As a developer working in a German company the question of translating some domain language items into English comes up here and there. Mostly we fail because the German compound words are so f*** precise that we are unable to find short matching English translations...unfortunately our non-native devs have to learn complex words they can't barely pronounce :D
Most of the time we try to use English for technical identifiers and German for business langugage, leading to lets say "interesting" code, but it works for us.
I think the issue of German compound nouns is seriously overegged. In almost all cases, it’s essentially the same as English, except with some spaces. It’s not like suddenly a short compound word expresses something that couldn’t be in English.
This is true, but some German compound words acquire a meaning that doesn't simply derive from their component words. Well-known ones include Kindergarten and Weltschmerz. This is often the case for domain-specific terms (Gestaltpsychologie, Bildungsroman).
It's true that English uses basically the same method to create compound nouns, but quantitatively it's a difference. Long compounds consisting of 3, 4 or more parts are completely common in German and cause usually no trouble in understanding, whereas English is far more likely to split them up by the introduction of words such as "of", "for", etc.
x100 this. You can sort of derive the meaning of a complex word if you grasp one or two parts of it and offer a hacked together English translation, even if it doesn’t map directly. I find that people online who haven’t actually studied German like to meme this often.
The Latin-derived cases from the article, on the other hand, are the truly maddening, and makes you appreciate the simplicity of English grammar by comparison.
This is so true. My favourite example is when Top Gear made fun of the German word "Doppelkupplungsgetriebe" by spelling it, when it is quite literally the translation to "dual-clutch transmission". It stil is hilariously funny, but you cannot conclude that German is weird with these words.
In some way yes, but not really. Had a colleague working on a project for Deutsche Bahn (state owned train operator), he was developing an app and the domain knowledge was full of long German words, no one outside this bubble ever uses: Bremshundertstel, Bremszettel, Mindestbremshundertstel, Notbremsüberbrückung... In a way it's better to have a super long name for this, so there are no 2-3 ways to describe the same thing.
I wonder 'where' these compound words end up in an n-dim embedding space (relative to their German and say English 'parts'). In fact this brings up the interesting question of tokenization of the long German compound words, and how all this plays out in German to English (and reverse) LLM translation and text generation.
Sure, you can say three nouns in a row in English. But can you then make them into a verb? Or and adjective? What happens when some of the three words in English already are in a form that also parses as a verb or an adjective?
English is a bastard language and it shows in its grammar.
I worked on a case management system for a few years that dealt with Norwegian criminal law, and we did the same. Technical terms and conventional parts of method identifiers (like getFoo, setFoo, isFoo and such) were in English while the domain terminology was left in Norwegian. It looks a bit weird when you first encounter it, but honestly it was fine. Especially for a domain with as much emphasis on nuance and as many country specific details as the legal domain anything else would be a terrible idea IMO. Not only would it be really hard to translate many cases, it would probably make the code harder to understand and in some cases even cause misunderstandings.
Yeah nothing worse than entering a translated to English portal for Dutch tax purposes. Because those English words also ended up in Business Dutch but then got another meaning. Dutchlish, or at least the original term in parenthesis) is really preferable to anything else.
Same as a friend of mine who works for NAV. There's a whole lot of long-ass variable and function names because they use the Norwegian name for whatever they are calculating. It makes sense for them though, as the ones who review your code are lawyers...
I work with a lot of Germans and have noticed this. For me to provide the English translation that is the most accurate I have to dig deep. The unabridged English dictionary has plenty of words but I feel slightly guilty providing them with a word which I know is the best fit but which they will probably never encounter anywhere else, and where most English people would just not know this word. The definition is often quite contextual and nuanced, hinting at (for example) the reliability of the thing that is described by it, or the way it is used (or was used) in society (e.g. for good or ill). The "baggage" I suppose.
I've had this same discussion with a colleague at my job in the Netherlands. He will ask me to choose from a list he provides for variable names. Usually I need to ask for more context and then I end up leaning towards the more "well known/normal" option, both because it still fits and will be more likely to be understood another decade from now when we've probably both moved on and are not there to answer anymore questions.
Discussing the words is a fun way to take a little break during the workday, but I don't consider it more than that.
I don't know where the idea about the preciseness of German language comes from, especially in anything computer-related. For one, German language famously fails to distinguish between safety and security as well as between an error, a fault and a mistake. Whenever Germans discuss any software matters, they seem to be "code-switching" to English terms themselves.
Compounds have to be translated using multiple words, yes - that's just a few extra white space, it doesn't result in loss of precision.
There very much was a well defined distinction between safety and security:
Sicherheit and Schutz, as in Datensicherheit and Datenschutz.
And yeah, you can see with those two latter terms where the issue lies :)
Those two were traditionally actually used this way in the safety and security context - I think I even have the script for the "Datenschutz und Datensicherheit" lecture I had on uni in the '90s lying around somewhere in the attic.
But their meaning has changed and muddled so much over the years - probably not helped by the fact that "Sicherheit" is much closer to "security" in colloquial usage, and probably vice versa(?) - that they stopped being useful and used in this context.
These things happen in any languages. English, for example, has "number" - which could mean cardinality of something (how many of something is here?), a number in the mathematical sense (real number, complex number, etc.), a digit (0/1/2/...), or a numeric identifier (room number, telephone number).
