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.

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.

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

> 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.