German Texts Research Articles

In an Archive of Fragments: The Loud Silences of Cod. Sang. 1394

Abstract: Fragments are collected in various forms of archives. This essay investigates a particularly vexing archive of fragments, the Cod. Sang. 1394, compiled at the beginning of the nineteenth century in the monastery of St. Gallen. Fragments in the collection represent a wide spectrum of chirographic production and include Latin, Hebrew, and German texts ranging from the fifth to the fifteenth century in date. By analyzing a selection of Latin and Hebrew case studies from this archive, the article aims to reevaluate the nature of refragmentation and the problems arising from selective cataloguing of fragments. It proposes an identification of previously neglected fragments and discusses the nature of Cod. Sang. 1394 as a codex on its own. Finally, it problematizes how fragments exist today in the state of disjoined digital existence, and what consequences does this bring for our research.

Viability of Open Large Language Models for Clinical Documentation in German Health Care: Real-World Model Evaluation Study.

The use of large language models (LLMs) as writing assistance for medical professionals is a promising approach to reduce the time required for documentation, but there may be practical, ethical, and legal challenges in many jurisdictions complicating the use of the most powerful commercial LLM solutions. In this study, we assessed the feasibility of using nonproprietary LLMs of the GPT variety as writing assistance for medical professionals in an on-premise setting with restricted compute resources, generating German medical text. We trained four 7-billion-parameter models with 3 different architectures for our task and evaluated their performance using a powerful commercial LLM, namely Anthropic's Claude-v2, as a rater. Based on this, we selected the best-performing model and evaluated its practical usability with 2 independent human raters on real-world data. In the automated evaluation with Claude-v2, BLOOM-CLP-German, a model trained from scratch on the German text, achieved the best results. In the manual evaluation by human experts, 95 (93.1%) of the 102 reports generated by that model were evaluated as usable as is or with only minor changes by both human raters. The results show that even with restricted compute resources, it is possible to generate medical texts that are suitable for documentation in routine clinical practice. However, the target language should be considered in the model selection when processing non-English text.

Pengembangan Media Komik Digital Berbahasa Jerman Cerita Rakyat Batak Toba Raja Si Opat Ama dengan Bantuan Aplikasi Next G-Toon

This research aims to develop German-language digital comic media that elevates the Toba Batak folklore "Si Raja Opat Ama" using the Next G-Toon application. The research method used a quantitative descriptive approach, including data collection through an online survey to assess the level of reader satisfaction with digital comics and data collection related to Toba Batak folklore from various sources. The results showed high interest from readers in digital comics, with the majority positively assessing quality, safety, ease of use, and providing recommendations for this digital comic. Visualization of the story through images and German text facilitates understanding of context and sentence structure. In conclusion, the German-language digital comic about Toba Batak folklore proved to be interesting and effective in helping learn German and understand local culture. It is recommended to develop further digital comics that raise folklore or other local cultures as an effort to preserve cultural heritage and promote Indonesia's cultural wealth

Harmony in diversity: exploring cross-linguistic, cross-cultural and multimodal dimensions of temporality within tourism discourse

Abstract This study explores temporal aspects in tourism discourse across modes, languages and cultures, focusing on translated texts in German, Italian, French, English, and Spanish. Tourism communication, a persuasive force promoting destinations, constructs authentic experiences for potential tourists. Beyond promotion, it reflects a societal practice shaping tourist identities and destination cultures. The translation of tourism texts involves considerations of cultural values and multimodal representations, seeking to transfer the unique selling proposition effectively. Existing research has analyzed trigger words, interlingual strategies, and cultural representations, but a gap exists in understanding the translation of temporal aspects. This paper investigates the multimodal representation, promotion, and transfer of temporality in tourism texts, contributing to contrastive and multimodal research in tourism communication. Key questions addressed include how elements from different modes contribute to the unique selling proposition, how the advertising message is conveyed in a multimodal coherent way, and which temporal aspects are translated and adapted in the target language. The present paper sheds light on the intricate interplay of language and image in conveying the temporal dimension of tourist experiences across diverse linguistic and cultural contexts.

