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How the brain processes German and Arabic

136 points by kaycebasques 3y ago

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
im_down_w_otp 3y ago
I always wondered if my propensity for learning German was also correlated with my preference for my HP48 given their mutual requirement for “unwinding the stack” style of thinking.
- myth2018 3y ago
  My native language is Portuguese and I'm currently learning German. The separable verbs are quite a challenge for me, especially in longer sentences. I'm used to simply read a verb and start picturing the sentence meaning in my mind, immediately. Whereas in German there's this need to keep the content in the working memory for possible supplementary info, and only at the end you can figure the meaning. Until the sentence finishes, there's this tension, this suspense.
  - maxweylandt 3y ago
    Obligatory Mark Twain on this, in case you or others haven't read his essay on learning German: "observe how far that verb is from the reader's base of operations; well, in a German newspaper they put their verb away over on the next page; and I have heard that sometimes after stringing along the exciting preliminaries and parentheses for a column or two, they get in a hurry and have to go to press without getting to the verb at all. Of course, then, the reader is left in a very exhausted and ignorant state." https://faculty.georgetown.edu/jod/texts/twain.german.html https://faculty.georgetown.edu/jod/texts/twain.german.html
    - gen220 3y ago
      Wow, this is such an incredible take-down, thank you for sharing! German is one of those languages where the spoken and written languages are incredibly distinct. I've felt that the written language requires massive intellect to pull apart as a non-native speaker, in comparison to the spoken language (once you adjust for pronunciation, etc.). The formalities of proper written German are inscrutable, this does a great job of laying the most painful aspects out.
      - tharkun__ 3y ago
        It's funny to see this actually. I never thought about it the way I read it from Mark Twain. Neither had I ever thought about English being a hard language because it has no regularity and every second word is an exception in how to pronounce it. But French eludes me. Written German of the times of Mark Twain is also quite different from today's. Of course the actual context dictates formality as well. Personally I can't understand Shakespeare era English nor German. It's just gibberish to me. With lots of concentration maybe but not just reading or listening to it. Also, the whole Dative and Genetive thing is not just a formality/written vs spoken thing but more a generational and societal one. Using Dative for things where the rules actually prescribe Genetive is a class thing. Working class usually means everything is just Dative. And if you're not good at learning languages. Even as a German native speaker. If you are trying to sound high society and snobbish you'll use a lot of Genetive in the proper way. Or if you simply learned it that way and it became second nature to do it correctly. A lot has changed that way since Twain.
        aleph_minus_one 3y ago
        > Written German of the times of Mark Twain is also quite different from today's. The German language mutated less over the centuries than the English language. An educated native German speaker should be able to mostly understand the "Nibelungenlied" (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nibelungenlied https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nibelungenlied), a text written down in the mid 13th century, which is thus nearly 800 years old.
        3y ago
    - JBiserkov 3y ago
      Q: Why does past participle in German begin with "ge-"? A: To give the speaker some time to remember what verb they had in mind 90 seconds ago when they started the sentence.
      - ElMocambo_x4 3y ago
        Why would the "normal" way of thinking/saying things, involve putting the verb, then the object, and not the other way around ? Pretty much like arguing that the normal way of writing is from left to right. Good demonstration of how brains are wired differently.
    - myth2018 3y ago
      Haha thanks for bringing this quote. That reminds me of a german friend listening to an announcement in a train station. He raised his hand signing he couldn't be disturbed and seemed to hold his breath during that fairly long speech. And at the end he told me "this language is so messed up, I had to listen it all up to the end to figure out whether we should wait some more minutes or leave and take a bus".
      - tharkun__ 3y ago
        Like "Ladies and Gentlemen. Train XYZ 123 from Hamburg Hauptbahnhof to Hamburg Harburg, originally arriving on track 12. This train is going to be late by 3 hours. Please take bus 112 instead"? And yes this is how they would say it, just literally translated to English. Seriously, which part here is language related vs. just structuring your announcements in a way where all information you need is presented in the way it makes sense? If you don't announce which train this is about first, then lots of people will have to listen to lots of announcements even though they're not meant for them. If you know your train number you can stop listening at "123". If you just know your destination and the trains origin/where you are you can stop listening right there etc.
        FearNotDaniel 3y ago
        My take on this kind of announcement structure, independent of language: the specifics (e.g. train/flight number) should be repeated at the beginning and end of the message. Why? Because people listen differently, also depending on the context and how many low-importance messages are being broadcast into the environment. When I'm at a station/airport and there is an announcement every two minutes of something mundane, e.g. which platform or gate is the next departure, I filter them all out, because I've already looked up that information on the screens or on my phone. Only when I subconsciously register something like 'cancelled' or 'changed platforms' or 'severe delay' do I start listening to hear if it is pertinent to me or not. That's when it's useful for the announcer to reiterate which service they are talking about, for those who only started paying attention half way through the message.
        myth2018 3y ago
    - bojo 3y ago
      Complete Japanese, SOV language, tangent: It's interesting watching real time thinking as the speaker navigates the final conjugation they intend to finish the sentence with. In a way I've always seen this as two things, 1) it gives the speaker time to think (along with their common filler words), and b) an option to change not only the tense of their sentence let alone compound it with more words, but the level of formality they wish to use on the fly that can also be tuned as they reach the end.
