How English Beat German As the Language of Science 323
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.
WWII proably didn't help much either (Score:4, Insightful)
...unless you're willing to hold your nose on where you get your rocket scientists.
Re:WWII proably didn't help much either (Score:4, Interesting)
And yet the funny / ironic thing is the Werner von Braun orchestrated a surrender of his team to the US instead of the rapidly advancing Russian forces due to religious reasons... he would prefer the German rocket scientists fall into the hands of Christians instead of atheists.
The ensuing space race / cold war could have turned out much differently.
Re:WWII proably didn't help much either (Score:5, Interesting)
Not really von Braun did more as political figure than as an engineer. The Thor, Atlas, and Titan had very little input from von Braun and Polaris and Minuteman had zero.
I doubt that religion had much to do with it. I am sure avoiding being slaves in Russia had a lot more to do with it.
Re:WWII proably didn't help much either (Score:4, Insightful)
Bollocks. It's just a coincidence that two different ways of making a choice lead to the same outcome.
It's like arguing that x^2 and 2x are the same because it happens to work if x == 2.
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So you had the choose of optional Christianity vs. Mandatory Atheism.
Now the U.S. weren't any saints but our culture was separated by an ocean from the war and were able keep our ideals a little more in controlled and more willing to accept different people especially in the more urban areas.
Re:WWII proably didn't help much either (Score:4, Funny)
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Citation needed? I'm sure he had plenty of good reasons. The Germans were very well aware of their likely fate at the hands of the Russians - they not only had a brutal reputation but the Germans knew that they felt justified in using that brutality in revenge. As the Red Army swept across eastern Germany, in some villages more people committed suicide than were left re
It Will Change (Score:3)
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.
Re: It Will Change (Score:3)
Perhaps your native tongue will get a turn one day.
German illegal? (Score:5, Insightful)
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FYI, most people weren't even born in 1923 when it was overturned. Only about a half a percent of the population is above the age of 90.
Re:German illegal? (Score:5, Insightful)
FYI, most people weren't even born in 1923 when it was overturned.
People should be able to use books, or the internet, to learn about things from other eras. 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.
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Well, sure. But there are worse abuses in more recent history. One only needs to turn their gaze on segregation and go "oh, yeah, half our country thought second-class citizens were a great idea".
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No, you're simply historically illiterate. (Progressives obviously have abandoned eugenics itself, but merely replaced it with other racially discriminatory policies.)
Common? (Score:2)
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
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Except that it was never common to own slaves.
It may have been uncommon to own slaves, but it was much more common to be one.
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Hell, that was in an era when the Comstock Laws made it legal for the Postal Service to search through your mail to make sure you weren't sending information on contraception. And when supporting "anarchism" or "Bolshevism" could get you thrown in prison. And when supporting a mine strike could get you killed.
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If you take a clear unbiased look at US history this happens over and over. The US changed the language after breaking off from Britain changing 's' to 'z' in many spellings for example, the role of the Spanish in the western US is glossed over and contracts land deeds which by treaty the US was supposed to honor in the peace treaty with Mexico were voided, newly arrived immigrants were often banned from jobs and political office, Jews and Catholics treated as second class citizens, Japanese interred, black
The American Language (Score:3, Informative)
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 [wikipedia.org]
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) [amazon.com] offers a much needed reminder that Shakespeare first attracted readers and audiences in the states because the language was familiar and
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And this isn't old news either - that a Presidential candidate (JFK) was Catholic was a divisive issue within living memory.
The problem with knowing the truth of US history is, starting in the 60's the black civil rights movement co-opted the idea of discrimination and painted in simple black-and-white terms. Steadily since then, except for things like the internment of the Japanese that simply couldn't be overwritten, the story of discrimination and persecution in the US has been told solely in terms of a
Re:German illegal? (Score:5, Interesting)
The USA has not always walked worthy of the document that started it all (The Declaration of Independence) but we are generally progressing towards the realization of it's principles.
Did we have slaves? Initially, yes. However, we did fight a bloody civil war in the 1860's and managed to abolish it in our laws. Tens of thousands of lives, both white and black where lost in this war. The USA paid in blood to do right.