PELATIHAN PENGGUNAAN STRATEGI HÖR-SEHEN DALAM MENINGKATKAN KEMAMPUAN MEMAHAMI TEKS BAGI GURU BAHASA JERMAN DI KOTA AMBON

Hör-Sehen is a strategy that combines what is heard and what is seen, or what is called an audio-visual technique, making it easier for students to understand the content of the text. This community service aims to prepare teachers through training on the use of the Hör-Sehen strategy for improving text comprehension skills for German language teachers. In addition, this training is very appropriate to be implemented as a strategy to be used by teachers not only in listening skills but as a combination of what is heard and what is seen. Thus, teachers can apply it to the teaching and learning process in the classroom. The PKM activities carried out by the team for German language teachers in Ambon City are expected to help teachers improve students' understanding of German texts.

Hortulus 37, 1959: Translation as Collaboration in an Anthology of New Poetry from Israel

Abstract This article presents one issue of the Swiss literary journal Hortulus as a case study on forms of exchange, translation, and traffic between German and Hebrew in the wake of Nazism and World War II. Drawing on discussions in the field of Periodical Studies, I examine the various networks in which Hortulus 37 – a special issue devoted to new poetry from Israel – is situated. I highlight the heterogeneity of the volume, which contains materials translated into German from multiple languages, as well as original German texts. Translation itself appears in the volume as a heterogenous practice, which encompasses self-translation and various modes of collaborative translation. Since many of the authors who are translated into German in the volume were native speakers of that language, the lines between collaboration and self-translation are blurred in ways that have important consequences for our theorization of translation and self-translation.

Off-line identifying Script Writers by Swin Transformers and ResNeSt-50

In this work, we present two advanced models for identifying script writers, leveraging the power of deep learning. The proposed systems utilize the new vision Swin Transformer and ResNeSt-50. Swin Transformer is known for its robustness to variations and ability to model long-range dependencies, which helps capture context and make robust predictions. Through extensive training on large datasets of handwritten text samples, the Swin Transformer operates on sequences of image patches and learns to establish a robust representation of each writer’s unique style. On the other hand, ResNeSt-50 (Residual Neural Network with Squeeze-and-Excitation (SE) and Next Stage modules), with its multiple layers, helps in learning complex representations of a writer’s unique style and distinguishing between different writing styles with high precision. The SE module within ResNeSt helps the model focus on distinctive handwriting characteristics and reduce noise. The experimental results demonstrate exceptional performance, achieving an accuracy of 98.50% (at patch level) by the Swin Transformer on the CVL database, which consists of images withcursively handwritten German and English texts, and an accuracy of 96.61% (at page level) by ResNeSt-50 on the same database. This research advances writer identification by showcasing the effectiveness of the Swin Transformer and ResNeSt-50. The achieved accuracy underscores the potential of these models to process and understand complex handwriting effectively.

ASPECTS OF NEW HIGH GERMAN LANGUAGE FORMATION OF THE 18th CENTURY (Gabriel Bodenehr’s Plan of Kamianets-Podilskyi, 1726)

The research examines the peculiarities of the formation of the German language in the New High German period using the example of the plan of the Ukrainian city in Podil – Kamianets-Podilskyi. This document was created in 1726 in the city of Augsburg (northern Germany) by the famous German engraver and cartographer Gabriel Bodenehr. The work aims to study the process of the formation of the New High German language at its early stage in historical, cultural, regional and linguistic contexts; to illustrate them on the example of the text of the explication of the city plan. The task of this research is to characterize the peculiarities of the process of normalization of the German language in the New High German period; to determine changes in language levels on the example of the German text of the explanation of the city plan of Kamianets-Podilskyi. To achieve the specified goal and solve the tasks, the following research methods were used: descriptive, comparative-historical, biographical, comparative, and linguistic. As a result of the research, it was found that the text of the plan, although it was written in the New High German period, which is characterized by the desire to create a language standard and the departure from regional dialects, still retains its regional flavour and reference to the written norm of the Viennese chancellery. The conducted research proved that the orthographic and phonetic levels were most affected by the region, where there are significant variations of graphemes in marking the length and shortness of the sound, qualitative changes in vowel sounds, orthographic and graphic features of consonant markings, gravitation to the norms of the Viennese chancellery, as well as a gradual rejection of orthographic norms of the Middle High German period. Certain changes at the morphological level were found in the explication text, which testifies to the formation and consolidation of some grammatical categories (tense forms of verbs, use of passive constructions, declension of nouns and adjectives). The information focus of the text determines its lexical content, which can be seen in the author’s extensive use of anthroponyms (names of architectural and church buildings) and toponyms. The historical and cultural context of the development of the city of Kamianets-Podilskyi is reflected in the author’s use of proper names (names of historical figures, religious orders, political and military groups) and a significant number of borrowings from French, Turkish/Arabic, Latin, and Italian languages. It has been established that the syntactic level is the most normalized and closest to the modern German language. Therefore, the conducted linguistic analysis of the text of the city plan testified that in the first half of the 18th century, there was no complete unification of the written norm of the German literary language. However, separate attempts were made to standardize it. Among the promising research areas, it is worth conducting a comparative analysis of other city plans of this period in order to identify common features in the development of the German language.