  - dav_Oz 3y ago
    German is not a pure SVO language rather it is classified as V2 (verb second language) in main clauses and SOV in subordinate clauses. At least I prefer to look at it in that - admittedly unsatisfactory - descriptive manner.[0][1] There are some folks (like in Generative Grammar) arguing that it has an underlying SOV layer which makes kind of sense because it gets processed like half of the time essentially like pure SOV languages. But alas sometimes one size doesn't fit all. In English you have to go through the extraordinary effort of a wedding ceremony in order to utter the words in SOV order: "With this ring I thee wed." That is some pure SVO energy right here, only broken by love ;) [0]https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/1057/german-is-sov-should-it-not-have-been-ich-ein-berliner-bin https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/1057/german-... [1]https://jakubmarian.com/is-german-an-svo-language/ https://jakubmarian.com/is-german-an-svo-language/
  - weinzierl 3y ago
    You are saying. For me as a native German speaker I feel very much the same when trying to speak Portuguese. I'm used to simply read a verb and start picturing the sentence meaning in my mind, immediately. Whereas in Portuguese there's this need to keep the whole conjugation table in working memory so you can figure out the meaning. Also in Portuguese verb forms are really important to understand and communicate meaning whereas split verbs are just fancy dressing even Germans get wrong sometimes.
    - nunuvit 3y ago
      Conjugations are just compound words with improved efficiency. If anything, maybe they're too German.
      - weinzierl 3y ago
        Hardly, with almost 70 forms per verb, many irregular verbs and almost 20 different tenses/modes in Portuguese - German is really a kid's game.
        nunuvit 3y ago
        Literally, though it's hardly obvious. Language Transfer does a good job of presenting Romance languages as conceptually regular in a way that's helpful, at least for beginners. I forget the term, but there's a concept where a word's distinct parts become merged in the mind of a native speaker. A simplistic example would be "breakfast". I was surprised as a kid to learn that it means "break fast" because I thought of it as an indivisible thing. Maybe that's obvious to Germans. Verb conjugations can be similarly decomposed, as long as you learn the conceptual "regular" form and the pronunciation "value system" that creates all the variety and irregular forms. It doesn't work for everything, but I think it's useful. It's more of a stretch for Portuguese, but the etymology is still there.
  - l3000 3y ago
    The thing is, when you become accustomed to the language there is no such thing as keeping stuff in the working memory. I think that’s just a convoluted way of explaining the processes that are behind speaking/understanding a language. As a native speaker of German I pretty much know at the first few words of the sentence which verb/words will have to follow and how the sentence will have to end. The meaning or information is not necessarily encoded in the verb or in those words that are moved to the end of the sentence. It’s just the shell of the sentence that is so common and you‘ll see/hear so often, you don‘t think about it anymore. Ultimately it‘s just pattern recognition that doesn’t require a lot of effort, IF you know the sentence structures that go with it. That’s also why I guess learning a language with a lot of input goes a long way to absorb the structure of a language, because at some point you‘ve seen everything and only the important bits (the real information) remain if you look at a sentence.
    - psychoslave 3y ago
      Yesterday I was reading some Frege[1] text, "Der Gedanke. Eine logische Untersuchung", or more accurately a French translation by Claude Imbert. In this essay, he makes some interesting remarks on how propositions uttered are only the tip of the iceberg of the meaning intended. What you say is of course true, in the same extent that you already have an idea about what someone is most likely going to say even before they open their mouth. It doesn’t invalidate that in German you might put a twist in the very end of your sentence, something that will be harder in a language structured differently, to the point that most attempt to do so will feel convoluted enough that you will probably spot it far before the end of the sentence. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gottlob_Frege https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gottlob_Frege
    - pantalaimon 3y ago
      Language usually has some sort of forward error correction so that if you mishear parts of a sentence, you can still reconstruct the content from the surrounding words.
  - valenceelectron 3y ago
    As a native German speaker, I have a very similar problem with Japanese. In Japanese it is possible (and popular, I'd say) to describe an object before mentioning what you are describing. For example, I can go on a tangent and have elaborate descriptions of an object ("is painted white, has two floors, a nice garden, a bus stop is close by, ...") but only at the very end of this description I tell the audience what object I'm describing ("a house"). It feels like my brain has to buffer all the adjectives and verbs before I finally know what I can apply them to. Very challenging for me. Well, I guess the better you get, the earlier you can deduct what this is about and I also guess that my analogy of "buffering" is not how it actually works but it feels like it.
    - glandium 3y ago
      Having things like verbs, and negation at the end also allows to say the total opposite of what the listener might be expecting from the beginning of the sentence.
xiaodai 3y ago
Germans have a reputation for being well organised.
- actionfromafar 3y ago
  And for well organised being.
  - mangamadaiyan 3y ago
    As also organised well-being.
    - dullcrisp 3y ago
      Well and also for being organized.
      - 2-718-281-828 3y ago
        hn the new reddit?
        dullcrisp 3y ago
        Sorry
        mangamadaiyan 3y ago
        It's not entirely pointless to indulge in wordplay in a thread about languages now, I think? Also, the last I heard, hn didn't have a CEO whose actions were reminiscent of a certain bodily orifice. I'll leave it at that :)
- expertentipp 3y ago
  Rather for asserting dominance by enforcing incomprehensible constructions.
schuyler2d 3y ago
They don't link to the study, but the image accompanying the article doesn't inspire much confidence. What are the lines? All the dots are almost identical with only one or two being slightly bigger or smaller. More fundamentally, what makes them think the results have anything to do with language other than culture and life experience? If they did this in Germany, native Arabic speakers will have (mostly) moved during their lives, presumably traversing a bilingual and bicultural life (that might demand more bicameral connections) relative to the German subjects.
