The Awful German Language (1880)

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.

Also between painting and drawing. And between pumpkin and squash lol

Painting - Gemälde

Drawing - Zeichnung

Picture - Bild

You were thinking of Bild, I guess?

I always thought it was from philosophy, Kant and the likes. Order, precision, detail (allegedly!).

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.

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.

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.

I meant the difference between safety-critical and security-critical systems, safety goals and security goals etc. It's all Sicherheit in German.

Schutz is protection. Can refer to both I guess. E.g. Datenschutz would be about security, while Arbeitsschutz is about safety.

Mahlen

Datenschutz is about legal protections for personal information (protection of the rights of the individual). Datensicherheit is about technical measures to ensure security of information (security).

painting = Malen

a painting = Gemälde

drawing = Zeichnen

a drawing = Zeichnung

Mahlen is grinding, you mean Malen

Fixed. I should have gotten a clue when I spelled Gemälde without the extra h.