The Awful German Language (1880)

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).

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.

I really agree. I think this is particularly peculiar to English speakers because the mix of origin in our vocabulary is such a grab bag.

Weltschmerz and Bildungsroman relate very closely to their compositional meaning. Sure, they have become slightly more specialised (a novel about a teacher wouldn't be a "Bildungsroman", I guess), but it's not like you can't make an educated guess.

Also, the fact that collocations can acquire more specialised meanings than just the sum of their parts is hardly unique to German (in English, the "theory of relativity" means something very specific and isn't used, e.g., for moral or epistemic relativism).

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.

> The Latin-derived cases

They're not Latin-derived, they come originally from Proto-Indo-European (which had even more cases). Many other Indo-European languages retain cases (Slavic languages, Greek, etc.), but were lost in English and the Romance languages.

What does come from Latin is the way we name and analyse these cases traditionally.

The whole is more than the sum of its parts; it's the product.

And personal pronouns preserve cases even in English (He/him/his).

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.

Windschatten is an exception.

You find the same in any language. A «coming of age» story is not about birthdays.

Interestingly, several different ways of analysis are in use. I first learned German as a third language and then moved to a German-speaking country, and realized that the way German-speaking people think about their grammar is often different from how foreigners think about the German grammar. The rules end up with the same result, but the angle can often be different.

For instance, we first learned what a direct object was (something which is done with/to, e.g. in “I ate the ice cream”, “the ice cream” would be direct object). Then we learned that in German, the direct object is declined in accusative (which primarily affects the article, and adjective declination). This was consistent across multiple classes and teachers and books and schools. But my German German teachers had never heard of the concept “direct object”; for them, only the “accusative object” existed. Of course, the accusative object would be in accusative, but also, its presence would signal e.g. whether to use “haben” or “ist” for “is” in certain situations (for which I learned an entirely different set of rules that they had never heard of).

You would think that this is because my native language (Norwegian) has different concepts, but our entire way of teaching Norwegian grammar was uprooted at some point pre-WW2 _precisely to map well to German_, to prepare students for German classes when that was a more common second language than English was. (There were tons of things I never understood why were important until I got to apply them to German later.) So you'd think they'd match better.

Sure, but again those concepts typically will still have an equivalent way to express them in English. For example, Kindergarten is nursery in en-GB. I'm not entirely sure what the others actually mean, but Bildungsroman is probably "coming-of-age novel" which is a common literary genre.

The biggest challenge I've had when writing multilingual user interfaces aren't lacking a way to translate, but just practical issues like dynamic string construction or where the structure of the UI somehow doesn't work in another language, or when a given string is used in multiple parts of the app in the English version, but the non-English versions need different strings in different places[0], or just where an English single word translates into a whole sentence (or vice versa).

[0] For example some languages don't have a commonly used word that means "limb" - i.e. arm _or_ leg. A bit niche, but if you're doing something medical-related it can cause issues.

You do have to draw a distinction between compounding, where joined words gain their own meaning (some English examples: breakfast, football, highlight), and agglutination, which is the habit of the language to join words together, not necessarily creating a novel word that has its own meaning and dictionary entry, which is what Mr Twain is grumbling about in the article.

We learn direct and indirect object in school as well it’s just not what people remember because they either had to grind the Latin for a test or the number (which js stupid on many different levels).

Use of Latin has nothing to do with Americans or whiteness. It's a holdover from the legal and medical professions, and you'll find bird-spotters and gardeners doing it too thanks to Carl Linné's / Carolus Linnæus's love of Latin.

See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_French - "attorney", "culprit", "grand jury", "tort", "voir dire" and so on

I think what you're trying to say is that people who are pretentious and middle-class (who in your experience are affluent white Americans) like to reach for Latin words because they sound grander. Orwell had a lot to say on that in Politics and the English Language:

https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...

> Pretentious diction [is] used to dress up simple statements and give an air of scientific impartiality to biassed judgements. [...] Bad writers, and especially scientific, political and sociological writers, are nearly always haunted by the notion that Latin or Greek words are grander than Saxon ones

On the other hand, as a Brit, I find German abbreviations oddly cutesy and childish — although I think that's just preferring what one grew up with!

