The Awful German Language (1880)

Care to share an example or two?

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.

I mean is this really one word though, or a bunch of words just spelled with no spacing?

In Australian English, this is known as "Section 10".

In fact, with added spaces, works fine in English too (since English is also a Germanic language):

the Donau steamship cruise organization's captain's cap button.

And extended:

the Donau steamship cruise organization's captain's cap button's colour factory's entry gate.

EDIT: Let's not forget to mention its Java implementation, which goes full German:

DonauSteamshipCruiseOrganizationCaptainButtonsColorFactory

In English English it’s a ‘caution’.

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.

It is one word in German. It has one article, Germans talk about it as about a single word and treat it as a single word for grammar purposes. You can use it as a single noun in any sentence.

But it also odd example for this, because it is long as hell anyway already and additional spacing that English equivalent would require is just opportunity to wrap. It is just harder to read, but English equivalent would be easier to layout.

Swedish works the same (unsurprisingly), but note that programming languages also kind of do that. If you had to use a word like that in Java you would just mash all the words together in CamelCase and it would be pretty much the same as using the long German word (and almost exactly as difficult to read) even if technically it moved from being a single word to being a long list of words. It can still be a single identifier without spaces even if you translate to a language where it can not be a single word.

German is a prime candidate to implement PascalCase in a natural language.

It really is one "new" word consisting of a bunch of words spelled without spaces. It is a compound, where every word adds additinal information to the last component. An easier example is sth like "Altbauwohnung" which would be an apartment (Wohnung) in an old (alt) building (Bau) where "Altbau" is also a compound. This way of compunding enables you to build new words everyone can understand the first time they encounter them, but also to build those stupidly long words.

There are similar distinctions in American law, e.g. with the police's right to tarry you. A short stop by the police can be conducted for 'reasonable articulable suspicion' of committing a crime, such as seeing you make a rash judgment in driving, while a longer stop or an arrest requires 'probable cause' such as smelling marijuana in your car after the initial stop.

In law of England and Wales we also have recording of non-crimes, which aren't cautions (it goes back to combating institutional racism).

I don't remember many events from 1996 but my German boss walking into the office excited about the spelling reform of "Schiffahrt" certainly stood out as a memorable event.

(They added the third f or maybe re-added it)

So these are kind of fun to compare. At the high level they clearly all have the same purpose: in some cases it's socially useful to have the punishment for a crime simply be a statement of "person X did this thing". But the details vary a bit:

- It seems the Australian section 10 is handed out by the court, where the English and Norwegian options dispense with a trial entirely. It also looks like a Section 10 doesn't go in a person's criminal record, unlike the other two.

- It looks like the English caution requires an admission of guilt, while the Norwegian option is at the prosecutor's discretion within the rules of applicability of the procedure. Of course someone not demanding a trial when given this can be seen as an _implicit_ admission of guilt, but the legal nuance can probably be important.

- The English and Norwegian procedures are nominally also different in who makes the decision: the English procedure is handled by the police, while in Norway it's the prosecutor's office. But this is more a theoretical than practical difference I think, because the Norwegian prosecutor's office is organized differently than the English Crown Prosecution Service: here, the lowest levels of prosecutors are integrated into the police services they work with, so in practice I think it works out much the same.

The German is only worse because we want to treat it worse, the sentence isn't much longer and they're broadly equal in conceptual cost.

Which isn't surprising since Anglo Saxon is at the heart of the non French bits of English.

Awesome example.

Germans are allowed to write compound nouns in hyphens

Donau-Dampfschifffahrts-Gesellschafts-Kapitänsmützenknopf-Farbenfabrik-Eingangstor

Context, maybe just for others: Schiff is ship and Fahrt is ride, so eine Schifffahrt is a cruise (and without the article, it is also the term for seafaring in general). Anyway, you can see that Schiff ends with two Fs and Fahrt starts with one, so if you put them together to form a compound word, you get three Fs in a row, Schifffahrt. In pre-reform German spelling, this was deemed excessive, so one would write Schiffahrt, instead. The German spelling reform in the mid-90s changed this, so now you do the logical thing. (Whether the old way really was confusing and which way is more aesthetic are separate questions.)

Yeah, there has been a changeset in spelling rules

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reform_der_deutschen_Rechtschr...

... several times: 1996,2004,2006,2011,2017.

The current correct spelling is either Schiff-Fahrt or Schifffahrt.

This is not necessary. Practiced German speakers generally do not struggle with splitting words into their components because syllables follow relatively predictable patterns. You will run into ambiguities from time to time, of course, but the same applies to tons of other features of natural languages as well. (Do you want to outlaw homophones in English?)

Anyway, there is also a perfectly acceptable and established way of making German words easier to parse if need be: hyphens. So Hyphen-Case instead of PascalCase.