- esalman 3y ago
  I think the lines indicate highly connected/weighted network edges. The weights are inferred from white matter tracts, measured using diffusion MRI. Dots are nodes on the network, highly connected nodes are indicated by a pair of large dots.
  - chaxor 3y ago
    Sure, but this is unfortunately not really novel work in this area. White matter tract and (3T, typically not more) fMRI-based analyses of language tasks have been done for decades, and simply don't provide much information due to the horrendous resolution inherent to the task. What is needed in the area is something more similar to EPFL's in silico rat cortex reconstruction, only for humans. I haven't seen a single reference (ever) for single cell resolution information on connectivity in Wernicke's area (arguably the absolute most important and distinguishing cortex in human brain vs non-human primate). This is what is needed now, rather than extremely ham handed or crude, low resolution correlations across brain structures which are well established in many contexts.
- tgv 3y ago
  Of course they can't distinguish language from culture, nor nature (heridatary influences). It's a farce to make that claim. And the claim really is "The current study suggests that the structural language connectome develops and is modulated by environmental factors such as the characteristic processing demands of the native language." And I don't know how much diffusion MRI has improved, but around 2010 (when I left this field) it wasn't considered reliable.
wudangmonk 3y ago
Sure hope that their claim that the expectation to have the same structures and connection strength among all languages was backed up by studies. Otherwise this reads to me like scientists discovering that water is wet.
detaro 3y ago
study: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053811923001015?via%3Dihub https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S105381192...
- r4nd_f 3y ago
  Thank you for linking directly to the relevant study! Definitely helps us all. :)
redbell 3y ago
> Leihst du dir das Buch von deinem Lieblingsschriftsteller aus? Oh, that word! Even in slow motion I couldn’t spell it :)
- tharkun__ 3y ago
  It's a relatively simple compound word. Just two words actually. I hope this doesn't get auto corrected but how about Donaudampfschiffahrtsgesellschaftskapitaen (sorry no umlauts here and no fff from me :)). For the uninitiated: Schiff has 2 f. Fahrt has an f. But there a rule that if you combine words to make a new one you can't have a letter repeat more than twice. Papplakate? Pappe and Plakate. Schlaemmkreide? (again no umlaut but you get it thats an a umlaut and not just an e). Coz it's from Schlamm not schlemmen.
  - aleph_minus_one 3y ago
    > For the uninitiated: Schiff has 2 f. Fahrt has an f. But there a rule that if you combine words to make a new one you can't have a letter repeat more than twice. This is a rule of the old spelling; it does not hold with respect to the new spelling rules. Of particular importance is because of this rule change, for some words many native speakers actually became aware that they pronounced some words wrongly. Old spelling: Stilleben [still life] Many native speaker pronounced wrongly this word as Stil-Leben [long i; style life], but actually correct is Still-Leben [short i; still life]. The new spelling removes this potential source of confusion.
    - tharkun__ 3y ago
      Yeah I don't do that. Never have, never will :P You are correct of course under the new rules (that I refused to ever learn, which is fine since I don't need to write German any longer :) Next thing you tell me the new rules for "das" vs "dasz" (sorry no umlauts here but I guess you get what I mean) after a comma make sense. The reasoning was that the new rules will finally make it easier for people to know when to write "das" after a comma vs. "dasz" which you now write "dass". No they don't, they just make the exact same mistake! It was never about the szett. It's all about the "das" vs "dass", which given I have no umlauts here I always wrote as "dass" anyway, since you can replace an szett with a double s. Ich dachte mir schon, dass das Auto neu ist. vs. Das Auto, das ich meine, ist neu. With the old rules, it would have been exactly the same, just that dass would be dasz. Bonkers! Now I will give you the Stillleben and the Pappplakate and Schifffahrt make sense in a way. But they went all out, didn't they? Let's just allow Schiff-Fahrt and Papp-Plakate and Still-Leben as well. Donau-Dampf-Schiff-Fahrts-Gesellschafts-Kapitaen FTW! :P
boringuser2 3y ago
[flagged]
- hnbad 3y ago
  Since race is not a scientifically meaningful concept, I assume you mean ethnicity?
  - boringuser2 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - hnbad 3y ago
      Race is only a sensible concept in science when it comes to the social category (i.e. it's a thing because we all act like it is a thing and some people ascribe certain meanings to it and act on those meanings). Since the study is about biological functions of the brain, "controlling for race" seems like a category error. If you're looking for biological differences, ethnicity (or clines, I guess?) seem the more appropriate distinction. I'm not even sure how the study would meaningfully assign race given that Germans generally don't share the same definitions of racial categories as Americans (anything other than "white" and "Black" is messy and even those categories don't match as neatly as you might expect). Heck, even ethnic groups are fuzzy ("ethnic German" being a particular problem because there is no cohesive concept of German identity prior to the 19th century and even if you only go back that far things remain confusing).
      - boringuser2 3y ago
        This is a tedious post that isn't worth dealing with in-depth because I am skeptical that you even fully understand the issues in question. I'll bullet a response to you so you have the potential to possibly open your thinking. 1. Just because blue and purple are proximal on the color wheel, does not mean that blue and purple do not exist. i.e. The notion that a gradient exists does not invalidate the difference between proximal colors. 2. Even granted, there is a large geographic component to genetic distance clustering determined via SNP variation. 3. There have been specific studies that assess the American definition of race as comporting to genetic admixture. Individuals identified as black or white had perfect correlation to European or African ancestry. 4. The motivation to deconstruct race clearly pollutes this discussion. Everything can be deconstructed similarly. In fact, there is no real reason to have a sense of self at all given that your notion of being a distinct entity is a social construct. 5. The idea that races would have obvious phenotypic differences and similarities but could not possibly have other cognitive differences is inconsistent with basic reason and very metaphysical in thinking. There is absolutely no reason to think that evolution has no effect on the brain.