Did we illegally arrest and hold Japanese Americans during WWII? Yes, but we have recognized that it was wrong and done what we can to restore what was lost.
Did we take territory from Mexico during a war? Of course, during the war we actually took ALL of Mexico, seems to me we gave a lot of it back and I'd bet that the people who live there now wish we had kept it all. Also don't forget that this war was to protect the disputed areas called Texas which had already declared it's independence and then joined the Union in 1845. Territory that had gone though multiple country's hands, including France, Spain before Mexico ended up with it. But this war was initiated by Mexico's attacks, and when the USA totally defeated Mexico, we gave most of it back to them.
Civil rights laws have (as a matter of law) established equal rights for all Americans. We may not have lived up to that ideal, but it is ILLEGAL to discriminate based on race or gender. Any failure to meet that ideal needs to be subject to legal action and dealt with in the courts.
How all this says that the USA is a bad place is beyond me. Are we perfect? No. But we are advancing closer to the ideal expressed in our founding document. "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." We need to keep advancing on the ideal set forth in the Declaration of Independence and should not abandon our past by declaring the USA a lost cause. Because it will only truly be a lost cause if we give up.
Re:German illegal? (Score:4, Interesting)
One small correction... We returned a LOT of Mexico, but not MOST of it after the war. The USA kept 55% or so but the land was seen as worthless, having little water. However, in the treaty that ended the war we did pay some of their debts and damages. Also, any citizens of Mexico where offered relocation from the territory if they wanted to stay in Mexico. If they stayed, they where given immediate US citizenship including the right to vote.
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Did we take territory from Mexico during a war? Of course, during the war we actually took ALL of Mexico, seems to me we gave a lot of it back and I'd bet that the people who live there now wish we had kept it all. Also don't forget that this war was to protect the disputed areas called Texas which had already declared it's independence and then joined the Union in 1845. Territory that had gone though multiple country's hands, including France, Spain before Mexico ended up with it. But this war was initiated by Mexico's attacks, and when the USA totally defeated Mexico, we gave most of it back to them.
Not to take away from your speech, but I believe you are severely downplaying the Mexican conquest [wikipedia.org]. Mexico lost almost half their territory, while USA increased almost 50% in size. I wouldnt be so quick to mark Mexico as the first agressor in the war either. Pre independence, Texas was first pretty much conquered by US settlers, in a somewhat similar fashion to how the Muslim arabs conquered Lebanon from the Christian arabs.
Not that this changes how the USA is good or bad today
Re:German illegal? (Score:4, Insightful)
There are two sides to every conflict. However, in this case it is clear that Mexico "fired the first shot" as it where, by engaging their military outside their country and attacking a US patrol in Texas, killing 16. War was declared on both sides and the conflict lasted about 18 months with the total capture of ALL of Mexico by the USA.
I'm sure the Mexican view is quite different, given that they still had not recognized the independence of Texas, but their surrender and subsequent sale of additional land to the USA makes the border between our two countries pretty much a settled issue at this point. Those who complain about it now are misguided and unfairly maligning the USA's actions.
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Any argument that only has two sides is a boring and overly limited view of reality. Texas was part of Mexico at the time, and there were a bunch of illegal immigrant gringos who came in and wanted to be able to own slaves.
But separately from that, during the various wars in Europe in the early-mid 1800s, there were a lot of German immigrants who moved to Texas and the rest of Northern Mexico. The Texas German dialect is dying out, but you'll still see a lot of German culture in places like New Braunfel
Re:German illegal? (Score:4, Interesting)
American settlers in Texas, with U.S. support, declared independence from Mexico to protect slavery, which was illegal in Mexico. Nothing noble about that.
Did we take territory from Mexico during a war? Of course, during the war we actually took ALL of Mexico, seems to me we gave a lot of it back
We let them keep half their country? Aren't we special! I guess if Russia took all of the Ukraine and gave half of it back, they'd be wonderful too.
I'd bet that the people who live there now wish we had kept it all
Mexico would be much wealthier country if we hadn't taken half of their territory. Not to mention the constant meddling of the United States in Mexican affairs. As Mexican President Porfirio Diaz said: "Poor Mexico, so far from God and so close to the United States!"
