Questions tagged German on Linguistics SE

In certain languages such as German or Russian word-final consonants regularly lose their voicing, but remain voiced in other positions, e.g. in German "Pferd" (horse) with [t] while "Pferde" (horses) with [d]. Should this devoiced consonant be transcribed as a /t/ or as a /d/? One of my professo...

In know the genitive case can be used to replace a dative that shows possession, e.g. "Der Hund von meinem Freund", "Der Hund meines Freundes". Often it replaces "von" + dative. Is it also grammatically correct to do this if it's "part of" a verb and doesn't show posession, e.g. "Ich erzähle von ...

I came across the article "Ist Deutsch eine Sprache?" which claims that Standard German shares 99% of its cognates with Bavarian but only 85% with Kölsch or Pennsylvania Dutch. This seems unlikely to me since a 99% lexical similarity would be seen between American and British English, while Bavar...

Why do English and German have relatively large vowel inventories?

I'm trying to build a sentence with an anaphora in place of the direct object or the oblique in the VP layer in order to understand whether it's the oblique or the patient occupying SpecV. According to recent theories on anaphora, the element that the anaphora refers to should c-command it (so ge...

I am studying the passive form of verbs for my M.A in Formal Linguistics. I was wondering whether a native speaker of German could help me out with the following sentences. I know some German myself, but I don't have the same level of competence of a native speaker. Here they are: 1.Ich wurde zwe...

In the German word "Winter" (winter), why didn't the High German Consonant Shift change 't' to 'z' /ts/, so as to be "Winzer"? German "Winter", just like English "winter", comes from Proto-Germanic *wintruz, and Proto-Germanic *t, in most cases, changes to 'z' /ts/ in German.

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 that both these languages reuse this specific pronoun for formal address (rather than a dedicated formal pronoun like "...

I've lost hope looking for a large context free grammar file resource. It could be either German or English and should cover a somewhat large variety of sentence structures. The only thing I found this far is a .cfg File within the NLTK python toolkit. https://www.nltk.org/nltk_data/ <- Number 14...

I recently came across this article on the inclusion of certain superscript combining characters for use with representing Middle High German in Unicode. From what I understand, scribes and early printers of MHG used superscript letters in places where the umlaut became standard usage later, but...

French/Italian and German have a composite past tense (passé composé/passato prossimo/Perfekt) that is formed using either auxhiliary verb to be (être/essere/sein) or auxhiliary verb to have (avoir/avere/haben) plus the past participle. The verbs using one or the other auxhiliary are not the same...

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 various other processes that caused a succeeding syllable's quality to change the preceding one. This d...

In an essay for school I recently claimed the generic masculine was caused by sexism, but my teacher complained that I hadn't given a reason for this. Assuming my hypothesis is correct, how did this develop (I'm not asking about a gender system or sexism – the web has a lot on these –, but on the...

English has very few words left from the Ancient British. I am wondering if the language of the Gauls suffered much the same fate, or whether there are significantly more Celtic substrate words remaining in French than in English. My suspicion is yes, both because the Latin antecedents of French ...

I learnt "fluent" German and Dutch and I am learning Norwegian. German is much closer to Dutch than Norwegian. Yet, there are obvious strong and fascinating similarities between German and Norwegian, which go beyond similar word stems or comparable grammar. Explained in neophyte words as a non-li...

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 pronounced like /hɛndi/, but not /handʏ/ (the regular way to pronounce this word in German). Is this f...

Sorry if this is very basic but I am very new to this area of study. Reiß and reis are two words that in Hochdeutsch have the same pronunciation - 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 system whereby words retain the ...

What are the best or most common English words for "not hungry" and "not thirsty"? I am asking as a German speaker. A related question: In German there is a word "satt" for "nicht hungrig/not hungry", but no word for "nicht durstig/not thirsty". Has anyone an explanation for this?

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 seems so the way the sentence is constructed itself depends in voice, eg: e. The dative object mo...

In many languages, verbs for telling a story are based on or related to verbs for counting. There are (at least) three groups of such verbs: English "recount", French "conter" and "raconter", Italian "raccontare", Spanish and Portuguese "contar" German "erzählen" (a prefixed form of "zählen", to...

The English meaning of -wise is the following. -wise adverb combining form Definition of -wise (Entry 5 of 5) 1a : in the manner of crabwise fanwise b : in the position or direction of slantwise clockwise 2 : with regard to : in respect of dollarwise However, I'm unable to find in a...

I have been in heated debate with a friend of mine who argues vehemently that these words, which I think do rhyme according to the common definitions, do not rhyme. Do they? Also do "polster" and "revolver"?

It seems to me that Dutch is closer to German in its pronounciation than in its writting. It is a bit approximative to say so, that's rather a personal impression, shared by some German native speaker and non Dutch-speaker I could talk to. For example "einfach" and "eenvoudig" are quite dissimila...

I started learning French a couple of months back. My German proficiency is at B2 level (CEFRL). I wanted to know if French also has the different Accusative & Dative forms for Personal Pronouns, Reflexive Pronouns, Possessive articles, Def./Indef. articles, Demonstrative articles ETC... just l...