toasted-subs 3y ago
seems like a recipe for disaster
niemandhier 3y ago
I wonder if this structural differences also create a tendency towards different behaviour patterns in the populations.
ElMocambo_x4 3y ago
These studies seem to confirm intuitions that many people have expressed in many ways, especially regarding German philosophers who cannot easily be translated in other languages because of the "analytical" properties of that language. As someone who speaks several languages it is also very apparent that somehow the infrastructure in the brain must be slightly different for different languages. For instance, to pick German again, when "caching" certain parts of sentences for later processing, which does not exist in other languages. The brain being a muscle, it is only natural that this would translate in more developed cognitive abilities for those language speakers. I've heard several takes on Asian students being better than others in maths: one of those argued that both the languages themselves, plus the way they are taught to young kids, could, on the long term, make brains better suited to maths. Would be curious to see such studies on that.
- ChainOfFools 3y ago
  asian students who matriculate into western unis or all asian students? significant filter skew happening in the former case. Perhaps related observation, though npt directly addressing the OP topic: STEM programs, as well as medicine - and from personal experience I would argue especially medicine (vs. STEM proper) - rely on curricula that tend to favor humans who are better than most at mimicking computers. Rote memorization (relatively necessary for ideogram-centric writing systems) is rewarded, excursive analysis is not.
- zozbot234 3y ago
  > especially regarding German philosophers who cannot easily be translated in other languages because of the "analytical" properties of that language. I wonder if the reverse is just as true in other contexts. How do you say "Let's think this through step by step" in German?
  - earthnail 3y ago
    „Lass uns das Schritt für Schritt durchdenken.“ Let us this step by step through think.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
josefrichter 3y ago
As someone who learned both German and Arabic, I don’t find the results that surprising. You can definitely feel that each forces you to think slightly differently. It’s also a known fact that speakers of different languages process the world around them differently, because of the language. In fact these are the main reasons why I start learning different languages without needing them - they make you think differently and give you new perspectives. I’d assume it’s the same with programming languages actually.
- MichaelZuo 3y ago
  It definitely isn't that surprising as the weak linguistic relativism hypothesis is all but confirmed.
bravura 3y ago
Nietzsche on German: "Das Verb ist der Herr und die anderen Wörter sind die Sklaven." ("The verb is the master and the other words are the slaves.") An personal observation I've noticed from living in Berlin: My German friends over a certain age (roughly 40), who are very liberal, tolerant, totally fluent English speakers, completely refuse to adopt "they/them" pronouns for their non-binary friends and insist until they're blue in the face that there's no reason not to mis-gender them. This still stumps me, because they are otherwise completely polite, elegant, and accommodating. A journalist friend of mine, when I asked him, says it's because German is so highly gendered as a language.
- BrandoElFollito 3y ago
  French is even more gendered and attempts to introduce a neutral pronoun basically failed. Now - English is for us a very different language that does not have declination so whatever construct there is inside is taken at face value. This is maybe why there are no particular problems using they/them for a single person. Maybe that the closer distance between German and English is one of the reasons for what you described? (wildly guessing)
  - bloak 3y ago
    There is at least one fully specified proposal for gender-neutral German: geschlechtsneutral.net. I don't know whether there's anything like that for French. In both languages there's a lot more to it than just personal pronouns: there are also other gendered pronouns (relative, demonstrative, interogative, ...), nouns and adjectives. At least in German the endings on adjectives and nouns are fairly distinct so you can specify them separately. In French the ending can be fused with the root, so you have, for example: * Je suis nouveau (I am new; masculine speaker) * Je suis nouvelle (I am new; feminine speaker) The first-person pronoun "je" is the same for both genders, but the adjective is modified in a semi-regular way. What does a non-binary speaker say? If someone can point me at a fully specified proposal I'll have something to read this weekend! (Just joking: I already have lots to read.)
    - 3y ago
expertentipp 3y ago
Processing the avalanche of letters in German after living in the country for a while will make your brain dead. I'm not even trying to be funny.
- MichaelRo 3y ago
  Nahrungsmittelunverträglichkeit Vermögenszuordnungszuständigkeitsübertragungsverordnung Rindfleischetikettierungsueberwachungsaufgabenuebertragungsgesetz?
  - expertentipp 3y ago
    > Nahrungsmittelunverträglichkeit Vermögenszuordnungszuständigkeitsübertragungsverordnung Rindfleischetikettierungsueberwachungsaufgabenuebertragungsgesetz? Yeah apparently this is a two years auto renewing contract, cancellation only by registered letter 3 months in advance by the end of the contract duration. Payment is 180 EUR monthly. You actually said clearly you don't want it but didn't do it in writing so now you can watch monthly Lastschrift on the bank statements (yup, statements arriving by fucking letter as well). Two exact copies of full terms and conditions are on their way in two separate letters because fuck you. Don't even try asking for help, it's all your fault.
    - felixg3 3y ago
      This is scarily relatable.
perlgeek 3y ago
It would a really good test if they could make a predictive model that, based on brain scans, classifies subjects as German or Arabic native speakers. If that had good classification results, we could be very confident that it's a real difference. Disclaimer: not a neuroscientist, maybe it's convincing for neuroscientists already as is.

