The Awful German Language (1880)

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.

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.

> 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.