial /z d/ in German transmit to the preceding voiceless consonant in the same consonant cluster?
Here are som examples:
[t͡sʰ], [t͡s] or [ʣ]?
Wie alt sind Sie?
nicht sehr
[s] or [z]?
Was sind Sie von Beruf?
Das Sofa
[st], [sd] or [zd]?
das du weißt
The consonant clusters ...
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1
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197
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Is there a name for self-reference in verbs?
In German and Swedish we have typically the ending ...sig (själv) or ...sich (selbst) (in German) when doing something with yourself, for yourself or oneself.
Example
Ändra sig (="change yourself/...
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Nominal umlaut alteration in German
I am trying to understand how umlaut came to be as a marker for various inflectional forms in Germanic. The obvious answer is that there was i-umlaut, a-umlaut, u-umlaut, R-umlaut, breaking and ...
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Is there any epenthesis in German by which "eins" sounds like "eints" and how frequent is the phenomenon?
The phenomenon works also on the cluster ls and thus it becomes [lts]. Both examples are alveolar sounds.
The epenthesis does not occur universally, but often works on "eins" anyway.
This does not ...
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Combinatory Categorial Grammar developments and lexicon for German language?
I am trying to apply Cornell Semantic Parsing framework (implementation of Combinatory Categorial Grammars CCG) to the German language. This framework takes natural language texts, learns grammar and ...
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0
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On the search for an example sentence from a German textbook
Once I read three sentences build of made-up words with correct German declination and conjugation, so you were able to parse this sentence although it beared no semantic meaning. It was something ...
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Are the English "Woe" and the German "Wo" related?
Is the English "Woe" and the German "Wo" related?
I just heard a colleague say, "Wo ist mein ..." and I thought of the band Woe is me.
Are these words just false cognates... or is there some common ...
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Beginner to Dutch language: should I translate Dutch to English or to German?
I am a fluent English speaker (lvl C2) and a decent German speaker (lvl B2 and fully prepared for C1). I recently started following a Dutch course for beginners. My fear is that I will eventually ...
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How Mistakes in Pronunciation Happen for native Germans speaking English
In German the sound of 'w' in the English word "wallet" does not exist.
As a result, it is difficult for native German speakers to speak it any indeed many say "vallet" instead, which is the typical ...
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Proximity of Dutch and German explained by the history of language
It seems to me that Dutch is closer to German in its pronunciation than in its writing. It is a bit approximative to say so, and that's rather a personal impression, shared by some German native ...
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Looking for tool to split german text into sentences
I want to train a german embedding and need to split text into sentences. That is not easy since "z. B." and "Dr." are not endings of a sentence. Does anybody know a tool to do that for german texts? ...
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Bisyllabic German Verb Roots with the Stress Being on the First Syllable
I'm looking for German verbs with a bisyllabic root that have are stressed on their first syllable. But verbs like ändern or wechseln and also eignen don't count, which would be verb roots that end in ...
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IPA notation for syllabic [n] after another [n]
Written German has verbs like <können> ‘can’, but some (quick, lazy, …) speakers – myself included – pronounce this word form without any /e/ or schwa sound in the second nucleus. There are still ...
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Auxilary verb alternation in analytic perfect for French/Italian and German languages [duplicate]
French/Italian and German have a composite past tense (passé composé/passato prossimo/Perfekt) that is formed using either auxiliary verb to be (être/essere/sein) or auxiliary verb to have (avoir/...
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How to know whether a word is context appropriate? [closed]
So as we all know in both Englisch und Deutsch there are many nouns/verbs that either mean the same or close to the same as eachother, but are chosen based on the context (ex: damp, moist, soggy, etc.....
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Why are German and Dutch preschool TV shows so unintelligible to English speakers?
I understand that English has a whole lot of Romance and Latin influence whereas Dutch has less and German has very little. This is the main reason why English is so different compared to its mainland ...
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How did Adolf Hitler pronounce his own name?
Adolf Hitler was an Austrian, who used the alveolar trill [r] in his speech, not the Standard German [ʁ]. This is only to be expected for an Austrian.
According to the German Wikipedia, in Austrian ...
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Phonology for Loanwords
What is the reason for loanwords to preserve the original pronunciation, but not to be assimilate into the new language?
For example, the German loanword from English Handy (mobile phone), it is ...
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816
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How similar are Low German and Dutch?
In Duisburg and Düsseldorf I have heard people talking a mixture of German and Dutch which really confused me! Can anyone please explain how similar to Dutch this so called Low German language is?
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Why did 'r' disappear in English "speak" (compare German "sprechen") and in German "Welt" (compare English "world")?
I cannot help but notice some 'r'-s seem to have randomly disappeared in both German and English. What is going on there?