That said, I don't think you can discuss German jargon without talking about Beamtendeutsch. I'm fairly comfortable reading in German — I'm slower than I am in English, but I can, say, read a book in German. Then I'll get a letter from some Amt somewhere and it'll be utterly unintelligible. Worse, I'll pass it to my German partner, and she has no idea what it says, and we'll need to go and find someone to translate the document we've just got back into regular German. I'll take "appendicitis" any day of the week over having to learn whole new grammar constructs just to interpret an official document!

Yes, "windshadow" one is more descriptive than "slipstream". (At least for me.)

In fairness to appendicitis, it dates back to the 1800s and the medical profession only stopped speaking Latin at the end of the 1700s.

The English lay term is probably something like "bursten belly" that would also cover everything from hernias to intestinal rupture.

>Jardin d'enfant.

All languages have noun-phrases. In this case, they are transparent.

To be technical, "accusative" etc. are cases (i.e. forms of words) while "direct/indirect object" are grammatical roles - those are different categories. In German, for example, the Dative case can mark an indirect object (although some verbs may require the Genitive case for its indirect object), but it can also have other functions. This is even more pronounced in e.g. Latin where the different cases can have a wide range of different functions, not just direct/indirect object.

This is possibly not something that is taught very explicitly in school, but it's what the terminology means. (Or at least it's how I was taught. Linguistics being such an old discipline used to analyse so many different languages means that different people will use terminology differently.)

I don't think "appendicitis" signifies affluence—it happens to enough people that the word has become very commonly known and used.

> coming-of-age novel"

Technically it is correct, but in doing that you lose the essence of the word “roman” and of the whole influence French culture had over the whole of Europe until not that long ago, including in Germany. It is in these cases where it is quite obvious that Britain was an island at the edge of Europe, culturally and not only.

+1 Baumwolle is my fav.

Also accounting!

In English: "assets and liabilities" (Old French derived). In continental languages: "actives and passives" (medieval Latin accounting vocabulary).

>the (very white) American latinization of jargon that signifies affluence ... Habeas Corpus. All these terms have German names that are embarrassingly straightforward.

BlueSky brainrot take. Habeas corpus predates modern Germany.

"Habeas corpus originally stems from the Assize of Clarendon of 1166, a reissuance of rights during the reign of Henry II of England in the 12th century.[12] The foundations for habeas corpus are "wrongly thought" to have originated in Magna Carta of 1215 but in fact predate it."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habeas_corpus

> Use of Latin has nothing to do with Americans or whiteness. It's a holdover from the legal and medical professions

The fact that the language has such a degree lf these holdovers has something to do with Americans (or, rather the Anglosphere more generally), which is why the GP can note that it is a difference from German, where once upon a time; Germany had the same use of scientific, clerical, and professional Latin in the past, after all.

Your objection to translating "Roman" as "novel" seems to be that Roman is closer to the French word for novel than "novel" in English is? But this seems to be more an objection to English using the word "novel" instead of something closer to the modern French term, and not actually an objection related to the translation.

This seems like a slightly strange objection to me; I would have thought the actual semantic problem lies with "Bildung", in that a Bildungsroman generally involves some kind of learning/development/improvement, whereas a coming-of-age novel does not necessarily involve this.

> It is in these cases where it is quite obvious that Britain was an island at the edge of Europe, culturally and not only.

I mean this is a very weird claim, which assumes that Europe is culturally homogenous (e.g. I think you will find that Britain and France are culturally closer than France and Slovenia).

It's worth noting this is normal in language. Consider the highly non-technical English "lighthouse," which has acquired a far more specific meaning than "a house made of light" or "a house that produces light" or "a house that weighs very little."

I'm not familiar with "blackboard" being a valid term for any board that is black, but specifically one used in pairing with chalk to be written on.

etc.

Well, perhaps we can congratulate the German-speaking countries for throwing off the yoke of Latin!

It did not happen in the Anglosphere because England was run by the Normans for hundreds of years, during which the common law system grew enormously...

Let's also not forget ecclesiastic Latin! Significantly less common in the HRE since Martin Luther's protestations!

And in any case, "this concept is untranslatable" is nonsense, usually born out of xenophobia or jingoism. "MY language is more expressive than those OTHERS."

Every language has technical words that "cannot be translated." But when we say "cannot be translated," what we mean is "it is unsafe to expect a foreign reader to know what the term means without explanation." It's not that it can't be translated; it's that there isn't necessarily a single-word equivalent. I agree with the original suggestion that these can be a challenge to translate elegantly. But, speaking as a lawyer by training, the solution is obvious: you begin your technical document by describing novel technical terms. Then you use them in your document without explanation.

