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How English Beat German As the Language of Science
HughPickens.com writes German was the dominant scientific language in 1900. Today if a scientist is going to coin a new term, it's most likely in English. And if they are going to publish a new discovery, it is most definitely in English. Look no further than the Nobel Prize awarded for physiology and medicine to Norwegian couple May-Britt and Edvard Moser. Their research was written and published in English. How did English come to dominate German in the realm of science? BBC reports that the major shock to the system was World War One, which had two major impacts. According to Gordin, after World War One, Belgian, French and British scientists organized a boycott of scientists from Germany and Austria. They were blocked from conferences and weren't able to publish in Western European journals. "Increasingly, you have two scientific communities, one German, which functions in the defeated [Central Powers] of Germany and Austria, and another that functions in Western Europe, which is mostly English and French," says Gordin.
The second effect of World War One took place in the US. Starting in 1917 when the US entered the war, there was a wave of anti-German hysteria that swept the country. In Ohio, Wisconsin and Minnesota there were many, many German speakers. World War One changed all that. "German is criminalized in 23 states. You're not allowed to speak it in public, you're not allowed to use it in the radio, you're not allowed to teach it to a child under the age of 10," says Gordin. The Supreme Court overturned those anti-German laws in 1923, but for years they were the law of the land. What that effectively did, according to Gordin, was decimate foreign language learning in the US resulting in a generation of future scientists who came of age with limited exposure to foreign languages. That was also the moment, according to Gordin, when the American scientific establishment started to take over dominance in the world. "The story of the 20th Century is not so much the rise of English as the serial collapse of German as the up-and-coming language of scientific communication," concludes Gordin.
The second effect of World War One took place in the US. Starting in 1917 when the US entered the war, there was a wave of anti-German hysteria that swept the country. In Ohio, Wisconsin and Minnesota there were many, many German speakers. World War One changed all that. "German is criminalized in 23 states. You're not allowed to speak it in public, you're not allowed to use it in the radio, you're not allowed to teach it to a child under the age of 10," says Gordin. The Supreme Court overturned those anti-German laws in 1923, but for years they were the law of the land. What that effectively did, according to Gordin, was decimate foreign language learning in the US resulting in a generation of future scientists who came of age with limited exposure to foreign languages. That was also the moment, according to Gordin, when the American scientific establishment started to take over dominance in the world. "The story of the 20th Century is not so much the rise of English as the serial collapse of German as the up-and-coming language of scientific communication," concludes Gordin.
...unless you're willing to hold your nose on where you get your rocket scientists.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
German was *illegal*?? WF? All the current "this politician has totally undermined the constitution in ways never seem before" crap must come from people with short memories.
Shocked, I say. To find out that the loser of a major World War (twice) lost their per-eminent place in scientific literature.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
While English is the official language at conferences I attend in my field, German is one of the next most spoken (likely after Mandarin Chinese and slightly ahead of, or even with, Russian). A lot of the top PIs in my field speak it as their first language as well, which makes it a very valuable negotiation tool.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Germany had the last laugh... German has always been "one space after terminal punctuation in sentences", and since 2009 or so, that's been retcon'ed into English as well: "Ha! Take that English speakers! You may have won the world wars, but *WE* took the second space after your periods!".
"Today if a scientist is going to coin a new term, it's most likely in English."
Could have fooled me. Looking at a broad range of newer terms in mathematics, physics, biology, and chemistry, an awful lot are Latin or derived from Latin.
Where are the sources backing up that claim?
while(1) attack(People.Sandy);
I read Turing's Cathedral recently that discussed this exact topic (with relation to math). German was still very strong after WW1 (Godel, Von Neumann, Hilbert, Einstein, Schrödinger and even more if you include groups like Hungary and Poland who were strong in math but discussed it in German, which is where we got Ulam and Teller). Unfortunately for the Germans, a lot of those mathematicians were Jewish, and they left when they saw war coming. Most of Ulam's family that didn't leave were killed in the Holocaust.
