Steven Pinker's book ‘The Language Instinct’ talks about pretty much everything a layman would want to know about the basics of language, in layman's terms. It covers syntax, Chomskian grammars, prescriptive vs descriptive grammar, history and relations of languages, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, biological and evolutionary basis for languages, language acquisition in children, differences between human languages and animals' attempts (spoiler: Pinker doesn't give any credit to claims that animals learn language). Big plus of the book is that it uses Chomsky's theories extensively but explains them without need for specialized knowledge (it's explicitly mentioned how Chomsky is unreadable without linguistic training). All in all, much recommended. The book even works well as an audiobook.
Also: in preparation to diving in Kafka's books I learned about a peculiar feature of his style:
> Kafka often made extensive use of a characteristic particular to the German language which permits long sentences that sometimes can span an entire page. Kafka's sentences then deliver an unexpected impact just before the full stop—this being the finalizing meaning and focus. This is due to the construction of subordinate clauses in German which require that the verb be positioned at the end of the sentence.
>> “Als Gregor Samsa eines Morgens aus unruhigen Träumen erwachte, fand er sich in seinem Bett zu einem ungeheuren Ungeziefer verwandelt.” (original)
> “As Gregor Samsa one morning from restless dreams awoke, found he himself in his bed into an enormous vermin transformed.”
Can someone provide more insight into what this refers to? There are definitely less formal or technical sounding word variants in German, and of course duzen/siezen to add another level of formality, so I'm not sure what this could refer to.
The other comment is not quite right, a ‘language register’ is not a dialect, even though apparently the whole classification is difficult and imprecise due to the nature of languages as a continuum. A ‘language register’ means a variant, choice of words, that are used in specific situations or settings: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Register_(sociolinguistics)
So, afaiu an ‘informal register’ would be something like brospeak or language spoken at home and among friends, contrasted to that spoken with strangers and at work. But I don't know what the situation is in German. With English and Russian, every generation and each subculture invents their own slang just to differentiate themselves―can't imagine how any country would avoid developing informal language, considering the existence of Oktoberfest.
I'd assume it's about the dialects, which are very different from the "official" language, so much that Jerome K. Jerome had a joke in one of his books, more than century ago:
"Germany being separated so many centuries into a dozen principalities, is unfortunate in possessing a variety of dialects. Germans from Posen wishful to converse with men of Wurtemburg, have to talk as often as not in French or English; and young ladies who have received an expensive education in Westphalia surprise and disappoint their parents by being unable to understand a word said to them in Mechlenberg."
"Modern times" and technologies suppress the dialects and with each generation the portion of the local-specific dialects is being lost.
In German, speaking in different registers actually changes the verb grammatically. Kanst du vs Können Sie vs Könnten Sie.
Could you (low register to someone of equal or lower status) vs Could you (medium register to someone of higher status) vs Might you (highest register to someone of higher status). In English I had to change to a different verb, non grammatically. In German these are all the same verb with a different rule applied.
Fascinating. I always felt there was something special about his sentence structure but could never quite put my finger on it. Other than their length, that is.
I thought previously that Yoda's speech is an emulation of anastrophe frequently seen in poetry. However, as the post article notes, generally the OSV order is barely ever seen in languages.
> “As Gregor Samsa one morning from restless dreams awoke, found he himself in his bed into an enormous vermin transformed.”
You know, this actually makes sense. I think that after a couple of hundred pages, this would just seem like an easy-to-read, natural alternative word ordering.
Then, if the author started substituting German words here and there, starting with the obvious ones, then ones English words are derived from, and so on... before you know it, you'd be reading German!
Also: in preparation to diving in Kafka's books I learned about a peculiar feature of his style:
> Kafka often made extensive use of a characteristic particular to the German language which permits long sentences that sometimes can span an entire page. Kafka's sentences then deliver an unexpected impact just before the full stop—this being the finalizing meaning and focus. This is due to the construction of subordinate clauses in German which require that the verb be positioned at the end of the sentence.
>> “Als Gregor Samsa eines Morgens aus unruhigen Träumen erwachte, fand er sich in seinem Bett zu einem ungeheuren Ungeziefer verwandelt.” (original)
> “As Gregor Samsa one morning from restless dreams awoke, found he himself in his bed into an enormous vermin transformed.”
There's a neat picture illustrating the difference in the order of the parse tree: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Kafka_bibliography#Eng...