The loss of synthetic past tense forms in Slovene in the context of the hypothesised Central European convergence area

Summary One of the salient morphosyntactic features of the hypothesised Central European convergence area is allegedly a simple three-tense verb system (i. e. past, present, and future) without any formal and semantic distinction between the different past tense forms. The simplification of the originally more complex past tense system has been claimed to be contact-induced, which is mirrored in the loss of synthetic past tense forms in the linguistic history of German and Slavic. The article verifies the hypothesis according to which the loss of the preterit (i. e. a synthetic past tense form) in Upper German caused the disappearance of synthetic past tense forms, i. e. the aorist and the imperfect, in Slavic, more specifically Slovene. First, the process of the loss of the aorist and the imperfect in three medieval Slovene texts is presented, viz. the Freising Fragments (c. 972–1039), the Klagenfurt/Celovec or Rateče Manuscript (2nd half of the 14th century), and the Castelmonte/Stara Gora Manuscript (end of the 15th century). Second, the use of the preterit and the perfect in the Early New High German text Ain newes lied von den kraynneriſchen bauren (c. 1515) from the South Bavarian-Austrian speech territory, more precisely Lower Styria, is analysed. The historical linguistic analysis of the cited Slovene and German linguistic material (the latter originating from the Slovene linguistic area as well) shows that in medieval Slovene the aorist (and most probably the imperfect, too) was lost no later than by the end of the 15th century, while the formal and semantic distinction between the preterit on one hand and the perfect on the other is still preserved in Early New High German documented in the “Slovene-speaking lands” in the second decade of the 16th century. From these facts one cannot but conclude that the loss of synthetic past tense forms in Slovene could not have been influenced by (the demonstrably later) loss of the preterit in South Bavarian-Austrian German dialects, which were historically (and in some regions still are) in geographical and, consequently, sociolinguistic contact with Slovene.

Document language moderates the text-belief consistency effect

ABSTRACT When researching socioscientific topics, particularly on the Internet, readers face multiple texts that they must integrate into a coherent mental model. Previous research in monolingual settings has found that comprehension is biased toward readers’ prior beliefs (text-belief consistency effect). Considering that the Internet is multilingual, this experiment focused on the influence of document language on the text-belief consistency effect. Assuming differences in epistemic prestige among languages, we hypothesized that document language would act as a credibility cue and moderate the text-belief consistency effect. Seventy-four German university students read two conflicting texts either in their L2 English (higher epistemic prestige) or in their L1 German (lower epistemic prestige). Participants constructed stronger situation models for the belief-consistent text than for the belief-inconsistent text only when they read the texts in German. These results indicate that document language can act as a source characteristic that may reduce belief biases in comprehension.

Using Negations in Analyzing German Texts in Finance

Using Negations in Analyzing German Texts in Finance

Image of Vlad III Basarab in German Sources of the 15th-16th Centuries

The article is devoted to the problem of the emergence of German texts about Dracula in Germany in the 15th-16th centuries and their genre evolution associated with a change in the linguo-pragmatic task. The links between the works about Dracula belonging to different genres are considered: the handwritten pamphlet of the Benedictine monks from Lambach, the historical episode in the “Chronicle of Constance” by Gebhard Daher, the poetic arrangement of “About the villain called Dracula the Voda of Wallachia” by the court poet Michael Beheim, an entertaining story in early printed editions – “folk books”. The article shows how, depending on the historical situation, the evaluative position and goals of the compilers of the texts changed, and what effect this had on specific linguistic features, primarily lexical ones. he works of Antonio Bonfini and Teodor Kuritan do not seem to have influenced the German Dracula narratives: even the later German texts are close in content to the Lambach manuscripts.