In the US, some foresighted individuals (like Veblen, Aydeloytte and Flexner at Princeton's Advanced Institute especially) made a huge effort to help the German scientists escape. So many top scientists did leave that the entire center of science moved from the German world to America.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
My great grandfathers drug store was burned to the ground because he was unlucky enough to have the last name of Bosh in 1918.
My uncle who was about 20 years older than my mother fought in WWII.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
One can dump on the Germans as much as one wants but both during WWI and WWII they matched and in some fields outdid the allies in technology and scientific research despite these boycotts, despite the isolation and despite the stultifying effect that the Nazi regime had on parts of the German tech sector which says something about the caliber of German science, scientists and engineers. As late as the 1950s the chief designer of North American Aviation went to night school in order to learn German so that he might study German aerodynamics research more in more detail. This resulted in the complete redesign of the aircraft that was to be come the world beating North American F-86.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
Germanic means shit when we have a base language to work from.
If this wasn't immediately obvious, then most of you likely have no reason to be in the scientific field.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Don't forget the Greeks had a name for everything ;)
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
World War I devastated Europe in both lives and in wealth. The US came out of WWI as a world power. Sure the US lost a lot of men but nothing like the number France, Germany, and the UK lost. The US filled the gap in science after WWI. It didn't hurt that Edison had invented the industrial research lab and other companies in the US soon developed labs of their own.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Two words : "World Wars".
Elok
In science, everyone uses the metric system. Now, if we can only get the engineers to convert.
it is far more likely to have first read on an article about the new GUI in one or another Linux distro on Slashdot than first read about transmission of Ebola through improper sterlilization of overgloves before disrobing. the AP will get the Ebola stories first. once the East Gutwrench Reporter and Advertiser runs the AP story two days later, when they're run out of new angles for stories about the new paint job at Ernie's Cafe, some tech in East Gutwrench will submit it because it's cool.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Isn't it odd that no matter how much progress America makes, the Left is always ready with a cutting criticism? Even considering that up until recently, new immigrants were expected to assimilate into the existing society, instead of having exceptions made for them?
Go ahead and try that bullshit anywhere else in the world. How welcoming is Egypt to new people? Nigeria? China? Thailand? Oh, but America somehow fails to live up to an imaginary ideal that NOBODY IN THE WORLD does, so that's wrong and we should hate Americans for that.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
America: Our courts force us to obey the first amendment.
Oof! How I wish!
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Obviously English becomes the language of our planet before star date 2233.
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain... time... to... die...
Don't discount the Royal Society journals and the early influence of British scientists. Yes, Newton's principia was published in latin, but the Journal of the Royal Society was printed in english. Even Leeuwenhoek had to have his work translated into english to get it published. I would say that the language of science went from greek to arabic, then to an early mix of latin and english, then to german due to the influence of the thriving german chemical and optical industries, then back to english.
Two words : "World Wars".
There was only one of those, with a twenty-year lull in the fighting.
1917: Sauerkraut becomes Liberty Cabbage.
2003: French fries become Freedom Fries.
Are you seriously using Egypt, Nigeria, China and Thailand as a human rights comparison?
My Herrschaft, German really is such a Biedermeier language and and doesn't fit with the current Zeitgeist. It has a gestalt that is more suited for 19th century expression. After the English-language Blitzkrieg that has taken over most pop culture, any german-language expression is seen as just a lot of flak from a karabiner. I guess we'll have to replace classical german terms such as Herz, Eigen-vector, E-Modul, with a more english ideal; cycles-per-second (so much for brevity). But German is such a beautiful language an sich. I really had my Aha-Erlebnis when I realised that german expressions were no longer associated with übermenschen traveling in U-Boots or flying in Luftwaffe planes. Now the whole world can enjoy rooting for German Wunderkinder on the national team, and at home recreate the best parts playing foosball. Maybe the French feel a bit of Schadenfreude at seeing the significant influence of german Gedanken in the english language. Maybe someday they'll be a putsch and French will take over, but for now, I'm counting on a german-language encore.
