Meine Seele ist satt
Note: I am not a linguist, if someone believes I am fundamentally wrong please correct me.
My brain had a thought last night but it was RIGHT as we turned out the light and I wasn't quite obsessed with it enough to flick the light back on and dive for some paper and a pen.
German has a lot of verbs that are essentially two parts. We'll use aufbauen as an example. Used in a sentence it would be ich baue es auf. I establish it or I build it up depending on how you want to interpret it because translation work is messy and full of opinions.
In the past tense Ich habe es aufgebaut. If I'm being fancy and want to say I know because I am establishing it, Ich weiss weil ich es auf baue. Auf is essentially a preposition on its own, but it is part of the verb here and gets thrown around and repositioned depending on the tense of the sentence and those verb-kicking conjunctions (denn das weil obwohl). English does the verb-linked preposition thing, but it isn't as obvious because it is hardly ever mooshed into one word (build up as seen above) and if it they are smashed together, never do they part (upheaval).
But this is all beside the point. The thought my brain latched onto linked to the genative case of German nouns. This comes into place when something is "of the" or "in the" and it's basically how the articles react when you put them in a posessive prepositional phrase, except in German the "of the/in the etc" is not necessarily written out. So you have Der Herr der Ringe, The Lord of the Rings because the genative form of the plural "the" (die) is der.
There are prepositions that bring up this genative case as well and I had the crazy thought, maybe it's not crazy, but the thought that some of these cases in the language developed to avoid confusion with the "floating" verbal prepositions.
And my brain is all "I need to use that," just not sure where and for what language.
I also want to note I haven't come across these types of verbs in Russian. What Russian does have is reflexive verbs. German has reflexive verbs too and English has some bare remnants of it, not nearly so strongly present as Germna or Russian.
In German one of the first reflexive verbs you learn is fühlen which is often translated as "to feel" but depending on the phrasing could be to sense, be aware of, or to be conscious of. Any way you slice it, the verb is reflexive which means instead of just saying "I feel sick" it is "Ich fühle mich krank" which if you're doing a word for word literal translation it would be "I feel myself sick" or maybe "I sense me sick" and even "I (am) conscious (of) me (being) sick." O my gosh, isn't language awesome? Now fühlen brings out the accusative case of the pronoun, there are other verbs, not necessarily reflexive that bring out the dative case, for I/ich that is mir, du/dich it is dir. Like helfen. You help me would be Sie helfen mir. If you were demanding to be helped it would be Helfen Sie mir or even just declaring "help me!" Hilf mir!
Russian does this with the verb to like/find pleasing нравится, which doesn't get conjugated, but puts the "subject" in the Russian dative case so instead of "I like sleeping" it is мне нравится спать or "Me like sleeping." They call it an imperfect verb. The word надо basically encompasses the consept of needing something or must do something. It is called a predictive adjective even if in English it is interpreted as a verb. So if I say "I need this" it is мне надо этот or directly "Me need this."
In other news I actually actively poked at Peter Schilling's YouTube channel the other day and it totally brought out the giddy fangirl in me. I watched one brief video of him thanking his fans for 20 million views in German woth English subtitles and then I stumbled on this one:
I love it. It's so endearing. I just can't even describe it. It throws me back to being a teenager and being ridiculously passionate about German and music and Schilling's work in particular. Not something I was expecting 20 years later, that's for sure.
I'll part with "Mechanik meines Herzens" because I found the English version while I was poking about and we'll let these two beautiful songs round out this language-inspired rambling.
"Mechanics of my Heart"
Ganz perfekt.
My brain had a thought last night but it was RIGHT as we turned out the light and I wasn't quite obsessed with it enough to flick the light back on and dive for some paper and a pen.
German has a lot of verbs that are essentially two parts. We'll use aufbauen as an example. Used in a sentence it would be ich baue es auf. I establish it or I build it up depending on how you want to interpret it because translation work is messy and full of opinions.
In the past tense Ich habe es aufgebaut. If I'm being fancy and want to say I know because I am establishing it, Ich weiss weil ich es auf baue. Auf is essentially a preposition on its own, but it is part of the verb here and gets thrown around and repositioned depending on the tense of the sentence and those verb-kicking conjunctions (denn das weil obwohl). English does the verb-linked preposition thing, but it isn't as obvious because it is hardly ever mooshed into one word (build up as seen above) and if it they are smashed together, never do they part (upheaval).
But this is all beside the point. The thought my brain latched onto linked to the genative case of German nouns. This comes into place when something is "of the" or "in the" and it's basically how the articles react when you put them in a posessive prepositional phrase, except in German the "of the/in the etc" is not necessarily written out. So you have Der Herr der Ringe, The Lord of the Rings because the genative form of the plural "the" (die) is der.
There are prepositions that bring up this genative case as well and I had the crazy thought, maybe it's not crazy, but the thought that some of these cases in the language developed to avoid confusion with the "floating" verbal prepositions.
And my brain is all "I need to use that," just not sure where and for what language.
I also want to note I haven't come across these types of verbs in Russian. What Russian does have is reflexive verbs. German has reflexive verbs too and English has some bare remnants of it, not nearly so strongly present as Germna or Russian.
In German one of the first reflexive verbs you learn is fühlen which is often translated as "to feel" but depending on the phrasing could be to sense, be aware of, or to be conscious of. Any way you slice it, the verb is reflexive which means instead of just saying "I feel sick" it is "Ich fühle mich krank" which if you're doing a word for word literal translation it would be "I feel myself sick" or maybe "I sense me sick" and even "I (am) conscious (of) me (being) sick." O my gosh, isn't language awesome? Now fühlen brings out the accusative case of the pronoun, there are other verbs, not necessarily reflexive that bring out the dative case, for I/ich that is mir, du/dich it is dir. Like helfen. You help me would be Sie helfen mir. If you were demanding to be helped it would be Helfen Sie mir or even just declaring "help me!" Hilf mir!
Russian does this with the verb to like/find pleasing нравится, which doesn't get conjugated, but puts the "subject" in the Russian dative case so instead of "I like sleeping" it is мне нравится спать or "Me like sleeping." They call it an imperfect verb. The word надо basically encompasses the consept of needing something or must do something. It is called a predictive adjective even if in English it is interpreted as a verb. So if I say "I need this" it is мне надо этот or directly "Me need this."
In other news I actually actively poked at Peter Schilling's YouTube channel the other day and it totally brought out the giddy fangirl in me. I watched one brief video of him thanking his fans for 20 million views in German woth English subtitles and then I stumbled on this one:
Click to viewI love it. It's so endearing. I just can't even describe it. It throws me back to being a teenager and being ridiculously passionate about German and music and Schilling's work in particular. Not something I was expecting 20 years later, that's for sure.
I'll part with "Mechanik meines Herzens" because I found the English version while I was poking about and we'll let these two beautiful songs round out this language-inspired rambling.
"Mechanics of my Heart"
Ganz perfekt.