I also work in Germany and the code-switching has nothing to do with the question of precision, but simply because English is the technical language for CS. Also, Germans apparently like everything American, so some of their own words which originally existed in German (and have exactly the same meaning as their English counterpart) have pretty much fallen out of use, cf. computer / Rechner.
It's not that German lacks precision per se but most of the jargon originated in the US or even England, and rather than coming up with German translations, it has become custom to use the original English. Which, frankly, makes everyday tasks like looking up documentation or debugging a lot easier.
Compare this to French where the Académie Française makes sure that you don't have to use these nasty English words! Yikes. And if there isn't a good French translation, they just make one up - my favorite example: the word "bug" (as in programming) has a made-up "French" alternative: "bogue". As far as I understand, no-one uses it, but it exists.
Native German here: In my experience the issue is in most cases not compounds, but the domain language.
There are terms that are specific to certain domains and used by everyone to precisely name a certain process. Belegprüfung, Indexpartizipation, Zessionär, etc.
Sometimes germans outside of your field of work don’t know these terms either, but those who do all use the same term. If you use english expressions you have to replace a domain term with one of multiple possible translations, making it confusing in many cases.
We have the same with translated documentation. Ever read the german version of Azure Docs? I have no clue what they are talking about until i switch to the english version.
The issue is not so much one of language but of habit and usage. That's why in that sense it is important for scientific and technical domains to be taught and practiced in your own language. This allows terms to evolve and be used habitually in the language.
Totally get where you’re coming from—German can feel like a surgical tool when it comes to precision, especially in law or certain engineering domains where it’s still dominant. But from my (very subjective) experience, that sharpness doesn’t always carry over to areas like machine learning or modern software architecture.
Most cutting-edge research and discussion happens in English, and honestly, I find it pretty tough to have a deep technical conversation in German—even with other Germans. The language just doesn’t seem to reflect the latest advancements in those fields.
I used to agree with the “German is super precise” sentiment—especially when it came to legal or philosophical stuff. But the more I’ve immersed myself in English, the more I’ve seen how nuanced and expressive it can be too. And ironically, German law often ends up being a case-by-case “interpretation party” anyway.
Don’t get me wrong, I still appreciate the poetic weight of words like Müßiggang—there’s real beauty there. But when it comes to actually getting things done or discussing complex, evolving ideas? I’m not sure German gives us much of a practical edge anymore.
> I find it pretty tough to have a deep technical conversation in German
...loan words?
Dutch doesn't have a word for computer other than computer, SSD is SSD, machine learning is machine learning, WiFi is WiFi (with a 50/50 split on people saying it the english or the dutch way), generative AI is generatieve AI and I don't think anyone would count loaning generative as-is as a typo either (maybe if you work for a publisher with a strict rulebook)
And from there you apply the normal grammar. To do stuff on the computer is computering (or, actually, we make verbs with -en so it's actually computeren) and machine learning applications are machinelearning-toepassingen. At least, to me it's normal to mix languages like that. It's also not like we avoid the word fingerspitzengefühl or überhaupt just because they once came from german, or like the english don't throw in a kindergarten or zwischenzug where applicable. It just gets mixed into the existing language
Maybe you could look into establishing a proper-technical-terminology-direct-literal-translation-enforcement-protocol that uses "-" and translates German words more or less literally. The effect should be very obvious for German speakers, and more obvious than German words to English speaking folks.
This leads to cringy non-idiomatic kf nit nonsensical English though. As a non-native but fluent English speaker, working in projects where people with only basic English proficiency translated the native terms into English by naive dictionary lookup, or sometimes by selecting false friends, is really painful, because the translations give all the wrong signals and connotations in English.
I was once involved in building the UI for a video game. There was some kind of labels for baseic color selection ... "czerwony" instead of "red" broke everything :F
> unfortunately our non-native devs have to learn complex words they can't barely pronounce
I simultaneously know too little about German and have seen too much horror stories on German that I cannot identify whether this is but a typographical-error or actually pursuant to DIN orthographical standards
I hope he will give us an actual example from his work. But meanwhile, here's a classic example:
The Donau is a river. On this river is a steamship (Dampfshiff): Donaudampfschiff
This ship is part of an organisation (Gesellschaft) that manages cruises (Fahrt): Donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaft
The ship has a captain (Kapitän) who has a cap (Mütze): Donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaftskapitänsmütze
On this cap is a button (Knopf): Donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaftskapitänsmützenknopf
You could extend this example: The button is colored with a special paint (Farbe), which is produced in a factory (Fabrik): Donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaftskapitänsmützenknopffarbenfabrik
And the factory has an entry gate (Eingangstor): Donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaftskapitänsmützenknopffarbenfabrikeingangstor
In English, this would be a huge sentence, all in reverse order: The entry gate of the factory that produces the color for the button on the captain's cap of the ship belonging to the cruise organization on the Donau.
The German is a lot more compact, if sometimes hard to parse :-)
An example from my work: in Norwegian criminal law, the prosecutor can in some cases hand out what is called a «påtaleunnlatelse», which means something like «decision to not prosecute». This is a legal punishment in the sense that it goes on your criminal record, but no punishment beyond that is handed out. Basically, the prosecutor’s office can note down «we are convinced we can prove this was done, but have decided not to prosecute».