136 points by kaycebasques 3y ago

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

I always wondered if my propensity for learning German was also correlated with my preference for my HP48 given their mutual requirement for “unwinding the stack” style of thinking.

myth2018 3y ago
My native language is Portuguese and I'm currently learning German. The separable verbs are quite a challenge for me, especially in longer sentences. I'm used to simply read a verb and start picturing the sentence meaning in my mind, immediately. Whereas in German there's this need to keep the content in the working memory for possible supplementary info, and only at the end you can figure the meaning. Until the sentence finishes, there's this tension, this suspense.
- maxweylandt 3y ago
  Obligatory Mark Twain on this, in case you or others haven't read his essay on learning German: "observe how far that verb is from the reader's base of operations; well, in a German newspaper they put their verb away over on the next page; and I have heard that sometimes after stringing along the exciting preliminaries and parentheses for a column or two, they get in a hurry and have to go to press without getting to the verb at all. Of course, then, the reader is left in a very exhausted and ignorant state." https://faculty.georgetown.edu/jod/texts/twain.german.html https://faculty.georgetown.edu/jod/texts/twain.german.html
  - gen220 3y ago
    Wow, this is such an incredible take-down, thank you for sharing! German is one of those languages where the spoken and written languages are incredibly distinct. I've felt that the written language requires massive intellect to pull apart as a non-native speaker, in comparison to the spoken language (once you adjust for pronunciation, etc.). The formalities of proper written German are inscrutable, this does a great job of laying the most painful aspects out.
    - tharkun__ 3y ago
      It's funny to see this actually. I never thought about it the way I read it from Mark Twain. Neither had I ever thought about English being a hard language because it has no regularity and every second word is an exception in how to pronounce it. But French eludes me. Written German of the times of Mark Twain is also quite different from today's. Of course the actual context dictates formality as well. Personally I can't understand Shakespeare era English nor German. It's just gibberish to me. With lots of concentration maybe but not just reading or listening to it. Also, the whole Dative and Genetive thing is not just a formality/written vs spoken thing but more a generational and societal one. Using Dative for things where the rules actually prescribe Genetive is a class thing. Working class usually means everything is just Dative. And if you're not good at learning languages. Even as a German native speaker. If you are trying to sound high society and snobbish you'll use a lot of Genetive in the proper way. Or if you simply learned it that way and it became second nature to do it correctly. A lot has changed that way since Twain.
      - aleph_minus_one 3y ago
        > Written German of the times of Mark Twain is also quite different from today's. The German language mutated less over the centuries than the English language. An educated native German speaker should be able to mostly understand the "Nibelungenlied" (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nibelungenlied https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nibelungenlied), a text written down in the mid 13th century, which is thus nearly 800 years old.
        3y ago
  - JBiserkov 3y ago
    Q: Why does past participle in German begin with "ge-"? A: To give the speaker some time to remember what verb they had in mind 90 seconds ago when they started the sentence.
    - ElMocambo_x4 3y ago
      Why would the "normal" way of thinking/saying things, involve putting the verb, then the object, and not the other way around ? Pretty much like arguing that the normal way of writing is from left to right. Good demonstration of how brains are wired differently.
  - myth2018 3y ago
    Haha thanks for bringing this quote. That reminds me of a german friend listening to an announcement in a train station. He raised his hand signing he couldn't be disturbed and seemed to hold his breath during that fairly long speech. And at the end he told me "this language is so messed up, I had to listen it all up to the end to figure out whether we should wait some more minutes or leave and take a bus".
    - tharkun__ 3y ago
      Like "Ladies and Gentlemen. Train XYZ 123 from Hamburg Hauptbahnhof to Hamburg Harburg, originally arriving on track 12. This train is going to be late by 3 hours. Please take bus 112 instead"? And yes this is how they would say it, just literally translated to English. Seriously, which part here is language related vs. just structuring your announcements in a way where all information you need is presented in the way it makes sense? If you don't announce which train this is about first, then lots of people will have to listen to lots of announcements even though they're not meant for them. If you know your train number you can stop listening at "123". If you just know your destination and the trains origin/where you are you can stop listening right there etc.
      - FearNotDaniel 3y ago
        My take on this kind of announcement structure, independent of language: the specifics (e.g. train/flight number) should be repeated at the beginning and end of the message. Why? Because people listen differently, also depending on the context and how many low-importance messages are being broadcast into the environment. When I'm at a station/airport and there is an announcement every two minutes of something mundane, e.g. which platform or gate is the next departure, I filter them all out, because I've already looked up that information on the screens or on my phone. Only when I subconsciously register something like 'cancelled' or 'changed platforms' or 'severe delay' do I start listening to hear if it is pertinent to me or not. That's when it's useful for the announcer to reiterate which service they are talking about, for those who only started paying attention half way through the message.
      - myth2018 3y ago