Consider "sushi": how do you translate that? Nowadays, we don't. But before it was widely known, you could've just said "a sour rice dish" and be done with it. (For those of you thinking "no wait, sushi is raw fish," no. That's sashimi. Sushi is vinegared rice mixed with other stuff, often. (Sushi can be with egg, pickled plum, crab, beef, etc. none of which are fish.)

Makizushi = rolled sour rice

Nigirizushi = sour rice to be gripped

Chirashizushi = sour rice with stuff scattered in it

> Technically it is correct, but in doing that you lose the essence of the word “roman”

This isn't specific to concepts like "Bildungsroman." You're essentially saying "this word isn't just a word, but a word with implicit cultural context."

That's true of pretty much every word. Hell, translating "ao" from Japanese, you'd think is so simple: blue. Except it can also mean green because in Japanese there is less historical, cultural distinction between blue and green. So obviously green traffic lights are called "blue" in Japanese, not green.

You'll never get a perfect translation of anything that's longer than a couple words. The point of translation is getting close enough. Translating Bildungsroman as "coming of age novel" gets you so close, that if your conversation hinges on the actual nuance, you're almost assuredly talking to someone who will understand what Bildungsroman means, so you just use that word.

EDIT: One of my friends at uni did his thesis on the difference between Japanese "natsukashii" and English "nostalgic." I've always thought about that as the perfect example of how any simple translation is fraught with cultural complications. There are certainly things I would call "nostalgic" but I'd never call "natsukashii," because nostalgia can come with sadness, but natsukashii never does.

I don't understand what argument you're trying to make, but I'm almost certain you did not understand mine either.

It's a good one ("tree wool"), but Buschwolle/Strauchwolle (bush/shrub wool) would probably be closer to accurate.

In case any anyone's still wondering: the word is cotton

Orwell said it better than I could, naturally. My point isn't that the professions can be traced back to origins in other languages. Nor do I mind a lingua franca for a scientific discipline. My gripe is that jargon, colloquial use and even common parlance haven't evolved away from it.

There could have been a movement away from old inherited terms. But there wasn't. And I have no better idea as to why than classism.

(German has a word for that! Jägerlatein, "hunter's latin", as a term for blowing up terminology to keep away the working population and restrict the game to the upper classes that are better educated, and frankly have a lot of time for that BS.)

Habeas corpus comes from English common law, not Roman law. It was never used in German law.

Latin terms are still used in German legal writing. Just not this one.

> Chirashizushi = sour rice with stuff scattered in it

And it annoys me to no end how many restaurants serve "chirashi" with completely plain, non-vinegared, non-seasoned-in-any-way rice. Just "throw some sashimi on some white rice".

> Kindergarten

Don't know about that. Garten, garden, a nurturing environment for raising delicate flowers. Children's Garden. Kindergarten.

Garten / garden derive from garte / yard, which just meant an enclosed outdoor space.

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.

>American latinization of jargon that signifies affluence ... Habeas Corpus.

Habeas corpus predates the United States of America by hundreds of years. It has nothing to do with "American latinization." You should remove that from your comment.

I know. But like I said, my German German teachers (all three of them, IIRC) used “Akkusativ Objekt”.

I find it really interesting that in Russian they clearly took the same concept but just made it out of Russian words instead. Kindergarten in russion is детский (children's) сад (garden).

There are other words that are straight from German, for instance бутерброд (sandwitch).

I don’t think the argument that English's book comes from novel as in new and in French book comes ‘of the roman vernacular’ and that this changes the meaning in some profound way. I don’t speak German, but it sounds like it the meaning has been fully lost and now it just means of the French. (unless you know all three languages and then I guess it has more meaning) At most, it is vaguely interesting to think of the etymology when hanging on a word, I guess more so if you know multiple languages

My favorite example is "kartoffellerntepause", it's the German word for the school break in southern Idaho for potato harvest.

> e.g. I think you will find that Britain and France are culturally closer than France and Slovenia

Not sure about Slovenia but there's a lot more France here in Romania (from where I'm from) compared to the France that is present in Britain, that is if we ignore the 1200-1300s Norman direct influences. But that's a different discussion, related to how the insular Brits cannot really comprehend Napoleon's work to the fullest (as a reminder, what is now Slovenia was indeed, if even for a short period of time, under Napoleonic France, with Ljubljana being indeed the capital of what was then a French autonomous province [1])

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illyrian_Provinces

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.

