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The article mentions the "Association for the German Language", which seems to refer to the prescriptivist "Gesellschaft für deutsche Sprache". It's important
by pluma 10y ago
The article mentions the "Association for the German Language", which seems to refer to the prescriptivist "Gesellschaft für deutsche Sprache".
It's important to understand that few Germans are even aware it exists and its conservative views are extremely unpopular and non-standard. Even the Council for German Orthography which regulates German orthography as taught in schools only has two Association representatives in its total of 18 German council members.
In practice Germans generally regard the Duden (the equivalent of the Oxford English Dictionary) as the ultimate authority on German orthography and vocabulary. And the Duden generally takes a descriptivist approach, adapting to language change rather than trying to halt it.
Additionally, there seems to be a strong correlation between Germans with strong opinions about loan words and Germans with strong opinions about immigrants (or more recently the loss of "occidental identity" via "Überfremdung").
There are of course people who feel strongly about language who aren't also nazis in the more literal sense but the kind of complaints people have about language use often gives you a relatively safe indicator of their political views:
Complaining about wrong apostrophe use: moderate grammar nazi
Complaining about excessive use of English loan words in office culture: red-blooded grammar nazi
Complaining about "Elektronik" not meaning "electronics": moderate actual nazi
Complaining about "Handy" or "Portemonnaie": red-blooded actual nazi
- weinzierl 10y ago> Complaining about "Elektronik" not meaning "electronics": moderate actual nazi Fellow German native speaker here: Elektronik means electronics, doesn't it? At least dict.leo.org and the Oxford German Dictionary (which came with my Mac) seem to say it does. Elektronik | elɛkˈtroːnɪk | Fem. Elektronik 1 electronics sing., no art. 2 (Bestandteile) electronic parts pl. electronics pl. Your other examples are spot on, so obviously I'm missing something in this case.
- pluma 10y agoYeah, Elektronik is a direct loan from English electronics. The language nazis are complaining we already have the word Elektrik for that because in German that apparently includes what is colloquially called Elektronik. It's mostly an argument based on word origins (i.e. they say Elektronik would have to be similar to Mechatronik in that it would specifically refer to electronic motors and such rather than typical consumer electronics). Of course Elektronik does have a distinct meaning separate from Elektrik and the entire argument is based on a simplistic understanding of how human language works. But like many of the more outlandish arguments this boils down to "foreign words are corrupting our Germanic language and ultimately destroying our culture" -- which of course is insane. The entire "Germanize the German language" idea was pretty popular in the Nazi era, btw, giving rise to many failed word creations as well as a few that stuck around (I think "Bürgersteig" successfully replaced the French loan word "Trottoir").
- weinzierl 10y agoI see, that makes sense.
- code_sardaukar 10y agoJust to clarify, you think that opposing immigration makes someone a nazi?
- pluma 10y agoNo, just like the language lawyering it's neither necessary nor sufficient, but the term is of course a bit fuzzy anyway. I guess "xenophobic asshole" is a more accurate term but I thought "nazi" conveys enough meaning without resorting on language Americans might find offensive.
- pluma 10y agoTo clarify: there are valid arguments against immigration and there are especially valid criticisms on how immigration is handled (e.g. I would argue the German approach has for a long time largely consisted of hoping they either go away or magically assimilate on their own). But any argument that is based either on the requirement for immigrants to abandon their entire identity or on ethnicity alone is blatantly xenophobic and dehumanizing.
- cafard 10y agoI was amused to see a small glossary in the back of a volume of Novalis, giving such equivalences as "Verbesserung" for "Amelioration" and "Zerlegung" for "Analysis". I know too little of German to say whether the Latinate vocabulary was deliberately displaced, or whether Novalis was outside the main stream of the writers of his day.
- pluma 10y agoThere are still people who like to Latinise their vocabulary to make up for not really having anything worthwhile to say and I bet they'd pick up the word "Amelioration" if you showed it to them. There's a general trick that you can import Latinate English vocabulary into German and pronounce it German to sound obnoxiously pretentious (e.g. apparently the official German phrase for "lift boy" is "Elevatorführer" which sounds so pretentious to Germans that most people I've pointed this out to thought it was satire). That said, "Analysis" is a distinct term in mathematics (I think the meaning is the same in English in that context). Outside of mathematics it is actually "Analyse" (such as when analysing a substance in chemistry or inspecting something in close detail in general). I don't think "Zerlegung" is particularly widely used in any context but it might be. I was a bit confused when I began studying computer science in university because all my prior exposure to programming had been colloquial or in English. But German academia had actually created its own vocabulary for things like stacks ("Stapel") and arrays ("Felder"), which are mostly just exact translations. This seems particularly awkward when nearly all actual programming is done in English and the academic and practical vocabulary clashes so hard.