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> In the real world, "Amideutsch" wasn't nearly as bad In the real world Germans already were on a technological comparable level to the Americans. Not to ment
by irishsultan 5y ago
> In the real world, "Amideutsch" wasn't nearly as bad
In the real world Germans already were on a technological comparable level to the Americans. Not to mention that by the 1940s the German language had already been much more standardized than it would have been in 1632, one big reason mentioned in the books that boosted "Amideutsch" was the fact that there was no "German" language that all German immigrants to Grantville/Magdeburg could fall back to.
- bayesian_horse 5y agoI can easily read and understand most texts from that period. It does feel and sound "old". The grammar is pretty much identical. It's sometimes difficult to distinguish between a grammatical error and a grammatical "difference to the standard", for example in a dialect or even Creole language. But if it hurts a native speaker, it may very well be a mistake.
- irishsultan 5y agoI don't entirely disagree on whether the German in the books is bad, I definitely notice issues when they have someone speaking in Dutch. It's just that I don't see how you could compare amideutsch (1632) with amideutsch (real world).
- bayesian_horse 5y agoThere are sometimes German words and phrases being used, wrongly. One of the lesser authors seemed to actually use google translator, and badly at that. To me as a native, it just has a feeling of wrongness. For the German language this is different than Dutch because Dutch has a less complicated morphology. One non-morphological example is that they would translate "uptime" as something like "aufzeit", while referencing it like a river. "zeitauf" would make sense as an adjective, but it hurts as a noun. The literal translation would be "Hochzeit" which unfortunately already means "wedding", but could be distinguished by context and pronunciation.