Does anybody know where to get a list of verbs which can be transitiv and not transitiv. For example die Tuer oeffnet sich. Er oeffnet die Tuer. Das gleiche Verb ein mal transitiv einmal nicht transitiv. Die Suppe kocht. Er kocht die Suppe. Danke im Voraus.

Middle High German had such pronominal forms as swër and swaʒ meaning jeder wer and alles was (see e.g. Mittelhochdeutsches Wörterbuch by Benecke, Müller, Zarncke). These forms are cited as having been formed as contractions e.g. from sô wer. I wonder how was the first consonant pronounced. By de...

My first language is English, and I was taught Yiddish (both hasidic and rabbinic/yeshivish dialects), Hebrew (including Biblical, Mishnaic, and Modern) and Talmudic Aramaic throughout my school years. I love learning new languages, and would like to pursue either German, Korean, Chinese, or Japa...

The regular form War er ... 'was he ...' would, in certain positions of sentence in my idiomatic sociolect, sound approximately as * wara /vaːʁɐ/. I can not imagine at the moment how this came about. It looks like metathesis, because war /vaːɐ̯/ alone elides r to a schwa, and, in any event, t...

This question has been inspired by the fact that I’ve recently heard the Swiss talk among each other and I started to dig deeper. Having done minors in Italian and American studies which each included different depths of linguistics, I found it fascinating how I couldn’t make out a single word wh...

Pardon my word choice, since I'm obviously lacking the background in linguistics. I know that language-specific questions are off-topic, yet I still like to use Finnish as an example, since it spawned my interest in this question, however I think this is general enough to warrant this query. Anyh...

How to write the Greek letter beta and the German letter eszett so that they look different enough? I've seen variants of beta with the final arc ending on the vertical line and ones which have a break there. In eszett the break seems to be always present. Is that the easiest distinction to learn...

Google translate translates the German sentence "Das ist mir egal." to "I don't care." which seems perfectly correct. Curiously, the negated sentence "Das ist mir nicht egal." ("I do care [about that].") gets translated to the same sentence. Is there any interpretation of the translation that wo...

Current modern pronunciation of "Euler" in Standard [High] German is [ˈɔʏlɐ], but it seems that Middle High German had a final -r rhotic sound. I wonder if the details of how the Swiss German pronunciation of this name was around 1750 are known.

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?

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 with the verb, it goes to the end. Does it have any syntactic classification? Or is it considered just a part of the ve...

I cannot help but notice some 'r'-s seem to have randomly disappeared in both German and English. What is going on there?

I note that Saturday is Shabbes but the other days are similar to German which are based on Norse mythology -- one could easily see this being a problem and that a choice to use the Hebrew words for the days have been made. Is it possible that alternate words for days of the week exist or at one ...

First, I don't speak/understand any so-called agglutinative languages, like Turkish. I also don't know German. I understand there's no good definition for the concept of "word", which could apply to all languages. But for the sake of this questions let's assume we define word as something indep...

Anyone has any ideas how to draw the tree structure of this embedded clause dass sie den Wein peobieren will that she the wine to taste wants that she wants to taste the wine Thank you very much!

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 with diacritics with the corresponding IPA below. Orthography Ä À É Ö Ü Ù IPA /ɛ/ /ɑ/,/ɑː/...

If a native Standard German speaker from Leipzig listens to Hessisch spoken by an elderly person from Lich(a small town in Hessen), will he/she understand it?

"um" = around, "bringen" = to bring. Why does "umbringen" = "to bring around" = to kill ?

One of the German words for Imagine is Einbilden, which I believe literally translates to "in-picture". This made me think of the fact that Imagine itself has the prefix Im-, which (together with In-) is often correlated with the German Ein- (Impression = Eindruck, Import = Einführen, Intimidate ...

A word for "pineapple" in Hebrew is "אננס" and in German is "Ananas". The pronunciation of "אננס" in Hebrew and "Ananas" in German are so similar that I wonder if it is merely a coincidence or there are some reasons behind it. Since Hebrew should be older than German as it was spoken Adam and E...

I have found the words with prefixes her and hin and I am little bit confused. I understand, hopefully correctly that hin means from me -> to somewhere else direction and her from somewhere -> to me directly or so. But what I do not understand the difference between two words, unterfallen and he...

German has an interesting situation in its noun phrases - articles and adjectives reflect case, but the noun itself does not. Der großer Mann seiht das Haus ("The big man sees the house," with "the big man" in the nominative) Ich seihe den großen Mann ("I see the big man," with "the big ...

I am no professional Linguist (nor have I ever studied it) so there might be a straightforward explanation to this which I could't find searching in ordinary places. I was analysing a few words from English that from what I am aware of derive their pronunciation from the Great Vowel Shift. I've...

vorstrecken is a colloquial word, "to pay or yield in advance". praestringo "to bind" is handled as the possible etymon of prestige via praesttigium "illusion, delusion"--to explain the latter's development, praestringo is glossed "to blind; to blindfold; to dazzle or confuse someone". I figured...

Consider the the embedded clause "du Schach gespielt hast" in this sentence Ich glaube dass du Schach gespielt hast. I think that you chess played have ‘I think that you have played chess.’ How do I draw the underlying structure ("deep structure") and transform it into the...

Are German wo and English who, German wer and English where, German da and English the, German der and English there from the same origin?