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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.
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."
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
I always thought this rule was invented to make it easier for typesetters to distinguish the end of a sentence from abbreviations. Were the two spaces ever actually typeset?
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!
But Latin sounds awesome, as compared to the angry, smashed together words that Germans use. Seriously, their language is terrible to look at and to listen to, so I'm feeling a touch of schadenfreude over the whole thing.
I wonder who helped them rebuild?
1917: Sauerkraut becomes Liberty Cabbage.
2003: French fries become Freedom Fries.
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.
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.
Or at least know German. When I was in HS in the mid 70's you were expected to take three years of German if you wanted to major in a science. I was lazy and went with Spanish. Sure enough when it was time for my senior project in college an important relatively current journal article was in German. I asked a professor to translate it for me. When my results didn't come out as expected I had a go at the relevant section of article myself. Parsing the math and scientific terms I was able figure out what the issue was. For a short while afterwards there was a shift towards Russian if you wanted a relevant language. Didn't last that long.
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
I am a native Italian speaker, but speak Russian, German and English daily. German is by no means the best language when it comes to being both precise and concise. The cup for that goes to Russian hands down. Both Germans and Russians express themselves very clearly and unambiguously (well, when they need to) but Russian sentences are shorter on average. Italian, on the other hand, is either ambiguous (relies on context a lot) or very verbose if you cannot allow yourself to be misunderstood.
Regarding how it sounds, German is terrible but at least is generally easier to understand than English for a foreigner (some Americans seem to have a damn frog in their throat). Unless you made the mistake to speak to an old Bayern, then you might as well pretend to be deaf. Italian is generally pleasant (even the dialects) and Russian can be very pleasant, if spoken by a well educated person, or extremely rude and unpleasant if spoken by a gopnik.
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.
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.
I always thought this rule was invented to make it easier for typesetters to distinguish the end of a sentence from abbreviations. Were the two spaces ever actually typeset?
No, not quite.
Early typesetting practices up to the late 1600s or so varied considerably according to local style. By the early 1700s, the standard practice emerged that larger spaces were placed after punctuation by typesetters to mark the ends of important parts of a sentence (which would allow readers to parse the meaning easier). The standard ultimately adopted in much of Europe was putting an M-quad (a square spacer the size of an 'M' in the font) after a period, an N-quad (the size of 'N', about half an M-quad) after lesser punctuation like commas, and a normal spacer (now called a "thick space") after words, which traditionally was about 1/3 of an em.
Note that these were the way a typesetter would begin to space a line, but most typeset matter was justified, which means various spaces in the lines had to be modified and squeezed or stretched, which might in some cases involve adding extra spacers in places. (The rules for which spaces to add width to were often quite complex, for those typesetters who wanted to obtain an optimal result.)
When typewriters first came into use in the late 1800s, people tried to imitate proper typesetting as best as they could by using 2 or 3 spaces after periods, and sometimes 2 spaces after other punctuation. Ultimately, the standard typesetting rule of 2 spaces after a period came about as an approximation to proper typeset text in the late 1800s.
In the period of roughly the 1920s to 1960s, a little war among publishers to decrease publication costs in books led to poorer cheap materials being used, as well as anything to minimize costs, so interword spaces got squeezed to 1/4-em in many houses, margins got smaller, line spacing decreased, etc. Obviously the large sentence spaces now looked out of place, so they were also reduced gradually to an N-quad and then just a standard interword space. (This was previously known as "French spacing" -- not as anything to do with the Germans, as asserted by the GP. It was practiced in the 19th century in a small number of French publishing houses.)
Meanwhile, typists were (and are) some of the few to attempt to retain the old larger sentence spaces that imitated the way things had been done in typesetting in the 18th and 19th centuries.
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."
Most of what caused WW1 and 2 was the speed at which Germany was advancing in technology which Britain feared tremendously. But what really kicked it off was their advancements in submarine technology:
"At the start of World War I, Germany had twenty-nine U-boats; in the first ten weeks, five British cruisers had been lost to them. On 5 September 1914, HMS Pathfinder was sunk by SM U-21, the first ship to have been sunk by a submarine using a self-propelled torpedo. On 22 September, U-9 sank the obsolete British warships HMS Aboukir, HMS Cressy and HMS Hogue (the "Live Bait Squadron") in a single hour."
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.
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