A special kind of this is the «prosessøkonomisk (process economical) påtaleunnlatelse» where in a large and complex case with many serious offences, some less serious can be non-prosecuted in this way to not spend eternity in the courtroom.
Another example, not involving compound nouns: Norwegian criminal process distinguishes two levels of suspicion. The first level «mistenkt» (suspect) is basically the investigation noting down in their log «we think this guy might have done it», but the second level «siktet» (literally aimed at, no idea how to translate to English or even if an equivalent term exists) is a formal decision made by the prosecutor’s office. And importantly, the use of «tvangsmidler» (coercive instruments, like arrest, search, seizure and so on) requires there to be a siktelse and this status also triggers legal rights for the accused like the right to a defence attorney.
In my experience, problems is not with German as a language, but with Germans requiring to use their hard language, I live in neighboring country and since like 2010, nobody bothers to learn German anymore, (some small percent still learn, ok) and everyone who I know rather works in different country because of this.
Like Netherlands, still hard language (multiple) but they don't expect you to learn it when working for multi-national company.
In every country there will be some expat bubble which can get away with not learning the local language(s). Sometimes that bubble will be bigger and sometimes smaller, but it definitely exists in Germany too (mostly in Berlin).
That said, I simply don't understand the mindset of people who move somewhere for an extended period of time and don't bother to learn the language. It locks you out of a lot of opportunities and makes you dependent on other people (especially for official/administrative/legal purposes). It also simply doesn't work in many places - (younger) Germans may speak decent English, but try going to Spain, Italy, or even Japan and see how far you get if you insist on speaking only English.
They don't expect it, but the amount of opportunities that will open up for you if you can speak the local language should not be discounted. I've found that my professional circle has been widely broadened because I can speak the local language. As an immigrant from a non EU country, the peace of mind that I get from knowing that I can leverage my own personal growth into more professional opportunities is worth the "hassle" of learning a new language.
As an added bonus, learning a new language has been one of the most enriching hobbies I've ever begun! Exercising a new part of my brain and opening myself up to new cultural experiences is something I'm very grateful for. If anyone is considering a move abroad, I strongly suggest not only weighing the financial factors, but also the cultural and self-enriching ones.
"problems is [..] with Germans requiring to use their hard language [..] nobody bothers to learn German anymore, (some small percent still learn, ok) everyone who I know rather works in different country because of this"
I assure you, as a matter of fact, (A) the size of your social circle is very limited, and (B) such an attitude as yours could safely be labeled as cultural ignorance bordering on cultural arrogance.
Can't confirm this.
I'm a native German working for a company in Munich and as soon anybody joins to the meeting that is not German we switch to English.
90% of meetings are in English.
When my Russian colleague asks me to speak German because he wants to practice then I speak some German with him. Otherwise all our conversations are in English.
The experience might be different in "older" companies.
My experience couldn't be further from this. As an English-speaker natively, French was the alien language which took yonks to get, German was 1. oh, these 5 things are pronounced like that, now you can read anything with confidence and people know what word you mean when you talk, and 2. oh, here's maybe 15h worth of grammar to learn and now you can make sentences up to upper intermediate level, and they feel pretty intuitiive as soon as you start flipping verbs to the end sometimes. French was ten times the struggle!
i spent like 10y studying German in school, and was pretty good at it. Then life happened, and we moved to France. I could speak good enough French after 1 year, and speak/understand basically everything after 2 years.
German was PITA, French was pretty easy but obviously I had a personal French teacher, and old lady who was amazing
How old were you when you first "learned" French? I've observed that kids/teenagers who aren't actually interested in learning the language retain just enough to pass their classes and then it all just drifts away. I was the same "learning" Spanish in high school in Texas.
Until I moved to a new country and _wanted_ to learn the language, I could barely remember how to ask where the toilet was. Now that I'm invested and interested, things are much more sticky.
I believe this is why much of the world has latched on to learning English. There is so much content available that people _want_ to consume, that it becomes a hobby they are actually interested in, rather than a chore. As more and more people learn English, it becomes a positive feedback loop of content creation that nearly the entire planet can participate in.
I've been studying German in my spare time for about a year now, and it seems very similar to Old English. Lots of subject-object-verb, lots of suffixes, noun gender.
I can certainly confirm that learning German grammar as an adult is...challenging. Even though I am now fluent, learning as an adult means that you will always make mistakes on the gender of nouns. There are effectively four genders (male/neuter/female/plural), plus four cases (nominative/accusative/dative/genetive), so you have a 4x4 table giving you a choice of 16 articles that can appear in from of a noun. Only, the 16 articles are not unique: the table contains lots of duplicates in unexpected places.
Of course, most Western languages have gendered nouns - English is pretty unique in that respect. That likely comes from English being born as a pidgin of French and German.
Verbs in German are valuable things. You collect them, hold on to them as long as you can, and then - at the end of the sentence - they all come tumbling out. The order of the nouns at the end of the sentence differs by region. In purest German, they come out in reverse order, giving you a nice, context-free grammar. In Swiss dialects, they come out in the order they were conceived, meaning that the grammar is technically context sensitive. In Austrian dialects, the order can be a mix.
Of course, every language has its quirks. French, for example, puts extra letters on the ends of words that you are not supposed to pronounce. Well, unless the right two words are next to each other, in which case, you pronounce the letters after all.
