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.

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 :-)

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

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.

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.

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.