Adopting ChatGPT as a writing buddy in the advanced L2 writing class

Since its release, ChatGPT has raised concerns in many teaching contexts given its threat to reliably evaluating learners’ knowledge and skills. Within task-based pedagogy, however, this technology opens new avenues for second language (L2) teaching when adopting the technology as a writing buddy. Our study explores how ChatGPT as a model impacts the revision process of advanced L2 writers of German. Twenty-two university students participated in a two-week classroom-based intervention, producing two summaries of popular-scientific texts in L2 German. After writing a first draft, they compared their summaries with texts produced by ChatGPT (3.5) and revised, where necessary, their own text. In this paper, we analyze all students’ rubrics-based ratings of the ChatGPT models and present data of six focus students’ screen-recorded revision processes that we coded for revision focus, source, and success. Results reveal students’ growing awareness of characteristics of ChatGPT-output, such as linguistic accuracy and fluency, as well as its flaws in content provision. Revision data demonstrate that students skillfully made use of the models to improve their own texts. To conclude, our study provides evidence that using ChatGPT as models in writing and revision processes can stimulate higher-order thinking in the revision process of advanced L2 students.

Wagler vs. Fitzinger: Leposternon microcephalus, a fight over gender (Sauria, Amphisbaenidae)

This short note provides some insight into an academic “battle” between early 19th century herpetologists about a small but interesting nomenclatural issue, namely the grammatically correct gender of a species epithet. Most texts used in the current note (Wagler in Spix 1824; Fitzinger 1826a‒b; Schlegel 1826; Wagler 1827) were published in 19th century German, which sometimes made use of vocabulary that is no longer employed nowadays. The old German texts are translated here into English in a way that they reflect modern language as much as possible.

Natural Language Processing and Fiction Text: Basis for Corpus Research

The study deals with NLP procedures on the material of the fiction texts in German and in English, which are considered as strong cultural texts. The aim of the study is to develop a model of such a technical device to process, analyze and interpret a fiction text, which would reveal the full potential of popular NLP tools within the corpus approach. The general methods used in the study are analysis and synthesis. Special methods are additionally used to solve certain specific issues: descriptive method, modelling and qualitative and quantitative analysis. The scientific novelty lies in the fact that the authors apply the crucial principles of the classical theories of text interpretation according to the latest methods and tools of the applied linguistics. As a practical result, special software has been developed, which is able to process SQL based linguistic corpora, automatically built with spaCy NLP library and Python programming language. This software can be used for a fiction text interpretation, as well as for compiling learning materials in Home Reading. It is assumed that the development of special software for strong cultural texts stimulates the search for scientific solutions and at the same time allows one to understand the essential differences that exist between natural and artificial intelligence.

Konjunktiv II в немецких энантиосемичных синтаксических конструкциях

The article investigates enantiosemy as a linguistic phenomenon. It is understood here as a complex, multidimensional object, which is both a phenomenon that reflects a certain essence and a general linguistic category. Along with studies into enantiosemy at the phonetic, morphological, lexical, phraseological and phraseosyntactic levels, publications on enantiosemy at the syntactic level are of particular interest, since this research area is at the initial stage of development. Therefore, the purpose of this article was to study enantiosemic syntactic constructions. As the material the author used German-language works of fiction. The paper considers several enantiosemic syntactic constructions in the form of complex sentences with adverbial clauses of comparison with conjunctions als ob and als (with als wäre, als hätte, als würde). These constructions are characterized by the use of a predicate in Konjunktiv II. The asymmetry of the form and content of the syntactic constructions is investigated. Considering that enantiosemy is based on opposition, context plays an important role in the actualization of the opposite meaning. The author found that when determining the enantiosemic nature of the constructions under study, context is not always required. In addition, it is noted that in most cases the selected syntactic constructions are asymmetrical. According to the results of the study, some of the proposed schemes, which can help to identify such constructions in the German language, can be introduced into scholarly discourse. The analysis of enantiosemic syntactic constructions contributes to further research into German syntax and can be of use when translating German texts.

