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Is there a tool that will analyze my German sentence and tell me which is a dative case which is genitive, etc. And ultimately tell me if my sentence was properly written out to be grammatically correct.

This would help me a lot for fully understanding the German cases.

user unknown
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W.Mailh
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  • Possible duplicate of Automatische grammatikalische Satzanalyse – Hubert Schölnast Apr 06 '17 at 20:16
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    @HubertSchölnast Your question is in German. As far as I know, an English question is no duplicate, right? – Arsak Apr 06 '17 at 21:08
  • @Marzipanherz: This is discussed here: https://german.meta.stackexchange.com/q/14/1487 As far as I know, this discussion has not yet led to any official result. – Hubert Schölnast Apr 07 '17 at 11:45
  • @HubertSchölnast Eben drum :) – Arsak Apr 07 '17 at 15:23
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    The generic understanding of natural language is one of the hardest problems of computer science. Solutions today are usually based on neural nets, which are trained on HUGE corpi of sample texts. In turn, even a perfect neural net does not allow a rule based insight into the thing it specialized in, since the rules are implicitely coded in the purely numerical parametrization that characterizes the relationships of the cells that consititute the network. – hiergiltdiestfu Apr 10 '17 at 10:23

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It is not so hard, because dative and accusative are always very different:

  1. With bestimmten Artikel, there is always difference (den-dem, die-der, das-dem, die-den). Similarly with unbestimmten Artikel (einen-einem, eine-einer, ein-einem, keine-keinen).
  2. In the case of pronouns, there is also a very visible difference (dich-dir, sie-ihr, etc)

On the first spot, this whole thing is not very hard. We have around 3 4x4 matrices (plus the pronouns, but also they are similar). The problem is that these to automatize... well... it can take years, even if your first language has much bigger ones. It is a big mistery of the language.

If I understand German sentences, I don't take care about what is dative or accusative. I simply decode the text from the meaning of the words. To identify Angehörigkeitrelationen ("of") is much more important, but it is also very characteristic.

To synthetise these structures, it is more easy to learn as realtime decoding them.

I think German is the best algorithmizable language I know, but this is also a reason, why is it a big win if you don't write code for that, instead develop this tool in your own mind. Look for complex sentences written by native speakers and decode some them.

peterh
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    "I think German is the best algorithmizable language I know." I fully agree, although I am not a computer scientist myself. But German is as close to being a "mathematical" idiom as natural languages can ever hope to be. – ΥΣΕΡ26328 Apr 08 '17 at 08:33
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    Errr what?! German has a high degree of irregularity when it comes to things like prepositions, it has genders of imported words that are more or less randomly assigned based on comparable German words, it's impossible to flex many verbs without having a dictionary, there's HUGE freedoms on how to structure sentences (which comes with very different meanings)... German would be one of the harder languages to understand as a set of rules, tbh – Marcus Müller Apr 10 '17 at 06:55
  • @MarcusMüller ABC die dieses in Reihenfolge Sätzes sind Wörter. :-) – peterh Apr 10 '17 at 07:26
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    @peterh exactly, while many structures are valid, many aren't, and it's very hard to know the difference based on strict rules. Construct a valid sentence from your words. Switch a couple of words, and still form a valid sentence, with a different meaning. Rinse, repeat. – Marcus Müller Apr 10 '17 at 07:57
  • I also disagree with the computer analysis statement. German has way too many ambiguities. If one takes a look at e.g. Lojban, which was designed to be understood by computer programs, one comes to realize how horribly unprecise natural languages can be. – marstato Apr 30 '17 at 23:06
  • @MarcusMüller No language could make me trying to invent new grammatical constructions as fun :-) – peterh Apr 30 '17 at 23:10
  • @marstato Lojban looks well. I think it could be better as German in precision. I think should be more similar to the westeuropean languages we are all familiar with. – peterh Apr 30 '17 at 23:17
  • @peterh im fine with it as it is - but its still humanly designed and has its flaws, of course. – marstato Apr 30 '17 at 23:20
  • @marstato You have some expert knowledge in language analysis? If yes, do you know a measure for the "precision" or "logicalness" of a language exists? I think, if the answer is yes, German would be very first between the natural languages. But what I think pretty wonderful, I think is "linearity". It is probably not the perfect word for that. It tries to mean, that grammatical constructions are nearly always "embeddable". For example: "I do", "I can do it", "I will do it", "I will be able to do it". Thus, combining the future with a modalverb. – peterh Apr 30 '17 at 23:25
  • @peterh no sadly not in terms of spoken language. If have some experience in analysing and proofing correct programming languages. From that perspecrive, it seems that Lojban can express a much wider variery of logical statements while staying 100% unambiguous; every sentence has one meaning; room for interpretation is only on vague definition of the vocabulary. – marstato Apr 30 '17 at 23:29
  • @marstato On English, you can't combine them together, "I will can do it" is false. On German, "Ich werde es tun können" is okay (not considering the s-word what one of my German coworkers used as I asked him, how futurI sounds today :-) ) – peterh Apr 30 '17 at 23:30
  • I agree that german can be very precise when compared to other languages (i know latin, and some japaneese) - although not as good, of course, as a lojban or a programming language can be. – marstato Apr 30 '17 at 23:30
  • @peterh wouldnt "Ich werde es tun können" translate to "i'll be able to do so"? – marstato Apr 30 '17 at 23:31
  • Let us continue this discussion in chat. – peterh Apr 30 '17 at 23:50
  • @marstato Yes. But here we combine 2 constructs: 1. modalverb 2. futur. Both are being done very similarly on English and on German (hilfsverb substitutes the original verb, the original verb goes to infinitive and to a specific position in the sentence. On German, it goes to the end, and on English, it goes after the hilfsverb.) On English, you can't simply combine them, you would get "I will can do it", which is false. On German, you can. And so is it on German, nearly everywhere. – peterh Apr 30 '17 at 23:55