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> There was an interesting/amusing post here the other day about learning German and how it relates to programming concepts. They suggested that gendered words

> There was an interesting/amusing post here the other day about learning German and how it relates to programming concepts. They suggested that gendered words work as a kind of parity bit for error correction. Slightly off topic (not about grammatical genus, but about German's case system): I often compare German's case system to a type system in a programming language: the verb expects the sentence's object in the suitable case. If you use a wrong type, it gives a compile error. In most cases, the case (type) that you have to use makes sense, but there are rare cases where you simply have to learn the case. The latter is like having to use a (programming) library that was designed by some other programmer with an interface that you would design differently. Just like you have to write a computer program that gives no compile error (e.g. because of typing), in German, you also have to formulate your sentences in a way that gives no compile error to its case (type) system.

bravura 8y ago
I am trying to learn German and gender is infuriating there. Why? Because you can't simply scan an existing sentence and color-code the words based upon simple heuristics to guess the gender. The first thing you learn is that three genders are indicated in the nominative case using der (masculine) / die (feminine) / das (neuter). So you see "der" in a sentence and that thing must be masculine, right? Nope, because "der" is feminine in the dative case. The gender system in German wouldn't be such garbage if the articles weren't overloaded. Imagine if in your type system "float" could mean two different types, and you needed more information to figure out which type it is (like, for example, memorizing the type of the object its referring to). It breaks the idea of locality.
- wolfgke 8y ago
  > The first thing you learn is that three genders are indicated in the nominative case using der (masculine) / die (feminine) / das (neuter). I personally would never teach it that way. To me the four cases are like different faces of, say, a cube (I know a cube has six faces - sorry), where the cube represents the noun. Just like looking at a cube from different perspectives (in the direction of some face) gives you a different view on it, each case gives a different "perspective" of a way that the word relates to some different clause in a sentence. How the articles and endings "rotate" when the case changes ("as the cube rotates") is something that I developed a really smart scheme for (which can be found in no book on German grammar that I am aware of) that every "mathematical-minded person" immediatelly grasped, told me it perfectly made sense and wished that someone had taught it this way in school. On the other hand, nearly every "humanities-minded person" told me that they cannot understand what I am even talking about and what advantage this perspective is supposed to have. Typical language teachers are "humanities-minded". :-( Unluckily, I have far too less time to write this all down in sufficient detail that other people can learn from it; I have far too many other things to do. :-( > Imagine if in your type system "float" could mean two different types, and you needed more information to figure out which type it is (like, for example, memorizing the type of the object its referring to). You are describing declarations and definitions in C++ and the problems of parsing C++? ;-)
checkyoursudo 8y ago
I don't think you're wrong, but my experience has some nuanced differences maybe. I have known plenty of German speakers, including natives and often myself, who make case/gender mistakes with no real impact on comprehension. There certainly can be some ambiguity, but context and word order can often mitigate that, no? I feel like if you used "die" for everything and just a neuter nominative case, I could still figure most things out. My experience is that many German speakers (especially when speaking a dialect) just mush articles and suffixes together and it's not entirely clear that they use specific genders and cases most of the time anyway. For example, my relatives near Frankfurt pretty much say "d- Milch", "d- Hund", "d- Mauer", etc. SOMETIMES, you can hear a bit of an "s" when it's supposed to be das, des. YMMV of course. I don't really find German to be less forgiving of mistakes than English or the handful of other languages I've studied. At least, this what I take away from your comment about compile errors. Maybe -Wcase or -Wgender is a closer analogy? Anyway, I like your analogy overall. :)

bravura 8y ago

I am trying to learn German and gender is infuriating there. Why? Because you can't simply scan an existing sentence and color-code the words based upon simple heuristics to guess the gender. The first thing you learn is that three genders are indicated in the nominative case using der (masculine) / die (feminine) / das (neuter). So you see "der" in a sentence and that thing must be masculine, right? Nope, because "der" is feminine in the dative case. The gender system in German wouldn't be such garbage if the articles weren't overloaded. Imagine if in your type system "float" could mean two different types, and you needed more information to figure out which type it is (like, for example, memorizing the type of the object its referring to). It breaks the idea of locality.

wolfgke 8y ago
> The first thing you learn is that three genders are indicated in the nominative case using der (masculine) / die (feminine) / das (neuter). I personally would never teach it that way. To me the four cases are like different faces of, say, a cube (I know a cube has six faces - sorry), where the cube represents the noun. Just like looking at a cube from different perspectives (in the direction of some face) gives you a different view on it, each case gives a different "perspective" of a way that the word relates to some different clause in a sentence. How the articles and endings "rotate" when the case changes ("as the cube rotates") is something that I developed a really smart scheme for (which can be found in no book on German grammar that I am aware of) that every "mathematical-minded person" immediatelly grasped, told me it perfectly made sense and wished that someone had taught it this way in school. On the other hand, nearly every "humanities-minded person" told me that they cannot understand what I am even talking about and what advantage this perspective is supposed to have. Typical language teachers are "humanities-minded". :-( Unluckily, I have far too less time to write this all down in sufficient detail that other people can learn from it; I have far too many other things to do. :-( > Imagine if in your type system "float" could mean two different types, and you needed more information to figure out which type it is (like, for example, memorizing the type of the object its referring to). You are describing declarations and definitions in C++ and the problems of parsing C++? ;-)

checkyoursudo 8y ago

I don't think you're wrong, but my experience has some nuanced differences maybe. I have known plenty of German speakers, including natives and often myself, who make case/gender mistakes with no real impact on comprehension. There certainly can be some ambiguity, but context and word order can often mitigate that, no? I feel like if you used "die" for everything and just a neuter nominative case, I could still figure most things out. My experience is that many German speakers (especially when speaking a dialect) just mush articles and suffixes together and it's not entirely clear that they use specific genders and cases most of the time anyway. For example, my relatives near Frankfurt pretty much say "d- Milch", "d- Hund", "d- Mauer", etc. SOMETIMES, you can hear a bit of an "s" when it's supposed to be das, des. YMMV of course. I don't really find German to be less forgiving of mistakes than English or the handful of other languages I've studied. At least, this what I take away from your comment about compile errors. Maybe -Wcase or -Wgender is a closer analogy? Anyway, I like your analogy overall. :)