The Slashdot summary gets it wrong. The anti-German hysteria that surrounded WWI did little to harm the mystique that surrounded German scholarship and the sciences. If you wanted to be near the top of your profession, you still needed to study in Germany. The Journal of the American Medical Association went out of its way in the 1920s and 1930s to report on developments in German medicine. German obsession with detail and their work ethic still trumped that fading war hysteria.
It was Nazism and the horrors of World War II, including the complicity of German science and medicine in those policies, that pushed Germany into second place. Forcing Jewish scientists to leave began the process. Making academia politically correct continued it. In physics and other fields, Jewish were dramatically overrepresented. Jews made up but 1% of the German population, but they'd be awarded a quarter of the nation's Noble Prizes. Most of those Jews came to the United States and remained there after the war.
And the fact that the U.S. ended the war far better off economically than any European country, meant that far more money was available for research here than in battered Germany. That also attracted scientists here in large numbers. Nazism, WWII, and post-war money made the difference, not the hysteria surrounding WWI.
That BBC article illustrates how foolish it is to get your news from journalists. Driven almost exclusively by fads and hysterias, journalist think history is driven by the same forces. Not so.
I did some ancestry work on my wife's family awhile back. The family story was that they came from Russia. I was surprised to find that one of her direct ancestors was listed as coming from Germany in one census and then Russia in another census. Now, it could have been a mistake (census takers were never perfect) or it could have been a German ancestor lying and saying he was Russian to escape anti-German sentiment. It would have been right around this time as well.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
A small but vocal group of whiners doesn't represent our full culture.
They will always be Xenophibic people, because we will always have problems and will need some one to blame. Europe, Asia, Africa, South America, and Australia have this problem too.
If you are in a majority, having a growing minority group can feel threatening to any person. If the minority is willing to change to be part of us, then we take it as a complement.
The First Amendment law is counter to what most governments wan't as it makes their job more difficult. Being that the courts make sure it is in place and active is positive. Because it is a hindrance towards easy government it is too easy to sliding scale away from it.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Did you notice the whooshing sound when MY joke went over your head?
I would say that melting pot works better than multiculturalism, and it also happens at the genetic level. Most Americans are mutts, which isn't as common elsewhere AFAIK.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Can't take anything this guy says seriously if he doesn't mention the root language of Latin.
Imaginary ideal?
It's in the fucking constitution.
It's just ignored a lot.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
... why aren't there mandatory whippings for blatant disregard of the Constitution when making laws?
...then some theories about German itself falling out of favor. The US leads the world in research spending, while Germany is fourth. No language conspiracy theories needed to explain this. Also, means we better continue outspending China and Russia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...
This is a similar reason as to why the Islamic world fell behind, after having such an early lead in science and math. They simply spent less on research than the other nations around them.
http://www.meforum.org/306/why...
The Invisible Hand of the Free Market is what punches workers in the nuts.
It's what we commonly refer to as a German Shepherd -- but after WWI, the notion of "German" anything was so reviled that they started calling German Shepherds Alsatians. It was this bias, hatred and on-going punitive measures against Germany post WWI that helped bring Hitler to power. With that in mind, I can only imagine what global menace shall be unleashed after renaming French Fries to Freedom Fries.
Even considering that up until recently, new immigrants were expected to assimilate into the existing society, instead of having exceptions made for them?
You're confusing culture and law.
You're expected to change your ways to adapt to American culture, but it's optional. You can be a recluse if you really want to. You know the stereotype immigrant who can't speak English and sticks to their own little enclaves.
The exceptions minorities get however, is related to law. Laws are not optional. Follow them, or you get arrested/jailed/shot by government.