  - bojo 3y ago
    Complete Japanese, SOV language, tangent: It's interesting watching real time thinking as the speaker navigates the final conjugation they intend to finish the sentence with. In a way I've always seen this as two things, 1) it gives the speaker time to think (along with their common filler words), and b) an option to change not only the tense of their sentence let alone compound it with more words, but the level of formality they wish to use on the fly that can also be tuned as they reach the end.
- dav_Oz 3y ago
  German is not a pure SVO language rather it is classified as V2 (verb second language) in main clauses and SOV in subordinate clauses. At least I prefer to look at it in that - admittedly unsatisfactory - descriptive manner.[0][1] There are some folks (like in Generative Grammar) arguing that it has an underlying SOV layer which makes kind of sense because it gets processed like half of the time essentially like pure SOV languages. But alas sometimes one size doesn't fit all. In English you have to go through the extraordinary effort of a wedding ceremony in order to utter the words in SOV order: "With this ring I thee wed." That is some pure SVO energy right here, only broken by love ;) [0]https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/1057/german-is-sov-should-it-not-have-been-ich-ein-berliner-bin https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/1057/german-... [1]https://jakubmarian.com/is-german-an-svo-language/ https://jakubmarian.com/is-german-an-svo-language/
- weinzierl 3y ago
  You are saying. For me as a native German speaker I feel very much the same when trying to speak Portuguese. I'm used to simply read a verb and start picturing the sentence meaning in my mind, immediately. Whereas in Portuguese there's this need to keep the whole conjugation table in working memory so you can figure out the meaning. Also in Portuguese verb forms are really important to understand and communicate meaning whereas split verbs are just fancy dressing even Germans get wrong sometimes.
  - nunuvit 3y ago
    Conjugations are just compound words with improved efficiency. If anything, maybe they're too German.
    - weinzierl 3y ago
      Hardly, with almost 70 forms per verb, many irregular verbs and almost 20 different tenses/modes in Portuguese - German is really a kid's game.
      - nunuvit 3y ago
        Literally, though it's hardly obvious. Language Transfer does a good job of presenting Romance languages as conceptually regular in a way that's helpful, at least for beginners. I forget the term, but there's a concept where a word's distinct parts become merged in the mind of a native speaker. A simplistic example would be "breakfast". I was surprised as a kid to learn that it means "break fast" because I thought of it as an indivisible thing. Maybe that's obvious to Germans. Verb conjugations can be similarly decomposed, as long as you learn the conceptual "regular" form and the pronunciation "value system" that creates all the variety and irregular forms. It doesn't work for everything, but I think it's useful. It's more of a stretch for Portuguese, but the etymology is still there.
- l3000 3y ago
  The thing is, when you become accustomed to the language there is no such thing as keeping stuff in the working memory. I think that’s just a convoluted way of explaining the processes that are behind speaking/understanding a language. As a native speaker of German I pretty much know at the first few words of the sentence which verb/words will have to follow and how the sentence will have to end. The meaning or information is not necessarily encoded in the verb or in those words that are moved to the end of the sentence. It’s just the shell of the sentence that is so common and you‘ll see/hear so often, you don‘t think about it anymore. Ultimately it‘s just pattern recognition that doesn’t require a lot of effort, IF you know the sentence structures that go with it. That’s also why I guess learning a language with a lot of input goes a long way to absorb the structure of a language, because at some point you‘ve seen everything and only the important bits (the real information) remain if you look at a sentence.
  - psychoslave 3y ago
    Yesterday I was reading some Frege[1] text, "Der Gedanke. Eine logische Untersuchung", or more accurately a French translation by Claude Imbert. In this essay, he makes some interesting remarks on how propositions uttered are only the tip of the iceberg of the meaning intended. What you say is of course true, in the same extent that you already have an idea about what someone is most likely going to say even before they open their mouth. It doesn’t invalidate that in German you might put a twist in the very end of your sentence, something that will be harder in a language structured differently, to the point that most attempt to do so will feel convoluted enough that you will probably spot it far before the end of the sentence. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gottlob_Frege https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gottlob_Frege
  - pantalaimon 3y ago
    Language usually has some sort of forward error correction so that if you mishear parts of a sentence, you can still reconstruct the content from the surrounding words.
- valenceelectron 3y ago
  As a native German speaker, I have a very similar problem with Japanese. In Japanese it is possible (and popular, I'd say) to describe an object before mentioning what you are describing. For example, I can go on a tangent and have elaborate descriptions of an object ("is painted white, has two floors, a nice garden, a bus stop is close by, ...") but only at the very end of this description I tell the audience what object I'm describing ("a house"). It feels like my brain has to buffer all the adjectives and verbs before I finally know what I can apply them to. Very challenging for me. Well, I guess the better you get, the earlier you can deduct what this is about and I also guess that my analogy of "buffering" is not how it actually works but it feels like it.
  - glandium 3y ago
    Having things like verbs, and negation at the end also allows to say the total opposite of what the listener might be expecting from the beginning of the sentence.