Don't forget:

    gefingerpoken
    mittengraben
    springewerk
    blowenfusen
    poppencorcken
    spitzensparken

>Use of Latin has nothing to do with Americans or whiteness.

My first thought was "it's especially strange to come out swinging against 'whiteness' in order to defend... native German language?"

Buffalo buffalo buffalo.

All words have history through etymology. Only a few dozen people actually care about it though.

None of those are actual German words. For some of them, I found references that these words could potentially be used in Pennsylvania, but most of these words are not even German, even when you split them into their components.

> I mean this is a very weird claim, which assumes that Europe is culturally homogenous (e.g. I think you will find that Britain and France are culturally closer than France and Slovenia).

Yeah I don't get this either. The English culture and language both have clear influences from French, courtesy of the Norman invasion (and other influence points over time of course). It's weird to point to Britain of all places as not being influenced by French culture.

The reference you were looking for is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blinkenlights

From your link there:

> written in a mangled form of German.

If you show this to anyone who knows German, they will recognize that this was written by someone who doesn't.

Please keep still and watchen astaunished the blinkenlights.

> None of those are actual German words

I've been misinformed!

I believe the comment you replied to is what is known as a "joke".

Das blinkenlights. ;-)

"Rain shadow" is a common idiom in English. "Wind shadow" is not because English has multiple dedicated words for this concept, including "lee" [2] as well as slipstream.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rain_shadow

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windward_and_leeward

Given that the commenter left another comment about having been misinformed, I don't think it was a Joke.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44008622

yeah, it was a joke and what you just linked to was sarcasm and/or mockery.

So the stereotype rings true then.

iirc at least 3 Russian empresses (and also Russian duchesses) started out as German princesses. The court spoke French. And Russia looked to the West as a role model and source of expertise for modernization and development. It could have been one or the other but France post revolution didn't have princesses to spare, so there is also the political aspect in terms of an absolute monarchy.

Would be interesting to know when these words entered Russian vocabulary: before or after Napoleon.

"From its inception, Russia has desperately needed foreign professionals—to teach Russians about governance, manufacturing, military, mining, and other trades. The Dutch, Swedes, Brits, and French were among the foreigners who came to Russia. But Germans certainly dominated, becoming a privileged nationality in Russia.

"The ruling Romanov dynasty, which shared a lot of the German bloodline, became a branch of the Oldenburg dynasty under the name of Holstein-Gottorp-Romanov. Many of its members were born in Germany and spoke Russian with an accent. Germans, especially the Baltic ones, rapidly advanced through the ranks of the Russian society thanks to their talents, persistence, discipline, and loyalty to the throne (as of 1913, approximately 2,400,000 Germans lived in Russia)."

https://www.the-american-interest.com/2015/08/27/russias-lov...

The English term for 'Bildungsroman' is actually... 'bildungsroman' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bildungsroman

That was actually from the faux English sign that German computer operators put in their facilities.

Slovenia's also been occupied by the Romans, Bavaria, the Austria-Hungarian Empire, the Holy Roman Empire, Fascist Italy, and was part of Yugoslavia. I think any French influence is probably a bit diluted.

>the way German-speaking people think about their grammar is often different from how foreigners think about the German grammar. The rules end up with the same result, but the angle can often be different.

That's true for most languages, native speakers are almost universally terrible at explaining rules because they just intrinsically know them and never have to name or even think of the rule. To the extent that native speakers are formally taught grammar, it's usually edge cases, formal registers, and more sophisticated tools, none of which are the primary concern of language learners.

That's funny, in English "actives and passives" are videogaming terms!

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.

The one about German’s lacking a sense of humor?

It happens to the best of us!

Heh. TIL.

Isn’t “сад” more like orchard?

Not in my experience. One might use the word огород (vegetable garden) for the kind of garden many have in an American residential backyard. But in my experience сад is used generically for many kinds of gardens.

I also went to Casablanca for the waters.

Ja

I have verbified nouns on several occasions.

My colleague this week took this a step further with this sentence: "We can model the data in [such and such way]. But then the user can PEBCAK their way into [impossible situation]." So close to poetry.