If your law is so complicated you need to make exceptions, the fault is not with the minorities asking for and getting those exceptions, but the law that was written so poorly that it can't treat everyone equally before the law, and needs exceptions to patch it up to a sorta kinda working level.
Adolph Hitler
There was lots of groundbreaking research published in German in 1930. By 1950, not so much.
The point is that claiming "things are worse than ever" is pretty silly in a country where it used to be common for people to own slaves.
Except that it was never common to own slaves. Slave ownership was primarily among Southern aristocrats--your average white Southerner wasn't rich enough to afford one.
Still laughed, though. <3
"Screw Sun, cross-platform will never work. Let's move on and steal the Java language." - Visual J++ Product Manager
Oh, but America somehow fails to live up to an imaginary ideal that NOBODY IN THE WORLD does
Well, American is supposed to be the best (according to lots of people here), so I expect more.
The US changed the language after breaking off from Britain changing 's' to 'z' in many spellings for example
Noah Webster published his speller in 1783. His grammar in 1784, and his dictionary in 1826.
His most important improvement, he claimed, was to rescue "our native tongue" from "the clamour of pedantry" that surrounded English grammar and pronunciation. He complained that the English language had been corrupted by the British aristocracy, which set its own standard for proper spelling and pronunciation. Webster rejected the notion that the study of Greek and Latin must precede the study of English grammar. The appropriate standard for the American language, argued Webster, was "the same republican principles as American civil and ecclesiastical constitutions". This meant that the people-at-large must control the language; popular sovereignty in government must be accompanied by popular usage in language.
Noah Webster
This is an essentially modern approach to language and usage.
You see it in H.L. Mencken, you see it in The American Heritage Dictionary.
One of the most provocative essays in Shakespeare in America: An Anthology from the Revolution to Now: (Library of America #251) offers a much needed reminder that Shakespeare first attracted readers and audiences in the states because the language was familiar and accessible.
Very close to what you would have heard on the street.
''American audiences will hear an accent and style surprisingly like their own in its informality and strong r-colored vowels,'' Meier said. ''The original pronunciation performance strongly contrasts with the notions of precise and polished delivery created by John Gielgud, Laurence Olivier and their colleagues from the 20th century British theater.''
Meier said audiences will hear word play and rhymes that ''haven't worked for several hundred years (love/prove, eyes/qualities, etc.) magically restored, as Bottom, Puck and company wind the language clock back to 1595.''
''The audience will hear rough and surprisingly vernacular diction, they will hear echoes of Irish, New England and Cockney that survive to this day as 'dialect fossils.' And they will be delighted by how very understandable the language is, despite the intervening centuries.''
First US performance of Shakespeare in the original pronunciation
Depends on if you are a scientist or engineer.
It means that Germans are able to read German stuff AND English stuff while many scientists from the US are just able to read English things.
By the way, learning a second language as early and thoroughly as possible does something to you. It breaks the unconscious 1:1 connection between concepts and words and makes you understand that even the best language is just a poor crutch. There have been countless studies about that. It even helps a lot with not reacting by instinct to things you hear and read because you have learned to differentiate between words and meanings and helps you to grow a kind of conscious processing layer between them. I've learned to never trust the words of someone who knows only one language. Chances are that most of what he treats as thoughts are just unconscious reactions. Things like knowing that the word "freedom" has the same roots as the German "Frieden" ("peace" as opposed to "war") actually helps you with understanding the world instead of just parroting noises.
Not so long ago you would never have been considered educated if you couldn't read and write at least two, maybe three or four languages. And I think there's more to that than just quantity. It's a bit like being able to see with two eyes instead of one, you gain the insight that there's actual a room in front of you and not just a picture. It adds a quality that is very hard to acquire when words, ideas and concepts are all the same to you in a totally unconscious way that you soaked up mostly in childhood (basically very much like an animal).
So: I think that learning a second language may easily be the most important thing you can learn in the long run.