English, meanwhile, gives learners fits, because the pronunciation has nothing whatsoever to do with spelling. Consider the letters "gh" in this sentence (thanks ChatGPT): "Though the tough man gave a sigh and a laugh at the ghost, he had a hiccough and coughed through the night by the slough, hoping to get enough rest."
>You collect them, hold on to them as long as you can, and then - at the end of the sentence - they all come tumbling out.
as a German native I felt oddly at home with Japanese because funnily enough building seemingly endless verbs at the end of sentences felt very natural. Despite the fact that German, most of the time, is an ordinary SVO language. It's one of the mistakes English natives who just learn German make, that only made sense for me after I thought how odd that structure is.
I've also heard live TV translators really hate this about German because it's annoying, depending on the context, to have to wait to the end of a sentence to translate the whole thing.
Or the tale about a speaker, being translated into German. He tells a joke, the English speakers laugh. He says "ok, and seriously now...", the German speakers finally hear the verb and start to laugh.
Also, English has the 5 vowels of the Latin script representing some 25 vowels sounds, to the point that consonants can turn into vowels with no rhyme or reason. The best way to learn that English is nonsense is to live in Britain and learn local city and village names. They all have made up pronunciation rules, evolved over the centuries, sure, but they forgot to update the bloody name on the map to match the sounds.
As a descendant of the Romans, I can only shake my head at such barbarism.
If you're counting sounds (i.e. phones), then most languages with those same 5 vowel letters have quite a lot because of numerous allophones.
English is criminal in that it has many vowel phonemes - British more so than American - and then on top of that its mapping of them to vowel letters is completely out of whack with both traditional Latin values of them, and how they're used in most other languages out there. I mean, cmon, <ea> for /i:/?
Still, with a sensible orthography, General American would only need something like 9-10 distinct vowel characters (for monophthongs; but diphthongs are best spelled as the obvious corresponding vowel-vowel or vowel-semivowel sequences anyway).
"Verbs in German are valuable things. You collect them, hold on to them as long as you can, and then - at the end of the sentence - they all come tumbling out."
Franz Kafka put this property to good use and sometimes keeps the reader in suspense for half a page or more until the sentence falls in place.
Swedish had some of this until the second world war, since then we've made it into an english-like pidgin.
> Of course, every language has its quirks. French, for example, puts extra letters on the ends of words that you are not supposed to pronounce. Well, unless the right two words are next to each other, in which case, you pronounce the letters after all.
A lot of this is to due with latin, which pronounciation evolved over time to give modern French but which origin is still kept in spelling. So it's not that the language "puts extra letters" it's that it kept old spelling when the pronunciation change.
An example: 'est' (to be, third person singular) is very obviously verbatim latin spelling but pronunciation has shifted so that the 't' is not pronounced (and arguably the 's' could go, too).
Sometimes there are useful "rules" about how spelling and pronunciations evolved, which can be useful for English speakers writing in French, too, to remember your accents:
I know what you’re getting at when you say that English is a pidgin of German and French, but that’s kind of a distorted version of the truth.
First of all, it is not German, but Old English, which is not particularly more similar to German than it is to any other Germanic language e.g. Icelandic.
Second, the idea that middle/modern English began as a pidgin is a very fringe view in linguistics; the vast majority of people who have studied the question would instead say that it indeed has a huge amount of French (or more precisely, Norman) influence, but not to the extent that we can say it went through a pidgin/creolization process.
IIRC (not sure about this) English is thought to have lost its case system mainly due to influence from Old Norse (which had a similar case system but with different and not mutually intelligible endings), not French.
> First of all, it is not German, but Old English, which is not particularly more similar to German than it is to any other Germanic language e.g. Icelandic.
While English is changing relatively quickly, German isn't. Children today read original texts from the Gutenberg era in school without any trouble.
Where I grew up, we actually read some old english texts in school. It was hard, but certainly doable, using just our knowledge of modern German and English and the local dialects (north frisian and low german).
> Of course, most Western languages have gendered nouns - English is pretty unique in that respect. That likely comes from English being born as a pidgin of French and German.
The John McWhorter theory (not sure if it's generally accepted, but he seems to have evidence that it happened in the right part of England at the right time) is that it comes from Viking-era Danish settlers learning Anglo-Saxon. Similar languages, but different enough that adult learners dumped out all the complications they could.
As a native German speaker, I think it's fair to say that German is a comparatively poorly designed* language. It has too many needless concepts. I envy Chinese and Japanese; I feel like these languages have got it almost right. If they eliminated measure words, they'd probably be as perfect as a language can reasonably be.
* I know languages aren't "designed" for the most part, but I find it helpful to compare them as if they were.
Measure words in Chinese are great. They provide so much descriptive capacity in such a short simple way.
一棍棒,
一把棒,
一根盪,
一條棒,
all would translate to English as "a stick", but they convey different perspectives about what that stick is. I can appreciate the frustration with learning words that only have one specific measure word that only really describes it, but even then you can honestly get away with 個.
I totally agree that learning German grammar as an adult is… demoralizing. Knowing, and accepting, that you will make a mistake every time that you open your mouth, hurts.
Also, the increase in possible permutations (and opportunities for mistakes) when you add adjective conjugations to the mix is daunting.
