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The Awful German Language (1880)

(faculty.georgetown.edu)
198 points nalinidash | 5 comments | | HN request time: 0.643s | source
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rawbert ◴[] No.44002326[source]
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.

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titanomachy ◴[] No.44002397[source]
Care to share an example or two?
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bradley13 ◴[] No.44002473[source]
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 :-)

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praptak ◴[] No.44002733[source]
I don't remember many events from 1996 but my German boss walking into the office excited about the spelling reform of "Schiffahrt" certainly stood out as a memorable event.

(They added the third f or maybe re-added it)

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bashkiddie ◴[] No.44002873[source]
Yeah, there has been a changeset in spelling rules

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reform_der_deutschen_Rechtschr...

... several times: 1996,2004,2006,2011,2017.

The current correct spelling is either Schiff-Fahrt or Schifffahrt.

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1. lucb1e ◴[] No.44009454[source]
Impartial foreigner here who has no stake in the old or new spelling. If you're combining ship and port, you can't just write shiport. Of course it's shiff-fahrt / shifffahrt? By what logic does anyone argue anything else?
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2. praptak ◴[] No.44012267[source]
First of all, it was probably a descriptivist move. What I think happened is that people wrote 'ff' because 'fff' looked like a typo or was less convenient to write, so the linguistics codified that.

Also, there are portmanteau words where the middle letters overlap, e.g. bro+romance=bromance.

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3. lucb1e ◴[] No.44014903[source]
Bromance does not sound like broromance in speech
4. kazinator ◴[] No.44014973[source]
I found a word like this in English.

https://www.etymonline.com/word/chaffinch

There may be others.

When we turn to the letter 'l', we have the word skill-less which is not always written with a hyphen, in which case the three l's remain intact.

5. bashkiddie ◴[] No.44016614[source]
I can only guess:

Once upon a time we used to write by hand. It was considered time consuming.

Once upon a time we used to set books in lead letters. There were ligatures, where two consecutive letters hat a special spacing - like "fi" or "sz". If we allowed three consecutive letters, we would need to invent new ligatures.

It is probably easier/cheaper to just forbid the spelling.