Re: French and German (jara: An introduction)

Hi!

Harald Stoiber <stoiberh@...> writes:
> On Thu, 5 Jun 2003 21:25:37 +0100, Jan van Steenbergen <ijzeren_jan@...> wrote:
>
> >Fraktur, IIRC. Personally, I find them very pretty. No, then try German
> >hand-written text from those years... Pure horror!
'S"uterlin' is the name of that script.

> The major difficulties of German could be (to a native
> English speaker):
> 1) grammatical gender, often quite arbitrary
> 2) the cases - even though English has them, too, but
> often hides them behind prepositions or word order
I think the problem that never disappears for most non-native speakers
are mistakes with the determiners and the adjective endings.  The
latter seem to be very, very hard it remember.  My theory is that the
discrepancy between number of grammatical positions and number of
endings is simply too confusing:

There are six forms of 'red': rot, rote, roten, roter, rotem, rotes,
of which one is easy: 'rot' ([Ro:t] to clarify the pronunciation),
this occurs only in predicative position and does not have any concord
constraints: 'Das Buch ist rot.' - 'The book is red.'

But the other five forms are used for 48 positions, since adjectives
are declined for the following categories:

    number/gender:  4 possibilities: m.sg., f.sg., n.sg. or pl.
                      (or six: m,f,n * sg,pl, but there is no
                       gender distinction in pl, so I collapsed
                       these to four)
    case:           4 possibilities: nom, acc, dat, gen
    adj.mode:       3 possibilities:
                       e.g. after 'manch' ('strong' form)
                       e.g. after 'ein'   ('weak/strong' form)
                       e.g. after 'der'   ('weak' form)

That's 48 possibilities for 5 forms and the forms seem to be
distributed at random if you look at them.
Unfortunately for foreigners, they sometimes (but obviously not often
enough to force proper internalisation) carry singular/plural
information, although it's the same form:

 - Ich gehe ohne den Jungen ins Kino.
 - Ich gehe mit  den Jungen ins Kino.

   I go with/without the boy/boys to-the cinema.
   I go watch a film with the boys/without the boy.

In the first sentence, 'den Jungen' is singular, because 'ohne'
(='without') selects accusative, but in the second, it's plural,
because 'mit' (='with') selects dative.

**Henrik

PS: You may say that there are only two adjective modes, which is true
for the *forms*, i.e. with all other categories equal, there are only
two forms for the three modes, but weak/strong mode sometimes uses the
weak, sometimes the strong form, depending on the other categories
values:

dat.neut.sg:
   mode 1: manch rotem Buch
   mode 2: einem roten Buch  \ same
   mode 3: dem   roten Buch  /

nom.neut.sg:
   mode 1: manch rotes Buch  \
   mode 2: ein   rotes Buch  / same
   mode 3: das   rote  Buch

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