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How English beat German as the language of science
- mapcar 12y agoI find it hard to believe that six years could solidify a culture of monolingualism; what about languages other than German?
- jessaustin 12y agoThey're probably exaggerating the state of language education in most of USA before those laws. However, one could also imagine the thought process of prospective teachers who lived then: "Well my Greek is pretty good, and with a couple of years' more study I could teach at the high school level. On the other hand, we might get in a war with Greece someday, so instead I'm going to teach math."
- tokenadult 12y agoThe key thing that World War I did was make it socially uncool (besides legally suspect) to use non-English languages for many daily life purposes, and for just about all official purposes. But in fact both of my parents, who attended high school in the 1940s and early 1950s, took foreign language classes in high school. Taking a foreign language was simply considered part of a sound academic high school education in those days, never to be omitted. What my parents missed out on was PRIMARY schooling conducted entirely in the medium of another language, which both of my mother's parents had even though both were born in the United States. (My maternal grandparents attended school in German, in two different Great Plains states.) The most important factor in making English the dominant language in the United States is that it is the interlanguage (dare I say "lingua franca"?) that unites all ethnic groups here. Only about a quarter of the United States population actually has ancestry from English-speaking places (which, once upon a time, meant the British Isles only). Sure enough, only about one-fourth of my own ancestors were English speakers when they arrived in North America. But all the people who arrived from other places to the United States found that English was the language they could count on as they traveled by canal boat or stage coach or railroad or sent postal letters or telegrams and eventually made telephone calls to one another, so ultimately everybody learned English. The United States is remarkably unified by a common variety of English, often the sole language of stubbornly monolingual people, even though Americans come from all over the world. Edit, as an aside, I'll mention that Esperanto (mentioned in another comment) failed because it is not at all a neutral choice, but is stuck with altogether many weird features of a tiny subset of Indo-European languages that make it quite hard for many learners to learn. http://www.xibalba.demon.co.uk/jbr/ranto/ http://www.xibalba.demon.co.uk/jbr/ranto/
- Htsthbjig 12y agoHow about winning the two world wars and taking all the scientist worth their name out of Germany? Remember that before WWII US of America was like China is today, a very powerful industrializing country, but with a lack of formal education. American products were inferior to German-Austrian-Swizzerland ones, but they were able to manufacture at a massive rate that Germanic countries were not able to compete. After winning WWII, half of the great German scientists went to USA(west Germany), the other half went to Russia(east Germany). German scientist were the ones that directed the Space programs both in US and Russia and educated native scientists along with other European ones that traveled to US as their countries were devastated after the war.
- ZenoArrow 12y ago"American products were inferior to German-Austrian-Swizzerland ones" Got some examples? Cars are a given, but I couldn't think of any others where the difference was that pronounced.
- WalterBright 12y agoAirplanes, aviation engines, jet engines, rockets
- leoc 12y agoOptics too, I think. The superiority of German optics was a big deal in WWII, though I'm not certain how they compared specifically to US products.
- junto 12y agoKarl Zeiss is still a big name in optics: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Zeiss http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Zeiss
- leoc 12y agoYes, and not just them: http://www.gtai.de/GTAI/Content/EN/Invest/_SharedDocs/Downloads/GTAI/Info-sheets/Electronics/info-sheet-optics-photonics-industry-en.pdf http://www.gtai.de/GTAI/Content/EN/Invest/_SharedDocs/Downlo... It's definitely still an area of strength for Germany.
- reitanqild 12y agoWe should be happy: For all its warts (horrible, horrible spelling) English is an order of manitude saner than German and a few other European languages. Imagine if you had to keep track of which (for all intents and purposes more or less randomly assigned) genders any thing had. Imagine if a/an had 12- 44 different forms instead of two and was dependent on the position, movement, a randomly assigned "gender" as well as ownership of the object in question. This is what German and a few other languages are like. Utterly stupid but it would sound ridiculous if we dropped it now. Just saying. (Source: native speaker of one of those.)
- dubcanada 12y agoHow is that harder then keeping track of the billion didn't vowel sounds and 4 ways to represent it? Or the lack of any sort of rule, as every single one of them has exceptions. Or the fact that depending on where you live depends on how you spell and say words which mean the exact same thing. Or the whole Your vs You're or its vs it's. Or the way it spells words which make absolutely no sense. Or the fact that half our words are German and the other half are French. I know 3 languages, German and French are both easier then English. And English is my mother tongue.
- reitanqild 12y agoTrolling or serious? How can you be a native speaker and not understand Your vs You're or its vs it's? > Or the fact that half our words are German and the other half are French. Quite a few of the basic ones come from old Nordic I think. : ) How did you really learn all the German (and French I guess) genders? I guess you either grew up in a multilingual home and as such doesn't represent the majority of us or you are incredibly gifted or just trolling.
- dubcanada 12y agoI don't mean that I don't understand it, of course I do. I'm basing this on the difficulty of the language. Not what I know/don't know. Learning genders is easy. It's just a memory game. And most people now and days don't really care if you mess it up. English is mostly old Germanic.
- danohuiginn 12y agoCoincidentally, I've just been reading about Esperanto. It seems slightly nutty in today's climate of English dominance. But when you needed to learn several natural languages to communicate internationally, it made far more sense to pine for a simple, neutral common tongue.
