The Spanish Liguistic Thread got me thinking about German

Factual Questions
1

So I was reading the Spanish Linguistic thread and I started thinking. I am currently living in Germany now and I am of course learning German. But what really is strange to me is how the words in German are formed. As you may know it is very possible in German to add on prefixes and suffixes to most words and change the meaning. Although it isn’t always possible it is very widely done. This is much more acceptable than in English with George W. Bush’s new word “misunderestimate.” Now if you think about that word, we all know that its wrong (As in not being in the dictionary as a defined word). But if you think about it to misunderestimate does make sense. To incorrectly underestimate seems like it could be a word. Anyway this is just a sidebar. On to the real question.

If you take English for example we have many latin words from Norman french and actually directly from latin as well. For instance. “to express oneself” “to impress someone” to “suppress.”

Now I am not a scholar of latin, and this is a little more educated than a WAG, but I think I am correct in saying that these are all compisite words like in latin.

ex/press “to push out” German is “Ausdrücken”
im/press “to push in” German is “beeindrücken”
sup/press “to push down” German is “ünterdrücken”
A little german translation for those who don’t know. drücken is the german word for press or push and aus, ein and ünter, are the german words for out, in, and under, respectively.
My question is how is it that these words got to be so similar to the latin words. How did these construcitons manage to turn out the same with in both languages? Now there are many words that have this same similarity but obviously not all of them and not even the majority of them, but most of the time it does work like that. I have another question as well. For those of you that know latin, did there ever exist the ability to use prefixes and suffixes the way that they are used in German? I know that they both belong to the family of Indo-European languages, but I have a hard time believing that this is the main reason. Was there ever some kind of influence involved between Latin and German that they decided to use latin words, but to translate them instead? For instance Germans use the word “Fernseher” for television, which is either a compisite of greek and latin words (i am not sure but i think that tele is greek). They both mean seeing far. Is this what happened a long time ago with the latin words? Of course now German is very common to use English words.

If there are any native speakers of German here I would like to ask a question to them as well. When you speak German words are you at least conscious on some level that when you use the composite words that you can break down the component parts? There are so many words that have “sprechen” for example as a root. Besprechen in english means to discuss, but is there some sort of mental thing going on when you categorize words “nicht absprechen sondern besprechen”

Maybe its like for an English speaker to use “to talk up” “to talk down” “to talk about” “to talk with” all mean different things. When I have learned Spanish I noticed that there really doesn’t seem to be this use of other kinds of words or suffixes or prefixes that modify the word outside of the latin ones. They all seem to have been set in stone then and from that point memorized as seperate entities to themselves.

Spanish examples

“To look for” buscar
“to look at” mirar
" to look" ver

Another point. Seperable prefix verbs in German seem a lot like English verbs that change their meaning in relation to a certain preposition (look at, for, around, after, etc…) you could contrue them in a way that sounds German and makes some sense. “Afterlooking, aroundlooking, forlooking, and atlooking” sounds really strange in an Orwellian kind of way, no?

I know I am more likely to be conscious of the core parts of German words because I have to memorize them somehow and sometimes the easiest way to memorize it is look at the component parts and make sense of them. Even when they aren’t an exact translation of a Latin word, they do often make some sense.

This makes me wonder sometimes if the infinitive of German and the -ing form of verbs in english are somehow related. In German you can say, “Lesen ist mir entspannend” Lit. “Reading is, to me, relaxing” But would you want to say “To read is to me relaxing?” No you wouldn’t. Of course there are differences where you put the “to me/mir” in german or english, if you take that out it is even clearer. “Reading is relaxing/Lesen ist entspannend.” What if you wanted to say, “Lesen ist mir entspannend” in english? You would probably say “It is realaxing to me, to read” A literal translation in German would be “Es ist entspannend mir zu lesen”

That’s where you see this “to read” and “zu lesen” come up. Zu is the german equivalent of “to” in German but it is never used to form the German infinitive like in English. Zu in german is pronounced somewhat like too in english but with an “s” thrown in as in “tsoo”

Well, anyway. I thought I would share these thoughts with you and raise some questions. I wondered if I should put this in GD, but I believe this is the right place. If there are general factual answers to my observations/quesions, then I suppose it will stay in GQ but if it is a debate then so be it. I didn’t know where to put it because I am not sure what kind of answers I’ll get.