All ideals are imaginary. It's great to strive for ideals, but you can't say things are getting worse because we're not meeting some ideal we have met. The realistic goal is incremental progress towards an ideal.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Nothing represents our entire culture. A small(but not that small) but vocal group of whiners does reflect aspects of our culture.
Gah! "Ideal we have never met".
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Language usage rises and falls with the dominate civilizations. French, German, Latin, Greek, Arabic (of some kind) all had a go at it in the past.
English will probably give way to Chinese at some point.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Until as late as the 1850's, there were as many German speakers in Pennsylvania as English speakers, and until just before WWI it was common to hear people speaking German in the streets of any of the large cities. (There are still about a quarter million people in Pennsylvania who speak a version of German as their primary or daily-use secondary language, apparently.)
Likewise, in Colorado, there were so many German speakers that when Colorado became a state in 1876, the laws of the state were distributed, by law, in English, Spanish, and German, until 1914.
Those are the two states I know best: I presume many other states had similar situations.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
Isn't it odd that no matter how much progress America makes, the Left is always ready with a cutting criticism? How welcoming is Egypt to new people? Nigeria? China? Thailand?
Yeah, it's stunning that some of us aim higher than Egypt, China, or Thailand as the aim for our moral compass. It's like aiming for bug-free code: we may never get there, but even incremental progress is still progress.
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
Yes--It was Latin for a thousand years, then it started to be okay to write poetry and the like in modern languages. (Petrarch, in Italian). And to use it for scholarship after that, and we had the industrial revolution. I guess German was winning for a while, and now English is.
It may be Chinese in seventy years or so, but maybe not--I've heard Mandarin is rather difficult to learn, which may slow it down.
But then, Latin wasn't exactly a walk in the park.
so, do you know when racial segregation was outlawed in your country?
The summary is a blatant rip-off of the BBC article found here.
Welcoming people means assimilating them, not leaving them isolated from the mainstream ethnic group. "Exceptions" are reverse racism, when they're not actual positive racism.
And luckily neither went to penalties, or the Germans would be dominating Europe even now.
I'll get me coat.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Luxury! When I were a lad, slashdot was full of articles I'd read on slashdot a few days ago.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Isn't the real reason that scientific words are already long enough without joining three or four of them together?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Had some good tunes, and they spawned The Fine Young Cannibals and General Public
'The unexamined life is not worth living' - Socrates
Is that according to the gist of this article, there is no Science in China.
In the late 1950's, my father had to take German as part of his chemistry grad school (think Adolf von Baeyer, Fritz Haber, Otto Wallach, Richard WillstÃtter).
Now as far as I see, the highest SJR ranking German-language titled journal is Journal fur die Reine und Angewandte Mathematik founded in 1826, but most articles in it are English language.
Also ironically Springer Science+Business Media, a leading scientific journal publisher mainly of English language journals, is based in Germany.
Plus, the Germans insisted on using the metric system.
Much better than the Napoleonic measurement. That was a disaster.
Don't be apathetic. Procrastinate!
German was a contestant, but French was the dominate auxlang (auxiliary language) used by most politicians internationally at the time.
As far as the international effort to criminalize Germany:
It should be worth mentioning that it's illegal in over 13 nations to question the history of the holocaust and that the numbers are based on eye witness reports and not actual forensics. Furthermore, antisemitism is a misnomer since the word 'Semitic' is a linguistic term that refers to a group of languages from the Middle East and has absolutely nothing to do with genetics nor religion. It was first coined by those who were in opposition of Jewish businesses reviving the Hebrew language (which had been a dead language for almost a thousand years) as a means of communication with one another back in the 1800s. However what sparked WW1 was Britain's fear of Germany's technological advancements in submarine technology which posed a great threat against their world dominating Navy.
Of course, everything that I've just said could get me deported to a country that takes offense and convicted as a criminal against history even though it's the job of historians to constantly revise history as new data is gathered...