Exactly. It’s not like you can even hear the absence of spaces in one or the other. It’s purely a writing choice.

Interesting insight, thanks! Linguistics is fascinating, especially in the wider cognitive science context.

Australian ad of 30+ years ago:

avagoodweekend and dontforgetaboutheaeroguard

It’s one word, like watchmaker or bookkeeper are in English.

It’s not considered prescriptively correct, but often nowadays people just write them with spaces (like in English), especially on phones, because hitting spacebar makes spellcheck/autocorrect kick in.

When I was learning to read German, for the longest time I thought the word “letztendlich” was “letz-tendlich” (which is meaningless but at least theoretically pronounceable) rather than “letzt-endlich” (which is what it actually is).

I’m sure a native German speaker wouldn’t make the same mistake, though.

What is your definition of “word”? This is not at all a simple question in linguistics. By the way, it can’t just be “written without spaces”, as languages with no writing system at all, and languages whose writing system has no spaces (like Chinese), still have various concepts of “word”.

Which is a combination of lisp-case and CamelCase. Neat!

I rather see the Objective-C one, https://github.com/Quotation/LongestCocoa

This is not an accurate or precise example. You surely know you are misleading people.

German does not simply just concatenate words ad infinitum across logical classification, a concatenated, compound word is generally logically limited by classification. The concatenation generally only tends to be used in relevant (operative word being “relevant”), increasing smaller/lower logical classification. You generally will not rise and fall in that classification, let alone jump horizontally as you concatenate. It is really just a logic tree, you don’t all the sudden jump trunks or branches. It has to be a logically precise unit.

You’re essentially just saying ManBearPig. It’s not an actual thing.

So the entry gate of the factory that produces paint that happens to maybe also be used on the button of the cap of the captain of the ship on the Danube and is also part of a union, is not…

Donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaftskapitänsmütze nknopffarbenfabrikeingangstor

Only in New South Wales Australian English. Not understood interstate.

I believe some dashes would make that even more correct English.

Normally whatever is acting as an adjective ie "donut-eating relative" but with such a long example it seems a bit trickier.

> It is one word in German

Is it in the dictionary?

The century old tradition has set up a couple rakes for native speakers to step into.

"Selbständig" (freelancing) is obviously derived like self-standing, but "selb" is archaic and completely unused, prompting native learners to write 'selbstständig, which is wrong.

Couple more ones like this. Ask a native speaker about hinüber vs herüber, they will be perplexed, because it feels so dialectal. And nobody even knows about imperfect tense vs perfect tense, it's just stylistics to most.

> prompting native learners to write 'selbstständig, which is wrong.

Not anymore:

https://www.duden.de/rechtschreibung/selbststaendig

Heh.

In the US, a nol pros.

You mean 'Terry' which is not a verb. The name comes from a Supreme Court case I am too lazy to look up. Correct usage is, "the police conducted a Terry stop and frisked the subject for weapons for their own protection."

What if I said in English, you can "compound" words with adjectives so for example if you have a book, you can add red and say redbook, and you can keep going and do stuff like uselessoldreddirtyneverusedbook. You can even add possessives which have their own adjectives, like if the book was owned by a redbearded german army vet you'd say

The redbeardedgermanarmyvet'suselessoldreddirtyneverusedbook

And I think the use of spaces between pieces of nouns in English has more to do with the fact that -- in comparison to German -- the pronounciation is so unpredictable from the spelling that not having the visual indicator between pieces could leave you completely lost -- "what word is this?" Whereas German has very regular and consistent rules of pronounciation that map closely to spellings, so once habituated you can scan it from the page and spit it out more reliably.

Still, having grown up with English as my first language and (partially) learned German as a young man, learning German gave me more appreciation for English. Which only grew once I studied a bit of Anglo-Saxon. I love our language, there's just something about its character.

A spelling reform would be nice (though entirely impractical) though.

The river has an English name - the Danube

If you enjoy English and German but want something with a more modern twist, might I suggest Dutch? I started learning it about 3 years ago and it's very regular in terms of spelling/pronunciation. Once you learn the irregular verbs (the most common ones, like in any language it seems...), many things will just "make sense", especially if you already know English and German!

Impartial foreigner here who has no stake in the old or new spelling. If you're combining ship and port, you can't just write shiport. Of course it's shiff-fahrt / shifffahrt? By what logic does anyone argue anything else?

Hah! That's amazing. Thanks for the correction. I had only heard it, not read it; I assumed it was from the verb 'to tarry'. The meaning is similar enough that it made sense.

First of all, it was probably a descriptivist move. What I think happened is that people wrote 'ff' because 'fff' looked like a typo or was less convenient to write, so the linguistics codified that.

Also, there are portmanteau words where the middle letters overlap, e.g. bro+romance=bromance.