Consider that the text is, in fact, from the 19th century.
Also, 'Weib' is not rude in every context. "Wein, Weib und Gesang" is not diminutive towards women, but in fact appreciative (as in 'necessary for having a good time'). We have Weiberfassnacht. And then there are the dialects, in which "Weib" often is indicative of a homely, loving relationship (-> bairisch, Swabian). Context matters.
I absolutely love German, it is one of my favourite languages, there's such beauty in it. I am not a native speaker, but enjoy studying it. I am a native Afrikaans speaker and I see so many similarities between the two, which I find intriguing.
Well, if it comes to that. German is not _really_ a single language. It’s a dialect continuum consisting of sometimes barely mutually intelligible variants. And yes, if you continue following that continuum, you get to the languages you mention.
A language is a dialect with an army and a fleet. As they used to say.
I can speak English and German which makes me able to somewhat understand written Dutch (especially if I know the context), but no chance when it's spoken.
Well, it's not a coincidence that the English word for the language of the Netherlands is the same the German state calls itself: "dutch" / "Deutsch".
A people and their language predated the concept of nation-states, but when the latter arrived obviously (geo-)political interests started to blur the facts.
So if you conflate the German state with Germans (I'd challenge that and view the German state as a continuation of the Prussian state), and you don't like the interests of the German state, it is predictable where you'll land on this issue.
Because of this, even if their national anthem does so, calling the Dutch Germans would infuriate them and rightly so, because it would imply justification to some for things like those happening between Russia and Ukraine right now.
I think in the end it is also a matter of "national" self-confidence. While Luxemburgish is virtually indistinguishable to the German ear from say the dialect of Cologne, Swiss-German is hardly understandable for anyone outside of Switzerland. Yet, the Swiss don't have an urge to re-label their dialect as a separate language. And the urge of the Dutch to re-lable themselves is lesser than that of Luxemburg because seemingly no one questions their identity.
A Dutch speaker read Afrikaans without too much effort; understanding spoken Afrikaans is a bit harder, but depending on the person it can be fine.
A Dutch speaker can't read or understand German. Some words are similar, but the same can be said about English. There are a number of differences in the grammar and alphabet.
Of course they're related languages; because I can speak English, German, and Dutch I can kind of read Swedish or Danish on account of being Germanic as well. But that doesn't make a "dialect with pretensions". We might as well say that all current Germanic languages are some sort of "dialect with pretensions" of some old Germanic language. But that doesn't really mean anything.
How is English then not a German dialect with pretensions? Is there a certain threshold in number of words that must originate from a different language family, or what's the logic here?
Yep. I find it easier to understand German verbally than Dutch. I struggle when Dutch people speak to me, the way they pronounce words are hard on my ears. German feels softer.
My native language is German, and I don't know whether I like it. It is the most natural to me, so no judgement -- I cannot look at it from the outside. Well, of course I like it, because I can express myself best with it.
Anyway, I absolute love Afrikaans. I also like droëwors, but that's a different topic. You should have a look at Icelandic -- it is the opposite of Afrikaans on the morphological complexity scale of Germanic languages. Quite a bit more going on with endings and such than in German. And yet it is weirdly familiar, because it is, well, also Germanic.
I am a native speaker. And I find German to be a very ugly language. Pronounciation wise. Compared to French or English. It sounds like someone is constantly having a quarrel with you.
There's this fun video from Easy German, where native speakers (Austrians in this case) express their feeling of uneasiness when flirting in German. As in, the German language not being the sexiest.
Weaknesses can become strengths. Sometimes you want to have a quarrel. When French people quarrel they must rely on changes on pitch, cadence and volume because otherwise it sounds like they are ordering baguettes at the boulanger.
German has harsh sound. But in terms of quarrelling, I find that Korean sounds like someone is complaining all the time. But then again I have never learned Korean, so my impression would surely change.
Precisely my thought - try learning French. At some point we've been asking our teacher "but, why would they start writing so many chars (unreadable) and so many different endings". and our guess is there must've been a financial reason to do so - more chars, more money when copying manuscripts, and less chance for the common people to ever have this level of writing skills, which takes years to master.
The French are so proud of their roots, they insist that for every French word you learn, you also learn its entire etymological development all the way back from Vulgar Latin.
I think German poetry can be very elegant and English poems feel dull in comparison. At the same time, the plainness of English makes it much better suited for songs. Lyrical German quickly sounds pretentious.
One of the things that helped me improve German was Poetry Slam contests, they are still quite popular over here in many regions, you get poetry coupled with another German property, plenty enough sarcasm.
Hmm, French definitely has ornamental noun paradigms affecting articles and adjectives, exceptions to every single rule and things like that. But it lakes the cases that German add on top of this. Syntax is not as funny with verb at second position, or end of the phrase, separable verbs, and so on.
French of course also have many original grammatical torture instruments. You might think that as a bastard child between Latin and the Germanic Frank tribe dialects it’s no wonder, though elimination of noun declension is rather surprising from this perspective. The truth is that all languages out there have their own dungeon with many traps and treacheries included.
Fortune, nun ni ĉiuj parolas Esperanton. Kaj ne forgesas la akuzativo nin. :D
> French of course also have many original grammatical torture instruments.