xiaodai 3y ago

Germans have a reputation for being well organised.

actionfromafar 3y ago
And for well organised being.
- mangamadaiyan 3y ago
  As also organised well-being.
  - dullcrisp 3y ago
    Well and also for being organized.
    - 2-718-281-828 3y ago
      hn the new reddit?
      - dullcrisp 3y ago
        Sorry
        mangamadaiyan 3y ago
        It's not entirely pointless to indulge in wordplay in a thread about languages now, I think? Also, the last I heard, hn didn't have a CEO whose actions were reminiscent of a certain bodily orifice. I'll leave it at that :)
expertentipp 3y ago
Rather for asserting dominance by enforcing incomprehensible constructions.

schuyler2d 3y ago

They don't link to the study, but the image accompanying the article doesn't inspire much confidence. What are the lines? All the dots are almost identical with only one or two being slightly bigger or smaller. More fundamentally, what makes them think the results have anything to do with language other than culture and life experience? If they did this in Germany, native Arabic speakers will have (mostly) moved during their lives, presumably traversing a bilingual and bicultural life (that might demand more bicameral connections) relative to the German subjects.

esalman 3y ago
I think the lines indicate highly connected/weighted network edges. The weights are inferred from white matter tracts, measured using diffusion MRI. Dots are nodes on the network, highly connected nodes are indicated by a pair of large dots.
- chaxor 3y ago
  Sure, but this is unfortunately not really novel work in this area. White matter tract and (3T, typically not more) fMRI-based analyses of language tasks have been done for decades, and simply don't provide much information due to the horrendous resolution inherent to the task. What is needed in the area is something more similar to EPFL's in silico rat cortex reconstruction, only for humans. I haven't seen a single reference (ever) for single cell resolution information on connectivity in Wernicke's area (arguably the absolute most important and distinguishing cortex in human brain vs non-human primate). This is what is needed now, rather than extremely ham handed or crude, low resolution correlations across brain structures which are well established in many contexts.
tgv 3y ago
Of course they can't distinguish language from culture, nor nature (heridatary influences). It's a farce to make that claim. And the claim really is "The current study suggests that the structural language connectome develops and is modulated by environmental factors such as the characteristic processing demands of the native language." And I don't know how much diffusion MRI has improved, but around 2010 (when I left this field) it wasn't considered reliable.

wudangmonk 3y ago

Sure hope that their claim that the expectation to have the same structures and connection strength among all languages was backed up by studies. Otherwise this reads to me like scientists discovering that water is wet.

detaro 3y ago

study: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053811923001015?via%3Dihub https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S105381192...

r4nd_f 3y ago
Thank you for linking directly to the relevant study! Definitely helps us all. :)

redbell 3y ago

> Leihst du dir das Buch von deinem Lieblingsschriftsteller aus? Oh, that word! Even in slow motion I couldn’t spell it :)

tharkun__ 3y ago
It's a relatively simple compound word. Just two words actually. I hope this doesn't get auto corrected but how about Donaudampfschiffahrtsgesellschaftskapitaen (sorry no umlauts here and no fff from me :)). For the uninitiated: Schiff has 2 f. Fahrt has an f. But there a rule that if you combine words to make a new one you can't have a letter repeat more than twice. Papplakate? Pappe and Plakate. Schlaemmkreide? (again no umlaut but you get it thats an a umlaut and not just an e). Coz it's from Schlamm not schlemmen.
- aleph_minus_one 3y ago
  > For the uninitiated: Schiff has 2 f. Fahrt has an f. But there a rule that if you combine words to make a new one you can't have a letter repeat more than twice. This is a rule of the old spelling; it does not hold with respect to the new spelling rules. Of particular importance is because of this rule change, for some words many native speakers actually became aware that they pronounced some words wrongly. Old spelling: Stilleben [still life] Many native speaker pronounced wrongly this word as Stil-Leben [long i; style life], but actually correct is Still-Leben [short i; still life]. The new spelling removes this potential source of confusion.
  - tharkun__ 3y ago
    Yeah I don't do that. Never have, never will :P You are correct of course under the new rules (that I refused to ever learn, which is fine since I don't need to write German any longer :) Next thing you tell me the new rules for "das" vs "dasz" (sorry no umlauts here but I guess you get what I mean) after a comma make sense. The reasoning was that the new rules will finally make it easier for people to know when to write "das" after a comma vs. "dasz" which you now write "dass". No they don't, they just make the exact same mistake! It was never about the szett. It's all about the "das" vs "dass", which given I have no umlauts here I always wrote as "dass" anyway, since you can replace an szett with a double s. Ich dachte mir schon, dass das Auto neu ist. vs. Das Auto, das ich meine, ist neu. With the old rules, it would have been exactly the same, just that dass would be dasz. Bonkers! Now I will give you the Stillleben and the Pappplakate and Schifffahrt make sense in a way. But they went all out, didn't they? Let's just allow Schiff-Fahrt and Papp-Plakate and Still-Leben as well. Donau-Dampf-Schiff-Fahrts-Gesellschafts-Kapitaen FTW! :P

boringuser2 3y ago

[flagged]

hnbad 3y ago
Since race is not a scientifically meaningful concept, I assume you mean ethnicity?
- boringuser2 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - hnbad 3y ago
    Race is only a sensible concept in science when it comes to the social category (i.e. it's a thing because we all act like it is a thing and some people ascribe certain meanings to it and act on those meanings). Since the study is about biological functions of the brain, "controlling for race" seems like a category error. If you're looking for biological differences, ethnicity (or clines, I guess?) seem the more appropriate distinction. I'm not even sure how the study would meaningfully assign race given that Germans generally don't share the same definitions of racial categories as Americans (anything other than "white" and "Black" is messy and even those categories don't match as neatly as you might expect). Heck, even ethnic groups are fuzzy ("ethnic German" being a particular problem because there is no cohesive concept of German identity prior to the 19th century and even if you only go back that far things remain confusing).
    - boringuser2 3y ago
      This is a tedious post that isn't worth dealing with in-depth because I am skeptical that you even fully understand the issues in question. I'll bullet a response to you so you have the potential to possibly open your thinking. 1. Just because blue and purple are proximal on the color wheel, does not mean that blue and purple do not exist. i.e. The notion that a gradient exists does not invalidate the difference between proximal colors. 2. Even granted, there is a large geographic component to genetic distance clustering determined via SNP variation. 3. There have been specific studies that assess the American definition of race as comporting to genetic admixture. Individuals identified as black or white had perfect correlation to European or African ancestry. 4. The motivation to deconstruct race clearly pollutes this discussion. Everything can be deconstructed similarly. In fact, there is no real reason to have a sense of self at all given that your notion of being a distinct entity is a social construct. 5. The idea that races would have obvious phenotypic differences and similarities but could not possibly have other cognitive differences is inconsistent with basic reason and very metaphysical in thinking. There is absolutely no reason to think that evolution has no effect on the brain.

toasted-subs 3y ago

seems like a recipe for disaster

niemandhier 3y ago

I wonder if this structural differences also create a tendency towards different behaviour patterns in the populations.

