German for Programmers

After 2 years of learning German I’ve noticed that, for the most part, you can go a long way by mapping foreign concepts to ones that you already know. In particular, I’ve had success mapping aspects of German grammar to programming concepts I use every day. After all, programmers deal with weird grammars all the time, why not take advantage of that skill?

Gendered nouns: forward error correction

Probably the first difficulty people run into when leaning German is memorizing the gender of each noun and properly declining that noun’s articles when used in a sentence. While the grammar is mostly regular here, two things make this challenging: the nonsensical assignment of genders to nouns¹ and the sheer amount of memorization required to select the correct declension once the gender of the noun is known.

While no amount of explanation can fully console someone going through this process, I’ve made peace with gendered nouns by treating them as a form of forward error correction. Forward error correction is an encoding technique that adds extra “redundant” information to a message such that if parts of the message are lost or garbled, the extra information can be used to reconstruct the original message without having to ask the sender to retransmit.

If you’ve ever had to attach words to letters to spell something complicated over the phone (S, T as in Tom, I, P as in Peter, I, C as in Charlie, …) you understand forward error correction. Underlying these methods are an agreed-upon set of rules that both sender and receiver know (“I’m going to say a word that we both know, and the letter I’m trying to communicate to you will be the first letter in that word”). A more formal “code” would involve agreeing to always use the NATO phonetic alphabet when spelling things out over the phone. When using this scheme, if you heard “{garbled}-ELTA,” you can guess that the sender said “Delta” because the rules were such that the sender couldn’t have said anything else (no other letter’s pronunciation ends in “elta”).

Computers use a more complicated version of this to protect bitstreams against different kinds of errors. The “rules that both sender and receiver know” can be Hamming Matrices ², Reed-Solomon polynomials ³, Markov Chains ⁴, or modifications and combinations of all of these.

The genders of individual nouns and the grammatical rules to decline articles and adjectives using those genders constitute a shared set of rules that the sender and receiver both know. It may not approach the Shannon limit, but German gendered nouns form a weird, organically developed forward error correcting code. This might be a convoluted example, but imagine trying to hear the difference between Rat and Rad over a bad phone line. Your brain has to do this kind of reconstruction all the time, you’re just not usually conscious of it! “Gib mir das Ra{d,t}” makes the distinction clear – a German speaker would decode it as das Rad immediately, because that “just sounds right.” The declinations are just parity bits in the sentence, and whatever “just sounds right” is actually an error-free solution to a parity calculation.

Many German verb constructs are just context managers

The earliest “weird” form of German grammar you usually encounter is the trennbares Verb. Much like “turning on a switch” is different than “turning a switch,” “Ich schalte den Schalter ein” is different than “Ich schalte den Schalter.” The main difference is that in English the rest of the sentence continues after the “on,” while in German the “on” always has to come at the end of the clause. So while in English we would say “I’m calling up a friend with my new phone,” in German you would say “Ich rufe einen Freund mit meinem neuen Telefon an.” Loosely translated, this would be “I’m calling a friend with my new phone up.”

The fact that the an comes at the end of a conjugated clause using anrufen works the same way Python’s context managers work⁵. Context managers take a bit of explaining if you’re not used to them, but they are a powerful way to harness the finally clause in Python. finally lets you execute code when a code execution leaves a certain scope. The most-often used context manager is in the file object; it ensures that the file is closed when the object goes out of scope so you can’t forget to close it.

with open('workfile') as f:
    read_data = f.read()

replaces

f = open('workfile')
try:
    read_data = f.read()
finally:
    f.close()

In addition to cleverly eliminating errors regarding forgotten cleanup and further consolidating code, context managers help ensure the correct ordering of cleanup code. This is because as context managers are combined, they maintain a LIFO ordering – the innermost context manager’s exit code is executed first, followed by the next innermost, until the entire stack has been executed.

This LIFO ordering can be seen with more complicated “context-manager-like” German verb constructs. Take a Modalverb such as können (“is able to”) combined with the dependent clause created by ob (“if”). Both ob and können require that the verb comes at the end of the clause involving it – “Ich weiß nicht, ob der Zug kommt” (“I don’t know if the train is coming”). When using both ob and können together, the LIFO ordering reveals itself: “Ich weiß nicht, ob sie tanzen kann.” Here, können ends its clause with tanzen, and ob ends its clause with können. Since they’re chained, this means that können itself goes at the end, and its clause comes before it (this is determined by ob, take a look at the Zug example again). Visually, it becomes “ob [(sie tanzen) kann],” where () signifies the scope for können and [] signifies the scope for ob. In both scopes, the relevant verb comes at the end, and the ordering follows the inverse of how the scopes are introduced.

Theoretically this can go even further, although it becomes quite complicated to parse. Generously contributed by Matthias Görner, the sentence “Ich stimme dem Maler, der die Meinung, dass Rot keine Farbe ist, vertritt, zu” layers a trennbares Verb (zustimmen), a relative clause (der … vertritt), and a dependent clause (dass … ist) to demonstrate the LIFO ordering. The translation is “I agree with the painter, who represents the opinion that red is not a color.”