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Voyage of the Damned when almost 1,000 Jews were turned away from the US in 1939.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M... [wikipedia.org]
[John]
Re:German illegal? (Score:5, Informative)
My grandparents are 82 and I only learned last year (at age 30) that they both speak fluent German.They changed the spelling of their last name and learned English due to social pressures. This was in a predominantly German-speaking rural Texas community surrounded by other German-speaking communities*, I can only imagine how badly speaking German was stigmatized in urban academic circles. This is a real thing.
*Texas has it's own recognized dialect of German, look it up on Wikipedia
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This was very common. Germans emigrated in large numbers in the late 19th century, but you wouldn't know it today. In response to public outrage at unrestricted submarine warfare many Germans immigrants Anglicized their names, turning Schmidt into Smith, Wilhelm into Williams, and so on. Anglicization also happened in England, with the most notable case being the rename of Saxe-Coburg to Windsor (yes, the English royal family were Germans with blatantly German names).
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Texas has it's own recognized dialect of German...
Guten Tag, y'all...
Re:German illegal? (Score:4, Informative)
The history of the US is filled with great moments, but also with horrible moments. There's also the Japanese internment during WW2 and the Ludlow Massacre [wikipedia.org] where striking workers and their families were killed by company militia and National Guard troops.
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Yes. That is why a pedantic and painfully logical interpretation of the constitution is usually for the best, even when you don't much like the result. Popular opinion often leads to a lot of creative interpretation that looks evil in hindsight. I can't wait until the 9th amendment starts getting some real traction. The roots of freedom lie in letting people do things you don't like so much, as long as it is causing no harm to you.
My mother and uncle were born in the days of anti-German hysteria, my gran
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argh. wasn't logged in. parent post is mine.
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And this is attached to the wrong comment. oooof. Having a bad post day today.
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I remember in 2012 when there was a Congressional hearing to decide if Muslims should be illegal.
Citation please.
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And NOBODY seemed to have a problem with this!!!
A lot of people did have a problem with this apparently, because Islam is more praised and protected by the US gov't now than ever.
I am not familiar with the congressional hearing you're referring to. Were they discussing stripping rights from Muslims living in the US, including US citizens, and imprisoning or deporting them summarily? Because that's what it sounds like you're saying.
I'll just say that there is a metric ton of difference between rounding up citizens and lawful residents based on their relig
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It was covered [cnn.com] a lot [foxnews.com] at the time, and they even had hearings to follow-up, and hearings about the hearings. There were congressional hearings to discuss if the hearings were themselves illegal because of how they were targeting and proposing to target Muslim-Americans, and hearings to discuss the response of Muslim-Americans to the hearings [huffingtonpost.com] about the civil rights of Muslim-Americans and their status as an internal threat to the security of the nation.
It's funny looking back at news articles, at clips of
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I remember in 2012 when there was a Congressional hearing to decide if Muslims should be illegal.
The links you provided do not support this description. Moreover, the way our system of government works, any moron congressman with an agenda can hold hearings to discuss his bedwetting problems. That doesn't necessarily make it representative of popular sentiment, and it certainly doesn't make it official government policy.
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It can't revolve around a flat land, duh.
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everyone bowing down before Obama
Uh, who is bowing before Obama? A large fraction of the Democratic legislators running for re-election this year are actively avoiding mentioning his name.
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Nixon's southern strategy is what helped flip a lot of this, along with a two party system. One of the two parties (sometimes both) wants to get the votes of the intolerant bloc.
I am SHOCKED! (Score:2)
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And yet Germany, Italy, and Japan are all major economies. Germany and Japan are still science centers.
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I wonder who helped them rebuild?
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I don't know about Japan (but I imagine you are wrong), but Germany is not an "occupied country" any more. One of the side-effects of reunification was a peace treaty formally ending that status. With the USSR giving up control of "their part" the western allies had no reason not to do the same. Margaret Thatcher was less than enthusiastic about this but could do little once George Bush the Elder (I think it was him and not Clinton) had made the decision. Thatcher was dumped around then anyway and John
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The Latins lost WW-1 and WW0 to the Huns and the Vandals, yet that didn't stop Latin from being the pre-eminent scientific language until the 1800s.