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- BillChapman 12y agoI don't see anything "nutty" about Esperanto. Not everyone speaks English, even people who spent several years on an English course in school. I have found Esperanto very useful on my travels.
- qwerta 12y agoBecause too many men from continental Europe were slaughtered during WW1. In many ways Europe has not recovered until 1960.
- scribu 12y ago> German is criminalised in 23 states. You're not allowed to speak it in public, you're not allowed to use it in the radio, you're not allowed to teach it to a child under the age of 10. I found that striking - how could someone just ban a language? - but then I remembered learning about Romanian being banned during the Hungarian occupation of Transylvania (where I currently live). I'm sure there are many other examples throughout history.
- fgp 12y agoIn Brazil German, Italian and Japanese were also banned during WW2. This was also done so that the immigrants and their descendants would integrate into the Brazilian society faster
- tokenadult 12y agoThe statutes were found unconstitutional, as the submitted article reports. I read the full Supreme Court opinion on that issue when I was in law school, as that is still a landmark decision in parental rights in education, which is how the issue was framed before the Supreme Court. The case is called Meyer v. State of Nebraska, 262 U.S. 390 (1923). http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=16175793893966768030&q=Meyer+v.+Nebraska http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=1617579389396676... It happens that my own maternal grandfather was born and attended school in Nebraska, and the schools he attended were conducted entirely in the German language. Similarly, my maternal grandmother was born in Colorado, also in a German-speaking community, and received all of her schooling in the German language. But the years from World War I until Meyer v. Nebraska was decided basically killed off German-language primary schooling in the United States, and my aunts and uncles heard German at home and at church growing up, but all learned their school lessons in English. Of course as I knew the family by the 1960s, everyone in all generations spoke English to one another routinely.
- reirob 12y agoIn deed almost incredible! Especially considering that during the same time in the Soviet Union speaking German was not forbidden (though it was not well seen by Russians).
- Rizz 12y agoHow about observation bias as another reason. There are plenty of research papers written in Russian and Chinese (fewer every decade of course), but they aren't considered for Nobel prizes and they aren't reported on in the Western media because people in the West aren't exposed to them. A famous example is stealth aircraft, that's based on a Soviet research written in Russian and took a roundabout way to reach the US aircraft manufacturers.
- niklasni1 12y agoDid this guy just call German 'the language of Ibsen and Hamsun'?!
- notvplez 12y agoNo, he just used the two recent Norwegian Nobel-winners as an example of scientist publishing in English instead of their native language (or any other).
- niklasni1 12y agoRight. I'm Danish which means my first language is spoken by ~6m people (slightly more than Norwegian). There are quite simply no Danish language scholarly journals in the field I trained in, and even in the fields where there are, they are by definition much, much smaller and publishing internationally is perceived as substantially more prestigious.
- legulere 12y agoGerman doesn't simply adopt english words but uses English word-stems to build things that don't exist in English. Handy for mobilephone, beamer for projector. We also kind of like our shitstorm: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shitstorm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shitstorm
- sjtrny 12y ago> The term has come into inflationary use by German-speaking media since 2010 to describe any clamour of outrage on the Internet, especially by posting and writing in social media. The first entry for shitstorm on urban dictionary is from 2003. Way before it became popular in the German media.
- darrhiggs 12y agoYeah, in the UK a cell phone is a mobile phone.
- nemetroid 12y agoJust to clarify, are you saying that the word "handy" is used to mean "mobile phone" in Australia?
- sjtrny 12y agoHah no. I misread the parent comment. I thought they meant as in "we have handy slang such as mobile phone".
- seven 12y ago> Nor is mobile phone. Germans do use the word 'handy' when referring to a mobile phone. To us, 'handy' sounds like it could be the actual English word for mobile phone. When we hear 'public viewing' we think of people watching soccer together outdoor on a big screen. And I guess that most of us first think of a laptop computer when we hear the word 'notebook'.
- redacted 12y agoI think they meant that "handy" is a slang word for mobile phone, as "beamer" is for projector. Shitstorm is definitely an English word though. Handy and beamer are both English words as well (so many words), although I doubt one would confuse projector technology with cricket terms!
- nishonia 12y agoThe last bit concerning the flexibility of foreign word adoption is key, I think. I heard a radio story a long time ago on the topic of word mutation in the English language (I think it was a story on ebonics). The theory was put forward that you could estimate the rate of foreign adoption based on the rate of mutation in the language. The thought being that foreigners to the language weren't simply bringing with them fragments of their mother tongue, they were dropping rules of the language that didn't make sense to them (or were too difficult for them to remember). For example, English nouns once had gender - but that was dropped a long time ago. The plural form of words were much stranger back in the day as well, compared to today where in most cases you can postfix an "s". As far as the OP, I don't know enough about German to compare mutation rates - I'd be interested to hear from somebody who does know enough to make the comparison.
- sjg007 12y agoJust wait until it becomes Chinese.
- 0xdeadbeefbabe 12y agoNein quarterly is going to be sad/happy about this.
- tsotha 12y agoThis is kind of funny. When I was in grade school one of my teachers told me "French is the language of science. If you want to be a scientist you'll have to learn French."