Prepositions claim different areas of ‘cognitive space’ in English and German

In 2010, the xkcd author ran a color survey looking for similarities in how people described colors. Out of that came a chart mapping a continuous color space to discrete English words⁶:

More detailed analyses have been done by Lindsey and Brown and Kuriki et al. for American English and Japanese respectively (thanks to Alice Boxhall for helping me find these!). The most striking part of this work is that Japanese speakers are far more likely to consider “light blue” to be a basic color term than English speakers would:

Just as our word “blue” covers both “blue” and “light-blue” in Japanese⁷, so do English prepositions cover a different “semantic space” than German prepositions. Take bei: according to Pons, depending on the situation bei can function like the English prepositions with, for, in, to, near, by, among, and during. Talk about multi-purpose! auf has the same problem, and it doesn’t help that auf is one of the prepositions that change meaning depending on which case it’s used with.

This became infuriating as I would memorize the translation given by the dictionary, then stare in disbelief at auf being used for both “The paper is on the table” and “We speak in English” (“Das Papier liegt auf dem Tisch” and “Wir sprechen auf Englisch”). The best advice I have is to ignore the English translations and senses entirely. um simply isn’t “around,” it covers a different shape over the semantic space and should be treated on its own. Don’t pay attention to translations, don’t try to “guess” how it might work based on prepositions you know, just learn them afresh (usually by memorizing which prepositions often go with which verbs, or memorizing common phrases like “auf der Hand”).

Declined ’the’s are just how German does kwargs

Most of the toil around early German involves learning how to properly decline articles. While the genderedness causes its own problems, even the declination rules themselves can take time to learn. The advantage of having declined articles is that subject/object order isn’t fixed.

For example, take the English sentence “The man gives the ball to the dog.” There’s no way to rearrange the sentence to have the same meaning without adding extra punctuation or words – “the ball gives the dog to the man” has a completely different meaning. The best you can do is maybe “to the dog, the man gives the ball” but that extra comma changes the structure a bit. In German, all three nouns are masculine and would nominally be der Mann, der Ball, and der Hund. However, each der changes whether the word is a subject (Nominativ), direct object (Akkusativ), or indirect object (Dativ). This means that the above sentence in German could be “Der Mann gibt dem Hund den Ball.” Because each “the” is declined (der, den, and dem), German allows you to be more flexible with where you put your subjects and objects around the verb.

There are additional rules around object placement which restrict some permutations, so ultimately it’s possible to write the same sentence three ways:

1. “Der Mann gibt dem Hund den Ball.”
2. “Den Ball gibt der Mann dem Hund.”
3. “Dem Hund gibt der Mann den Ball.”

Each way can be used to emphasize a different object, but they all mean the same grammatically.

In Python, a function can be called with positional and keyword arguments. Usually positional arguments are specified in the signature, but unlimited ’extra’ positional arguments and keyword arguments can be collected by convention in an “*args” array and a “**kwargs” dictionary respectively⁸. kwargs have the nice property that they can be given in any order⁹, but the price is that you have to refer to them by keyword:

def giver_pos(subject, direct_object, indirect_object):
    """This uses English-style positional ordering."""
    print(f'The {subject} gives the {direct_object} to the {indirect_object}.')


def giver_kwargs(**kwargs):
    """This uses Germanish free-form keyword ordering."""
    subject = kwargs['subject']
    direct_object = kwargs['direct_object']
    indirect_object = kwargs['indirect_object']
    print(f'The {subject} gives the {direct_object} to the {indirect_object}.')


# These print the same thing
giver_pos('man', 'ball', 'dog')
giver_kwargs(subject='man', direct_object='ball', indirect_object='dog')
giver_kwargs(direct_object='ball', indirect_object='dog', subject='man')
giver_kwargs(indirect_object='dog', subject='man', direct_object='ball')
giver_kwargs(subject='man', indirect_object='dog', direct_object='ball')

# This does *not* print the same thing
giver_pos('ball', 'man', 'dog')

Note how the positional one loses functionality but requires less typing. You need some kind of information to differentiate in which sense a word is to be used, and each way has a tradeoff. English chooses to use position for simplicity and loses flexibility, German chooses to use declination for flexibility but loses simplicity.

Position 2 is just a delay slot

In normal sentences, German verbs stay in “Position 2,” meaning right after the first clause. Directly translated, this can sound quite weird! “The dog goes to the vet tomorrow” could become “tomorrow goes the dog to the vet.” There are still kernels of this in modern English but in general it can take a long time to get used to the fixed aspect of German word order.

Thinking of delay slots in older computer architectures helped me conceptualize Position 2 a little better. Processors need to determine where to read instructions after a branch (say, which side of an if statement to execute). In the case of pipelined processors, this calculation can be blocked while waiting for a previous value to become computed¹⁰. Delay slots were used by pipelined CPUs to solve this problem before modern out-of-order execution methods rendered them unnecessary. The older processors were unable to look ahead to compute possible branch targets, so they forced the developer to give a one or two cycle “heads up” that a branch was coming. The processor used this time to compute the jump targets with the caveat that the programmer couldn’t insert hazards in the delay slots – that would defeat the entire purpose of the delay.

I see verbs staying in Position 2 the same way: they guarantee your brain gets a heads up on what action is about to happen, even if you have a long flourishing adverbial or subject clause. “On Fridays I eat pizza” becomes “On Fridays eat [hey the subject’s coming later but just fyi the subject is eating] I pizza.” It’s possible to get lost in complicated German sentences, so forcing the important bits up front just seems helpful.