ElMocambo_x4 3y ago

These studies seem to confirm intuitions that many people have expressed in many ways, especially regarding German philosophers who cannot easily be translated in other languages because of the "analytical" properties of that language. As someone who speaks several languages it is also very apparent that somehow the infrastructure in the brain must be slightly different for different languages. For instance, to pick German again, when "caching" certain parts of sentences for later processing, which does not exist in other languages. The brain being a muscle, it is only natural that this would translate in more developed cognitive abilities for those language speakers. I've heard several takes on Asian students being better than others in maths: one of those argued that both the languages themselves, plus the way they are taught to young kids, could, on the long term, make brains better suited to maths. Would be curious to see such studies on that.

ChainOfFools 3y ago
asian students who matriculate into western unis or all asian students? significant filter skew happening in the former case. Perhaps related observation, though npt directly addressing the OP topic: STEM programs, as well as medicine - and from personal experience I would argue especially medicine (vs. STEM proper) - rely on curricula that tend to favor humans who are better than most at mimicking computers. Rote memorization (relatively necessary for ideogram-centric writing systems) is rewarded, excursive analysis is not.
zozbot234 3y ago
> especially regarding German philosophers who cannot easily be translated in other languages because of the "analytical" properties of that language. I wonder if the reverse is just as true in other contexts. How do you say "Let's think this through step by step" in German?
- earthnail 3y ago
  „Lass uns das Schritt für Schritt durchdenken.“ Let us this step by step through think.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

josefrichter 3y ago

As someone who learned both German and Arabic, I don’t find the results that surprising. You can definitely feel that each forces you to think slightly differently. It’s also a known fact that speakers of different languages process the world around them differently, because of the language. In fact these are the main reasons why I start learning different languages without needing them - they make you think differently and give you new perspectives. I’d assume it’s the same with programming languages actually.

MichaelZuo 3y ago
It definitely isn't that surprising as the weak linguistic relativism hypothesis is all but confirmed.

bravura 3y ago

Nietzsche on German: "Das Verb ist der Herr und die anderen Wörter sind die Sklaven." ("The verb is the master and the other words are the slaves.") An personal observation I've noticed from living in Berlin: My German friends over a certain age (roughly 40), who are very liberal, tolerant, totally fluent English speakers, completely refuse to adopt "they/them" pronouns for their non-binary friends and insist until they're blue in the face that there's no reason not to mis-gender them. This still stumps me, because they are otherwise completely polite, elegant, and accommodating. A journalist friend of mine, when I asked him, says it's because German is so highly gendered as a language.

BrandoElFollito 3y ago
French is even more gendered and attempts to introduce a neutral pronoun basically failed. Now - English is for us a very different language that does not have declination so whatever construct there is inside is taken at face value. This is maybe why there are no particular problems using they/them for a single person. Maybe that the closer distance between German and English is one of the reasons for what you described? (wildly guessing)
- bloak 3y ago
  There is at least one fully specified proposal for gender-neutral German: geschlechtsneutral.net. I don't know whether there's anything like that for French. In both languages there's a lot more to it than just personal pronouns: there are also other gendered pronouns (relative, demonstrative, interogative, ...), nouns and adjectives. At least in German the endings on adjectives and nouns are fairly distinct so you can specify them separately. In French the ending can be fused with the root, so you have, for example: * Je suis nouveau (I am new; masculine speaker) * Je suis nouvelle (I am new; feminine speaker) The first-person pronoun "je" is the same for both genders, but the adjective is modified in a semi-regular way. What does a non-binary speaker say? If someone can point me at a fully specified proposal I'll have something to read this weekend! (Just joking: I already have lots to read.)
  - 3y ago

expertentipp 3y ago

Processing the avalanche of letters in German after living in the country for a while will make your brain dead. I'm not even trying to be funny.

MichaelRo 3y ago
Nahrungsmittelunverträglichkeit Vermögenszuordnungszuständigkeitsübertragungsverordnung Rindfleischetikettierungsueberwachungsaufgabenuebertragungsgesetz?
- expertentipp 3y ago
  > Nahrungsmittelunverträglichkeit Vermögenszuordnungszuständigkeitsübertragungsverordnung Rindfleischetikettierungsueberwachungsaufgabenuebertragungsgesetz? Yeah apparently this is a two years auto renewing contract, cancellation only by registered letter 3 months in advance by the end of the contract duration. Payment is 180 EUR monthly. You actually said clearly you don't want it but didn't do it in writing so now you can watch monthly Lastschrift on the bank statements (yup, statements arriving by fucking letter as well). Two exact copies of full terms and conditions are on their way in two separate letters because fuck you. Don't even try asking for help, it's all your fault.
  - felixg3 3y ago
    This is scarily relatable.

perlgeek 3y ago

It would a really good test if they could make a predictive model that, based on brain scans, classifies subjects as German or Arabic native speakers. If that had good classification results, we could be very confident that it's a real difference. Disclaimer: not a neuroscientist, maybe it's convincing for neuroscientists already as is.