Особенности структуры и языковой реализации категориальной ситуации необходимости в немецкоязычных инструктивных текстах со специфическим субъектом действия – животным

The research aim is to identify the specific structure of the modal categorial situation of necessity and the peculiarities of linguistic means usage to represent it in German-language instructional texts featuring a specific subject – an animal. Within the framework of the categorial situation concept, the modal value of necessity is examined, and the structural features of the necessity categorial situation in the analyzed texts are characterized. The linguistic means used in the German language to express it were highlighted, and the specifics of their usage for different models of necessity situations were described and analyzed. The scientific novelty of the research lies in the first attempt to model the categorial situation of necessity and define the linguistic features of these models in instructional texts in the German language – manuals on care and upbringing of animals, where subjects include not only humans but also animals. Two structural models with different types of action subject were identified, where the determination of necessity and the level of obligatoriness influence the choice of linguistic means to express modal necessity in the studied German texts.

Automated Extraction and Analysis of Sentences under Production: A Theoretical Framework and Its Evaluation

Sentences are generally understood to be essential communicative units in writing that are built to express thoughts and meanings. Studying sentence production provides a valuable opportunity to shed new light on the writing process itself and on the underlying cognitive processes. Nevertheless, research on the production of sentences in writing remains scarce. We propose a theoretical framework and an open-source implementation that aim to facilitate the study of sentence production based on keystroke logs. We centre our approach around the notion of sentence history: all the versions of a given sentence during the production of a text. The implementation takes keystroke logs as input and extracts sentence versions, aggregates them into sentence histories and evaluates the sentencehood of each sentence version. We provide detailed evaluation of the implementation based on a manually annotated corpus of texts in French, German and English. The implementation yields strong results on the three processing aspects.

An untimely vocation: Gadamer’s ‘Wissenschaft als Beruf. Über den Ruf und Beruf der Wissenschaft in unserer Zeit’ (1943)

Abstract On 27 September 1943, Hans-Georg Gadamer published a brief but significant article in the conservative newspaper Leipziger Neueste Nachrichten und Handels-Zeitung, entitled ‘Wissenschaft als Beruf. Über den Ruf und Beruf der Wissenschaft in unserer Zeit’ (Science as Vocation: On the Calling and Profession of Science in Our Time). The article, which addressed the problem of the value and status of science and philosophy in the midst of the Second World War, was never reprinted in Gadamer’s work, neither in the ten volumes of his collected writings published by Mohr Siebeck, nor separately in books or journals. I offer here a critical introduction to the context and main contents of this text due to its philosophical, political, and historical relevance. In particular, the introduction analyses Gadamer’s confrontation with his own time through explicit and implicit references to Max Weber’s 1917 lecture, ‘Wissenschaft als Beruf’ (Science as Vocation), and traces echoes in Gadamer’s later works that bear on contemporary challenges. Following that, I present the first English translation of Gadamer’s original German text.

Bojová činnosť 71. pešieho pluku na sočskom fronte. Obrana Kostanjevice

The author has chronologically reconstructed and translated the original German text of the war diary of the 71st Infantry Regiment for the period from November 4, 1916, to February 13, 1917, into Slovak. The critical situation on the front, prompted by the 9th Sochi offensi ve, necessitated the transfer of the regiment from the Russian to the Italian front. This jour ney took 2.5 days; upon arrival, the regiment was immediately deployed to the frontline. Equipped with 13 machine guns, it achieved fire superiority in the defence of Kostanjevica na Krasu. The Italian advance was halted, the front stabilized, and the regiment was relieved after two days. In the subsequent months, it conducted three ambush operations. The paper includes archived battle sketches, proposals for awards (Adamica, Turanec, Dzurek), and reports on the ambushes (Schariczer, Šarić). The war diary describes the tactics of deep defence within the divisional section, the rotation of units, and the relocation of reserves. The author cross-refe rences this information with the memoirs of Jozef Turanec. Keywords: Austro-Hungarian Army, Isonzo Front, 71. Infantry Regiment, Stormtroopers, Kostanjevica