For me it was when I had to realize that for the French, every number larger than what they can count with their fingers becomes a small algebra problem. quatre-vingt-dix-neuf ... four times twenty plus ten plus nine makes 99.
He actually learned German well enough to have appreciative audiences in Germany, but he also knows how to make amazing comedic essays on many topics. He did plenty about US-specific topics, and about French too, not just about German.
Which gives us Hitler memes where they audibly says German words that are very similar to their English counterparts, but the /funny/ subtitles is just a Beavis and Butthead level joke.
> everything Twain rants about here we attribute to French
The part where you have to have the equivalent of a LIFO stack in your brain, piling stuff up and praying you won't overflow, until the effing verb finally shows up and deigns informing you of what is actually happening in the sentence, well that is not, I believe an attribute of French, and definitely specific to German (I believe Japanese has that to a certain extent has well).
Yeah, I vividly remember writing whole essays in school with only two sentences like that (sometimes over several pages of relative and temporal sentences and adjective chains), just as a raised middle finger to my German teacher who sleighted me once over the interpretation of some baroque poem.
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Most of the time we try to use English for technical identifiers and German for business langugage, leading to lets say "interesting" code, but it works for us.
The Latin-derived cases from the article, on the other hand, are the truly maddening, and makes you appreciate the simplicity of English grammar by comparison.
English is a bastard language and it shows in its grammar.
Discussing the words is a fun way to take a little break during the workday, but I don't consider it more than that.
Compounds have to be translated using multiple words, yes - that's just a few extra white space, it doesn't result in loss of precision.
And yeah, you can see with those two latter terms where the issue lies :)
Those two were traditionally actually used this way in the safety and security context - I think I even have the script for the "Datenschutz und Datensicherheit" lecture I had on uni in the '90s lying around somewhere in the attic.
But their meaning has changed and muddled so much over the years - probably not helped by the fact that "Sicherheit" is much closer to "security" in colloquial usage, and probably vice versa(?) - that they stopped being useful and used in this context.
Similarly for English and French, seen as practical and artsy, resepectively, due to say Hobbes/Smith and the likes of Baudelaire or Rimbaud.
Whether any of that makes any sense is a problem for the philologists, I suppose.
Also the infamous "free" bear vs. software.
It's not that German lacks precision per se but most of the jargon originated in the US or even England, and rather than coming up with German translations, it has become custom to use the original English. Which, frankly, makes everyday tasks like looking up documentation or debugging a lot easier.
Compare this to French where the Académie Française makes sure that you don't have to use these nasty English words! Yikes. And if there isn't a good French translation, they just make one up - my favorite example: the word "bug" (as in programming) has a made-up "French" alternative: "bogue". As far as I understand, no-one uses it, but it exists.
There are terms that are specific to certain domains and used by everyone to precisely name a certain process. Belegprüfung, Indexpartizipation, Zessionär, etc.
Sometimes germans outside of your field of work don’t know these terms either, but those who do all use the same term. If you use english expressions you have to replace a domain term with one of multiple possible translations, making it confusing in many cases.
We have the same with translated documentation. Ever read the german version of Azure Docs? I have no clue what they are talking about until i switch to the english version.
So it's code-switching code.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code-switching
That does not seem like a concept at all, let alone an actual German word. “Beans” is not even German, there is no German word spelled “Beans”.
Most cutting-edge research and discussion happens in English, and honestly, I find it pretty tough to have a deep technical conversation in German—even with other Germans. The language just doesn’t seem to reflect the latest advancements in those fields.
I used to agree with the “German is super precise” sentiment—especially when it came to legal or philosophical stuff. But the more I’ve immersed myself in English, the more I’ve seen how nuanced and expressive it can be too. And ironically, German law often ends up being a case-by-case “interpretation party” anyway.
Don’t get me wrong, I still appreciate the poetic weight of words like Müßiggang—there’s real beauty there. But when it comes to actually getting things done or discussing complex, evolving ideas? I’m not sure German gives us much of a practical edge anymore.
...loan words?
Dutch doesn't have a word for computer other than computer, SSD is SSD, machine learning is machine learning, WiFi is WiFi (with a 50/50 split on people saying it the english or the dutch way), generative AI is generatieve AI and I don't think anyone would count loaning generative as-is as a typo either (maybe if you work for a publisher with a strict rulebook)
And from there you apply the normal grammar. To do stuff on the computer is computering (or, actually, we make verbs with -en so it's actually computeren) and machine learning applications are machinelearning-toepassingen. At least, to me it's normal to mix languages like that. It's also not like we avoid the word fingerspitzengefühl or überhaupt just because they once came from german, or like the english don't throw in a kindergarten or zwischenzug where applicable. It just gets mixed into the existing language
Translating German into English resulted in code being understood neither by Germans nor by Englishmans :-)
cut,copy,paste auschneiden,kopieren,einfügen
this can break the UI so you have scroll on a popup just to copy a piece of text because google put "copy" last in the selection.
I simultaneously know too little about German and have seen too much horror stories on German that I cannot identify whether this is but a typographical-error or actually pursuant to DIN orthographical standards
Technical entities get English names, domain entities get German names.
I also dimmly remember a German version of VBA.