True, he should have used other countries like Japan, Norway, Mexico, Australia, etc. that also are less welcoming to border jumpers/trespassers.
I often don't like the choices people make, but I like the fact that people make choices. That's why I'm a conservative.
Imaginary ideal?
It's in the fucking constitution.
It's just ignored a lot.
Where in the American Constitution does it say we have to accept anyone and everyone, and that we shouldn't expect those we do accept to adapt to our culture and political system?
I often don't like the choices people make, but I like the fact that people make choices. That's why I'm a conservative.
Imaginary ideal?
It's in the fucking constitution.
There is nothing in the US Constitution that requires uncontrolled immigration be tolerated. There is nothing that requires accommodation of foreign languages in government or schools. There is, technically, nothing in the Constitution that prevents a State law banning the use of certain languages. Banning the use of German during the war was a little crazy, but lots of crazy things happen when a population gets whipped into a war frenzy.
It should not be forgotten that Woodrow Wilson was President during WWI. Wilson was a racist tyrant of the first order. All the dictators of the 20th century admired Wilson.
Yep
I often don't like the choices people make, but I like the fact that people make choices. That's why I'm a conservative.
... not to alarm you, but how about Chinese? Asia is growing in power, economically, socially, politically. Will Chinese surpass English in the future?
Not Chinese as it is currently written. It is too hard to learn. It is to hard to type. Chinese written with pinyin may work, but I'm not sure if the number of homophones will make that difficult.
Chinese as spoken might work. The grammar is simple. I can't say much about the precision and ambiguity since I don't know the language that well.
Currently Chinese scientists learn and use English. The transition would likely occur if the Chinese government decided to make it happen by sponsoring conventions, journals, and such.
I often don't like the choices people make, but I like the fact that people make choices. That's why I'm a conservative.
German and English won in the engineering world because of compound words. You can invent a new device and create a name that works in letter describing it.
English wins over German because of the relative lack of gendered words. Genders can get very messed up when using compound words. As an example, if a boat is female and a trailer is male, what gender should a boat-trailer be?
Natural languages (Chinese, English, German, French, etc) all have their languistic flaws in the face of globalization. Sooner or later, an international effort needs to be pushed forward to construct a language that is not only phonetically/logically free of ambiguities, but can easily be adopted by nearly everyone.
English is merely a placeholder until that time comes. In other words, our capacity to think and reason is limited by the language that we think in. The only way we'll be able to reach beyond these limitations is to construct a language that will allow us to think in ways that go beyond the current limitations.
A prime example is Lojban: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...
Even the Chinese have trouble learning to write Chinese. It is more severe than the flaws of most languages - especially in an age of typing. But I'm pretty sure they teach pinyin to all the kids in China (except perhaps HK and Macau) so pinyin might take over as a written language. I believe it is already heavily used as an input tool for computers (they type the pinyin and a list of characters that match show up - then they select the character).
Esperanto and Lobjan haven't caught on nor are they likely too. It is hard enough to learn a new language - learning one that no one uses doesn't interest many people.
I often don't like the choices people make, but I like the fact that people make choices. That's why I'm a conservative.
Mexican history considers Santa Ana to be one of their least competent generals over the years. But after he lost, the US rejected his initial peace proposals, which would not only have given the invaders the land they got, but also the states of Sonora and Chihuahua. While they were officially Mexican territory at the time, the local Native Americans had other opinions about whether they were interested in being run by the Spanish or Mexican colonialists, and groups like the Apaches and Comanches wouldn't have been much more cooperative to the US than they were to the Mexicans.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
" England the second (thanks to the US who confiscated a large part of her empire)."
What part of the the old UK Empire did the us confiscate?