2

Well, yes, in german you would allways use the infinitve for ongoing processes that use the gerund in english. The rest of your argument I don’t really get as “Lesen ist mir entspannend” is really not correct, sorry.
Try “Lesen ist mir zu langweilig” . I don’t think that in this construction there can be a verb (entspannen) but only a real adjective (langweilig)
But I have to admit that grammar questions are very tricky to a native speaker because he learned to speak, but often doesn’t know any rules.
For example I just yesterday became aware of the fact that there exists a rule that by the endings of a german word you can determine the gender.
I allways told people that they simply have to learn the gender of any word by heart.

3

I’m a native German speaker, and I have a couple of small nitpicks.

First: “Lesen ist mir enstpannend” is wrong. As a literal translation of “Reading is, to me, relaxing”, it should be “Lesen ist für mich entspannend”. There is no way you can use the dative “mir” there. Similairly, the sentence “Es ist entspannend mir zu lesen” is not a literal translation of “It is relaxing to me, to read”. again, the dative “mir” doesn’t fit here. A more correct phrasing would be “Es entspannt mich wenn ich lese”.
Second: German for im/press is “beeindrucken” without the umlaut.

Third: The prefix in sup/press is “unter” again without the umlaut.

Like I said, they’re small nitpicks, and your German seems to be really good.

Now, to answer some of your questions. A lot of the German grammar is actually derived directly from Latin grammar. Look at the way German still has the dative, and accusative cases. But, I think the english -ing ending can be compared much better to the German gerund, than to the infinitive. For example: “I am reading” would translate literally as “Ich bin lesend”. That’s also why relaxing becomes “entspannend” and not the infinitive “entspannen”. Now the real question is why the heck the English language decided to make the infinitive the same as the gerund? Or did they drop the gerund completely and just use the infinitive instead?

As to whether I am conscious of how compound words like “besprechen”, “absprechen”, “zusprechen” can be broken down when I am using them, I would have to say no. I just “know” instinctively that “besprechen” means something different than “absprechen”. I know a lot of non-native English speakers have the same problem with the prepositions in English. Why do we say “take your clothes off” and not “take your clothes out”? In Germany it’s the opposite. The correct German would be “Ausziehen”, and not “abziehen”.

Some of my favourite quirks of the German language (although they drive non-native speakers batty) is the ability to form almost endless compound nouns. The most famous example of this is the “Donaudampfschifffahrtskapitänsmützenabzeichen”, which would translate as: “The medallion on the hat of a captain of the steam boat company on the Danube”.

Another great little quirk is the ability to nest clauses almost endlessly, leaving the verb unclear to anyone listening or reading until you get to the very end of the sentence. By this point you may have forgotten what the subject of the sentence was.

Mark Twain wrote a terrific essay on the difficulties and quirks of the German language which you can read here. Not only is it enlightening, it is hilarious too.

4

From at least the 19th century on there have regular attempts to “germanize” the german language. Originally this was mostly directed against Latin/Greek words. Nowadays this is mostly directed againt unnecessary or fake English words. However this is neither wide-spread nor does it have much momentum.
Longer ago there were more organized attempts to change the language.
Some never caught on like the “Gesichtserker” (“face gazebo”) for “nose” instead of “Nase”, some did, like “Anschrift” for “address”.

Obviously the nazis were especially fond of germanizing their language (and everything else.) “Fernseher” came into use during the third reich (first regular transmissions during the 1936 Olympic Games.) They also tried to suppress existing foreign words like “Baby”, now and then the common word in German. There is no exact match for that in German, closest is “Säugling” (“suckling”), a harsh-sounding and rather technical term for a child (or young animal) being breastfed. They were aware of that and wanted to establish “Kindlein” (“little child”) as a replacement.

5

… the “Treibling” (motor) and the “Schmetterblech” (trumpet) didn’t either. But those two are kind of cute, IMHO.

6

This process is called explicit derivation, i.e. a prefix is added to the stem of a verb to form a new verb. Latin and German have a lot in common in this regard, as to why, Mycroft Holmes has covered that. Latin also used compound nouns.

Depends. I know they are composite words and I am conscious of the fact that they can be broken down into their components. Sometimes I’ll start thinking about it and notice funny connections or incongruities. It’s fun, and I like to play with these things, it’s great for making puns. But I don’t have to be aware of it in order to choose the right word when I’m speaking.