The Donau is a river. On this river is a steamship (Dampfshiff): Donaudampfschiff
This ship is part of an organisation (Gesellschaft) that manages cruises (Fahrt): Donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaft
The ship has a captain (Kapitän) who has a cap (Mütze): Donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaftskapitänsmütze
On this cap is a button (Knopf): Donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaftskapitänsmützenknopf
You could extend this example: The button is colored with a special paint (Farbe), which is produced in a factory (Fabrik): Donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaftskapitänsmützenknopffarbenfabrik
And the factory has an entry gate (Eingangstor): Donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaftskapitänsmützenknopffarbenfabrikeingangstor
In English, this would be a huge sentence, all in reverse order: The entry gate of the factory that produces the color for the button on the captain's cap of the ship belonging to the cruise organization on the Donau.
The German is a lot more compact, if sometimes hard to parse :-)
A special kind of this is the «prosessøkonomisk (process economical) påtaleunnlatelse» where in a large and complex case with many serious offences, some less serious can be non-prosecuted in this way to not spend eternity in the courtroom.
Dead Comment
That said, I simply don't understand the mindset of people who move somewhere for an extended period of time and don't bother to learn the language. It locks you out of a lot of opportunities and makes you dependent on other people (especially for official/administrative/legal purposes). It also simply doesn't work in many places - (younger) Germans may speak decent English, but try going to Spain, Italy, or even Japan and see how far you get if you insist on speaking only English.
As an added bonus, learning a new language has been one of the most enriching hobbies I've ever begun! Exercising a new part of my brain and opening myself up to new cultural experiences is something I'm very grateful for. If anyone is considering a move abroad, I strongly suggest not only weighing the financial factors, but also the cultural and self-enriching ones.
In my experience as a German, everyone instantly switches to English if just one non-German speaker is in the group.
I assure you, as a matter of fact, (A) the size of your social circle is very limited, and (B) such an attitude as yours could safely be labeled as cultural ignorance bordering on cultural arrogance.
When my Russian colleague asks me to speak German because he wants to practice then I speak some German with him. Otherwise all our conversations are in English.
The experience might be different in "older" companies.
The Awful German Language (1880) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27173967 - May 2021 (253 comments)
The Awful German Language (1880) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18147467 - Oct 2018 (311 comments)
German was PITA, French was pretty easy but obviously I had a personal French teacher, and old lady who was amazing
I don't speak German at all anymore :/
(Given https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44001832, maybe it's because I learned French first?)
Until I moved to a new country and _wanted_ to learn the language, I could barely remember how to ask where the toilet was. Now that I'm invested and interested, things are much more sticky.
I believe this is why much of the world has latched on to learning English. There is so much content available that people _want_ to consume, that it becomes a hobby they are actually interested in, rather than a chore. As more and more people learn English, it becomes a positive feedback loop of content creation that nearly the entire planet can participate in.
Of course, most Western languages have gendered nouns - English is pretty unique in that respect. That likely comes from English being born as a pidgin of French and German.
Verbs in German are valuable things. You collect them, hold on to them as long as you can, and then - at the end of the sentence - they all come tumbling out. The order of the nouns at the end of the sentence differs by region. In purest German, they come out in reverse order, giving you a nice, context-free grammar. In Swiss dialects, they come out in the order they were conceived, meaning that the grammar is technically context sensitive. In Austrian dialects, the order can be a mix.
Of course, every language has its quirks. French, for example, puts extra letters on the ends of words that you are not supposed to pronounce. Well, unless the right two words are next to each other, in which case, you pronounce the letters after all.
English, meanwhile, gives learners fits, because the pronunciation has nothing whatsoever to do with spelling. Consider the letters "gh" in this sentence (thanks ChatGPT): "Though the tough man gave a sigh and a laugh at the ghost, he had a hiccough and coughed through the night by the slough, hoping to get enough rest."
as a German native I felt oddly at home with Japanese because funnily enough building seemingly endless verbs at the end of sentences felt very natural. Despite the fact that German, most of the time, is an ordinary SVO language. It's one of the mistakes English natives who just learn German make, that only made sense for me after I thought how odd that structure is.
I've also heard live TV translators really hate this about German because it's annoying, depending on the context, to have to wait to the end of a sentence to translate the whole thing.
As a descendant of the Romans, I can only shake my head at such barbarism.
I swear they only do this to mess with people.
English is criminal in that it has many vowel phonemes - British more so than American - and then on top of that its mapping of them to vowel letters is completely out of whack with both traditional Latin values of them, and how they're used in most other languages out there. I mean, cmon, <ea> for /i:/?
Still, with a sensible orthography, General American would only need something like 9-10 distinct vowel characters (for monophthongs; but diphthongs are best spelled as the obvious corresponding vowel-vowel or vowel-semivowel sequences anyway).
Franz Kafka put this property to good use and sometimes keeps the reader in suspense for half a page or more until the sentence falls in place.
Swedish had some of this until the second world war, since then we've made it into an english-like pidgin.
A lot of this is to due with latin, which pronounciation evolved over time to give modern French but which origin is still kept in spelling. So it's not that the language "puts extra letters" it's that it kept old spelling when the pronunciation change.
An example: 'est' (to be, third person singular) is very obviously verbatim latin spelling but pronunciation has shifted so that the 't' is not pronounced (and arguably the 's' could go, too).