India?
that is just dumb.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
"That was also the moment, according to Gordin, when the American scientific establishment started to take over dominance in the world." That one sentence at the end explains it all. English became dominant because the Americans and the British dominated science after WWI. German was the lead language before 1900 because that's when they dominated science. It didn't help that Hitler caused many of Germany's remaining best scientists to emigrate to America and Britain in the '30s.
The US was a world power before WWI. During WWI, the US had the third largest fleet in the world, a large population, and a large industrial base. The lack of US impact in 1917 was more a matter of deployment than force. The only reason for not considering the US a Great Power would have been the US isolationism of the period.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
STUPIDEST QUESTION EVER.
I am native German speaker and I love my language (I speak Dutch too, but German and Spanish are both my mother languages)
But, we have 4 declinations and 8 verb tenses. Yes, there are many other languages with this many declinations (Icelandic), but we decline almost everything except the punctuation marks and to make matters worse we have two types of declination, the strong and the weak. Most of the people I know who have a Good command of German struggle with this concept and have a very difficult time placing the articles (three genres, four declinations, two cases). For the natives this is obvious and innate and misplacement sounds pretty hilarious.
And this is not all: Our language is agglutinant, so that we can make up extremely large words AND we put sometimes extra letters in between (Fugenzeichen). We have our weird ß (not a beta!) that we use in certain words for purely grammatical reasons. Our phonetic is not difficult except a few sounds like the ch in "ich" who are impossible for most non-Germans (add "r" rolled in different ways who seems to produce real nightmare to English speakers). And we place commas almost in every part of the sentences: Sometimes you can't tell nomal text from a CSV... LOL (I'm joking but it's almost this bad)
And last but not least there is another extremely funny characteristic of German: We use separable verbs. While this is common in many Germanic languages, our closest relatives like Dutch prefer to keep things at bay and the phrases are normally build in such a way that the phrases don't run out of control. Unlike in German, were it is absolutely normal to put the first part of a separable verb at the beginning of a phrase (in second place after the subject, normally) and then go on for a whole paragraph worth of text until you get the final part of the verb at the end of the phrase (which can easily be a quarter of a page, and no, I'm not joking). The problem is that you will only know the meaning of the whole phrase once you have read / heard the dreaded final part. We natives have a feeling for that and we can infer the final part out of the context and we are used to read whole blocks of texts in one go... but for non-natives this is a serious issue that makes reading slower and this is specially important when you are trying to figure out what a scientific texts says.
But why am I telling you all this? Somebody explained this already better than me: Mark Twain nailed it in his Essay "The Awful German Language" (http://www.crossmyt.com/hc/linghebr/awfgrmlg.html#x1) and despite his funny tone he does a very good job at explaining how my mother tongue works.
Take English on the other hand: I agree it has it's drawbacks, for instance the chaotic phonetic which makes it difficult to know the spelling of a word you don't know even for a native. But the advantages are way more than the drawbacks. It is much more tolerant to faults so that mildly wrong written text can still be understood while in German it could destroy the whole readability of a phrase.
Not for nothing English is also the language of the Arts... and don't take this wrong: It is not because of the cultural hegemony of the USA during the first part of the XX century: Had English not been fantastically suited for poetry and rhymes it would not have triumphed.
As a final note I would however make you aware that German is the Second most spoke language in Europe, as both, mother tongue and second language: Besides of Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Luxemburg and Lichtenstein there are German speaking minorities in Italy, Belgium and some East European countries trumping over French not only in the number of native speakers but also in he number of non native who learn or use German for various purposes.
-- 29A the number of the Beast
Not nations that is for sure. The US got some bases but except for the one in Bermuda, the Bahamas, and some in Canada the US returned them all in 1949.
The problem is that you do not seem to know what the words confiscated means since the UK leased the US those bases, or large since the those bases where in no way a large part of the British Empire, and you really don't seem to have much of an knowledge of history.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...
Yep that statement was just dumb since no part of the British Empire became part of the US.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
You think units should be difficult to convert between, and that English is somehow American. You're not too bright, are you?