Gentoo bans AI-created contributions

Posted Apr 21, 2024 20:55 UTC (Sun) by donald.buczek (subscriber, #112892)
In reply to: Gentoo bans AI-created contributions by malmedal
Parent article: Gentoo bans AI-created contributions

> German also has present simple and present perfect, it is missing the continuous forms.

No, German has that, too. "I am working" would be "Ich bin arbeitend". Yes, this isn't used much and sounds a bit strange but it is valid. It strongly indicates "right at this very moment".

Now, to make things even more complicated: A male "worker" is a "Arbeiter" and a female worker is a "Arbeiterin". A worker or a group of workers with unknown, irrelevant or mixed gender would be "Arbeiter", too. But many people now reject the generic masculine.

So currently, several gender neutral forms compete with the old generic masculine and with each other. For plural, the substantivized form of the verb in the present continuous tense is often used: "Arbeitende".

So the seldom-used tense got a little revival lately.

I don't like it, because to me the natural interpretation of "Arbeitende" would be "people, who work at this very moment".

Gentoo bans AI-created contributions

Posted Apr 21, 2024 21:14 UTC (Sun) by malmedal (subscriber, #56172) [Link] (2 responses)

> "I am working" would be "Ich bin arbeitend".

Mmmm, I believe arbeitend functions as an adverb, in this sentence. That is "I am something" and the something that I am is "working".

Gentoo bans AI-created contributions

Posted Apr 22, 2024 7:25 UTC (Mon) by donald.buczek (subscriber, #112892) [Link] (1 responses)

> Mmmm, I believe arbeitend functions as an adverb, in this sentence. That is "I am something" and the something that I am is "working".

After reading a bit I have to admit that you are more correct than I am. The word form 'arbeitend' is known as 'Partizip I' (Present Participle) in German, which functions as a hybrid between a verb and an adjective/adverb.

This is from the beginning of the German variant of the Wikipedia of "Participle" / "Partizip" page:

> A participle (Latin participium, from particeps "participating"; plural: participles) is a grammatical form (participial form) that is derived from a verb and thereby partially acquires the properties of an adjective, but also retains some properties of a verb. The term "participle" and likewise the German term Mittelwort express this characteristic of participating in two categories at the same time, namely verb and adjective. [...]
> German examples of participles are the forms ending in -end like spielend (to the verb spielen; called "Present Participle") and the forms starting with ge- like gespielt (called "Past Participle"). In traditional grammar, participles were often listed as a separate part of speech alongside verbs, adjectives, nouns, etc.; however, this view is not shared in modern linguistics, where participles are considered as words or even constructions that contain varying proportions of verbal and adjectival
components.

You are correct; the Present Participle ('Partizip I') is not typically used in natural speech as a verb to denote an 'immediate' tense. "Ich bin arbeitend" can be said to be wrong and is not listed in tables with verb tenses. At least, it sounds yoda-ish.

As you mentioned, The Present Participle is used as an adjective or adverb to describe a state. It's also used, a bit more verbish, to indicate simultaneous actions, for example, "Die Kinder kamen lachend aus der Schule" ("The children came out of the school laughing").

Gentoo bans AI-created contributions

Posted Apr 27, 2024 2:19 UTC (Sat) by gutschke (subscriber, #27910) [Link]

Just to throw another wrinkle into this discussion, I believe that in "ich bin arbeitend", the "arbeitend" would be a predicative expression, which is different both from an adverb and from a way of expressing what English would do with present continuous. It simply describes a state that you are in. For a better discussion, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predicative_expression

I understand why it is tempting to say that the present participle is used to form a present continuous. That would feel very natural to an English speaker who is familiar with Latin. And it feels almost but not quite as if German should do the same. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if some regional German dialects did this. There is a lot of cross pollination between all of these languages, but in the process grammatical concepts get repurposed and subtly change.