Sometimes there are useful "rules" about how spelling and pronunciations evolved, which can be useful for English speakers writing in French, too, to remember your accents:
hospital -> hôpital
hostel -> hôtel
castel (castle in English) -> château
In my native German spelling, while there are irregularities, has been updated over times. Sometimes out of habit, sometimes by "order."
First of all, it is not German, but Old English, which is not particularly more similar to German than it is to any other Germanic language e.g. Icelandic.
Second, the idea that middle/modern English began as a pidgin is a very fringe view in linguistics; the vast majority of people who have studied the question would instead say that it indeed has a huge amount of French (or more precisely, Norman) influence, but not to the extent that we can say it went through a pidgin/creolization process.
IIRC (not sure about this) English is thought to have lost its case system mainly due to influence from Old Norse (which had a similar case system but with different and not mutually intelligible endings), not French.
While English is changing relatively quickly, German isn't. Children today read original texts from the Gutenberg era in school without any trouble.
Where I grew up, we actually read some old english texts in school. It was hard, but certainly doable, using just our knowledge of modern German and English and the local dialects (north frisian and low german).
The John McWhorter theory (not sure if it's generally accepted, but he seems to have evidence that it happened in the right part of England at the right time) is that it comes from Viking-era Danish settlers learning Anglo-Saxon. Similar languages, but different enough that adult learners dumped out all the complications they could.
* I know languages aren't "designed" for the most part, but I find it helpful to compare them as if they were.
Up until the point you have to read and write them.
Especially written Japanese, which is a giant mess of stuff they borrowed from the west, china as well as native stuff.
Also, the increase in possible permutations (and opportunities for mistakes) when you add adjective conjugations to the mix is daunting.
the poem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chaos :)
Don't worry, only few German natives speakers are actually able to speak or write without grammar errors. Let's not even get started on spelling.
Could you give some examples? As a German native speaker I have to admit I have no idea what you are talking about. :)
"Wife" is female in German, not neutral: Die Ehefrau. "Weib" is old language and rude to use these days.
Also, 'Weib' is not rude in every context. "Wein, Weib und Gesang" is not diminutive towards women, but in fact appreciative (as in 'necessary for having a good time'). We have Weiberfassnacht. And then there are the dialects, in which "Weib" often is indicative of a homely, loving relationship (-> bairisch, Swabian). Context matters.
This saying exists in English too: "wine, women and song".
Amongst guys, women are still sometimes referred collectively to as "Weiber".
All diminutives in German are neuter, for whatever reason. You could do the same for “Der Knabe” (“boy”) → “Das Knäbchen” (“little boy”).
Curiously, saying “Die Mad” would be as uncommon – at least nowadays – as saying “Das Knäbchen”.
A language is a dialect with an army and a fleet. As they used to say.
A people and their language predated the concept of nation-states, but when the latter arrived obviously (geo-)political interests started to blur the facts.
So if you conflate the German state with Germans (I'd challenge that and view the German state as a continuation of the Prussian state), and you don't like the interests of the German state, it is predictable where you'll land on this issue.
Because of this, even if their national anthem does so, calling the Dutch Germans would infuriate them and rightly so, because it would imply justification to some for things like those happening between Russia and Ukraine right now.
I think in the end it is also a matter of "national" self-confidence. While Luxemburgish is virtually indistinguishable to the German ear from say the dialect of Cologne, Swiss-German is hardly understandable for anyone outside of Switzerland. Yet, the Swiss don't have an urge to re-label their dialect as a separate language. And the urge of the Dutch to re-lable themselves is lesser than that of Luxemburg because seemingly no one questions their identity.
A Dutch speaker can't read or understand German. Some words are similar, but the same can be said about English. There are a number of differences in the grammar and alphabet.
Of course they're related languages; because I can speak English, German, and Dutch I can kind of read Swedish or Danish on account of being Germanic as well. But that doesn't make a "dialect with pretensions". We might as well say that all current Germanic languages are some sort of "dialect with pretensions" of some old Germanic language. But that doesn't really mean anything.
I was assured with a smile that the feeling is mutual.
Anyway, I absolute love Afrikaans. I also like droëwors, but that's a different topic. You should have a look at Icelandic -- it is the opposite of Afrikaans on the morphological complexity scale of Germanic languages. Quite a bit more going on with endings and such than in German. And yet it is weirdly familiar, because it is, well, also Germanic.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEx0edmLdLo
French of course also have many original grammatical torture instruments. You might think that as a bastard child between Latin and the Germanic Frank tribe dialects it’s no wonder, though elimination of noun declension is rather surprising from this perspective. The truth is that all languages out there have their own dungeon with many traps and treacheries included.
Fortune, nun ni ĉiuj parolas Esperanton. Kaj ne forgesas la akuzativo nin. :D
For me it was when I had to realize that for the French, every number larger than what they can count with their fingers becomes a small algebra problem. quatre-vingt-dix-neuf ... four times twenty plus ten plus nine makes 99.
Doesn't work as good if one has ears.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6pY-0JfEdLY
(From a mockumentary)
The part where you have to have the equivalent of a LIFO stack in your brain, piling stuff up and praying you won't overflow, until the effing verb finally shows up and deigns informing you of what is actually happening in the sentence, well that is not, I believe an attribute of French, and definitely specific to German (I believe Japanese has that to a certain extent has well).
Good times.