Comments on: The Uncanny Valley http://www.waywordradio.org/uncanny-valley/ A lively radio program about words and language, broadcast on many NPR stations and heard by podcast around the world. It's more than grammar! Sat, 18 May 2013 23:30:17 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.5.1 By: sandorm http://www.waywordradio.org/uncanny-valley/#comment-2912 sandorm Mon, 10 Dec 2012 12:25:42 +0000 http://www.waywordradio.org/?p=1172#comment-2912 I agree entirely about the need to learn nouns with their gendered articles for languages that have them (French, Spanish, Italian, German, etc.). The main difficulty with German, though, is that the articles are ‘declined’ depending on the case of the noun (nominative, or subject case; accusative, or direct object; dative, or indirect object; andr genitive, i.e. possessive). This means that while you may memorise that it is die Frau (woman, quite logically, is feminine, although girl, Mädchen, is neuter gender!), you will also hear “der Frau” if the woman is the indirect object or if the possessive case is being used (of the woman).

Since it seems to me the trick to learning correct usage is never to hear or see it wrongly used (or that wrong usage will imprint on your memory – this is why good language teachers never write ON THE BOARD the wrong spelling, even in order to explain why it is wrong), this feature of German impedes learnign the genders of nouns correctly.

]]> By: sandorm http://www.waywordradio.org/uncanny-valley/#comment-2911 sandorm Mon, 10 Dec 2012 12:19:20 +0000 http://www.waywordradio.org/?p=1172#comment-2911 About “haircuts” – I’ve been working in financial translation, and the term gained popularity (and maybe a slightly different meaning?) after the financial crisis. In finance it means “a percentage that is subtracted [by a lender] from the market value of an asset that is being used as collateral.” The amount of haircut applied to the collateral depends on the risk – eg a US Treasury bill may be discounted only 10%, since it is very safe, but a corporate bond more like 20-25%.
However, in the crisis, it has been used to refer not to an automatic standard reduction, but to something negotiated among lenders where a debtor is in difficulty but not fully bankrupt – e.g. recently international banks and investors agreed to a 50% ‘haircut’ on Greek sovereign debt, which means the amount Greece should pay them back has been cut by half (see article in the British Guardian newspaper of Thursday 27 October 2011).

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