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Re: I am SHOCKED! (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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By the time the Vandals got to Rome, the "Roman Empire" was a shadow of it's former self. It wasn't even a single entity anymore. I think Latin hung around so long because the only educated people in the West were Catholic clergy, who happened to all use Latin until the 1960s.
EnlishBeat as the Language of Science (Score:2)
A very useful second language in my field (Score:2)
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Was ist ein "PI" wenn es zuhause ist? Private Investigator?
Germany had the last laugh... (Score:2)
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!".
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People argue that two-spaces is an anachronism and we shouldn't do it anymore. They tell us that the computer algorithms adjust everything to have that extra space from one space after a period or colon. Yeah? And when you post on the Internet, it condenses two spaces to one, and it's in variable-width type, and the period is like two pixels wide, and the space doesn't automatically become wider.
People are so fucking stupid they type arguments on a computer screen about how things they're looking right
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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?
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It's vestigial from the typewriter, which could only do whole-number spacing and could not do justified text. Typesetting did not have a fixed amount of space after a period, because the whole line was stretched out to justify the text. They did, however, leave more space after a period than they did between words. Computers can make the space any size that you wish, so physically entering two spaces is indeed anachronistic unless you are using a monospace font and wish to poorly approximate typeset text.
Re:Germany had the last laugh... (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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One period!
One space!
Nah, it does not have that ring to it.
Could have fooled me (Score:2)
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?
death of German math (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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So many top scientists did leave that the entire center of science moved from the German world to America.
Which lead to the radar, sonar and atomic bomb and hence victory in WWII. Think about that the next time your friendly republican says that cutting government budgets is always a good thing (particularly to give tax breaks to the wealthy)... but we digress.
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Unfortunately for the Germans, a lot of those mathematicians were Jewish
Wow. That's an unfortunate choice of words.
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Turing's famous paper: On Computable numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem [virginia.edu] The paper's in English, but the problem it solved was formulated by David Hilbert, in German, in 1928.
Yes it did happen. (Score:2)
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.
German science... (Score:4, Informative)
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 [wikipedia.org].
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Welcome to Latin (Score:2)
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.
Because the US was really the only winner of WWI. (Score:2)
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.
Plus ca change (Score:3)
1917: Sauerkraut becomes Liberty Cabbage.
2003: French fries become Freedom Fries.
my rant... (Score:5, Funny)
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replace Herz, [...] with a more english ideal; cycles-per-second (so much for brevity).
This one is a false near-cognate: The cycles-per-second unit is "Hertz", as in Heinrich [wikipedia.org], not as in heart.
That still makes it German though...
German Ancestry (Score:2)
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.
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Or they could have been some of Catherine the Great's Volga Germans [wikipedia.org], whom I believe still qualify for German citizenship, even if they were born in Russia and never spoke German.
Because Latin? (Score:2)
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Criminalizing a language. (Score:2)
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... why aren't there mandatory whippings for blatant disregard of the Constitution when making laws?
I figure your comment is probably sarcastic but I'll just say that legislators would have to be guilty of something specifically codified in criminal law to be receiving such punishment but since it is not illegal to make dumb laws there is no punishment.
Even if it were somehow illegal the Eight Amendment [constitutioncenter.org] of the very same Constitution forbids such punishment.
More due to money spent on research (Score:2)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L... [wikipedia.org]
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. [meforum.org]
Ever Heard of an Alsatian Wolf Dog? (Score:2)
Two words (Score:2)
Adolph Hitler
There was lots of groundbreaking research published in German in 1930. By 1950, not so much.
And what does this mean? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Wortlaengerheitversicherungsmittelstoff (Score:3)
Isn't the real reason that scientific words are already long enough without joining three or four of them together?
And there are still people asking why? (Score:3)
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.
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Don't forget the Greeks had a name for everything ;)
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Two words : "World Wars".
There was only one of those, with a twenty-year lull in the fighting.
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because once they hit the web, they get submitted (Score:2)
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.
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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 w
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Are you seriously using Egypt, Nigeria, China and Thailand as a human rights comparison?
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Re:Same old American Xenophobia (Score:5, Interesting)
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Imaginary ideal?
It's in the fucking constitution.
It's just ignored a lot.
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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 t
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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 secti