Yup, that’s just the different ways the two languages deal with it.
I must admit I don’t get the whole infinitive/gerrund question. In “Reading is relaxing”, “reading” is used as a noun, and “relaxing” is an adjective. The infinitive is “to read”. The gerrund of to read is reading, but then the sentence would have to be “I am reading, I always find it very relaxing”, or am I totally off here?
And the “Lesen ist für mich entspannend” doesn’t have an infinitive, either. “Das Lesen” is a noun, it just has the same form as the infinitive “lesen”. But I may have gotten this totally wrong, or just misunderstood your question.

T. Mehr, I once saw a German grammar book. Yes, there are rules for determining the gender. More than 40 different ones. At least 10 of them with massive exceptions. Some are obvious, such as all the -ie, -ung, -ismus endings, but some are completely illogical. And for some nouns, there are no rules at all. I think people are better off with just learning the gender by heart. :slight_smile:

You tell me… this is especially fun when interpreting. :rolleyes:
Many German speakers have the bad habit of making endless sentences because it sounds so much more sophisticated. And even if it’s just a long enumeration, which is sometimes unavoidable, the verb comes at the end. In such a case I just have to anticipate the verb or choose a fairly neutral one and get on with the sentence, because there’s no way I can wait until the end before I start interpreting - especially if it’s an enumeration.

Oh, and Merkwurdigliebe (I like the name, btw): breaking up words into units of meaning is generally a good idea when learning a language. Good approach :slight_smile:

7

Actually, this isn’t a matter of German deriving its grammar from Latin, but rather from both deriving their grammar from a common source, Proto-Indo-European. You’ll find the same basic case system (or vestiges of it, in many instances) in all Indo-European languages, though it’s a lot more obvious in some than in others.

8

Seemed kind of natural when I was able to speak German (now I try and it comes out in Spanish. I can read and understand on a basic level, though).

In English, I think you’re referring to particles of the verb. I’ve seen a lot of people call 'em lots of things, but there not really used as a preposition but as adverbs. I like “adverb particles” myself, but someone will be along shortly to say “adverbial” or one of a hundred other things.

As I try to teach my wife English (Spanish speaker by default), I try to tell her that most English verbs are two-part verbs (like German), and that (to use your example) the verb “to look” is a single verb, and “to look at” is a different verb, and “to look around” is a different verb, and so on.

There was just recently another thread on a similar vein – “Where are you?” vs. “Where are you at?” I find either acceptable as “to be at” is a good verb. On the other hand, at work I hear people on the radio ask all the time, “What’s your location at?” and it drives me nuts, since the “location” isn’t at a place; it is the place.

9

Thanks for the interesting info so far guys, I have found it pretty cool. My internet access is pretty limited at the moment, but about the Lesen ist mir entspannend sentence, I don’t know that I was trying to do really. I was trying to come up with a good example, but it didn’t really come out well. I would normally say “Ich lese um mich zu entspannen” or something like that. And yes I can attest to the German tendency to make extremely complex sentences. Its very difficult at times. I have had to read texts about political science recently and it has nearly killed me. All of the specialized vocabluary and the sentence structure is driving me crazy! But the true hard part about German for me has got to be the relation between the article of the noun and the case. I have a hard enough time memorizing the gender of a noun. Then I have to figure out how to decline it. The declentions aren’t so hard, its just memorizing the article. There are some rules about the gender, but you just have to keep doing it and you slowly get better. The worst thing about having learned German is that when I type English now I captialize a lot of nouns! I suppose i’m the kind of person who easily mixes languages. I had to try very hard to keep Spanish and German seperate. I still have problems when I talk with Spanish friends here in Germany. If I have to use a German word in the middle of the Spanish sentence, some kind of switch gets flipped and after that it all comes out in German! You Europeans are lucky having had the advantage of started learning languages at early ages in school :slight_smile: For us Americans we have a much harder time, not getting any real education till college.

10

You’d probably find this thread interesting.

It’s good that you’re learning the language in Germany itself. I learnt it in India, and had a tough time understanding it when I went to Germany for higher studies! Fortunately, I was studying in Hamburg where they mostly speak Hochdeutsch. It allowed me to acclimatise to the accent and speed (in India, it’s neutral and slow). I’m glad I could do that, because when I went to work in Munich, I had a rough time getting used to Bayerisch :slight_smile:

Funnily enough, while I was in Hamburg, I started taking a Spanish course with some friends during weekends. It got to a point when I was speaking English, German and Spanish within minutes of each other… I would get words like ‘si’, ‘ja’ and ‘yes’ mixed up - very frustrating for the pretty girl from whom I was buying a train ticket!

I gave up learning spanish soon after :smiley: I do plan on taking it up again.