How English beat German as the language of science

http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-29543708

by KhalilK • 12 years ago

70 79 12 years ago

mapcar• 12 years ago

I find it hard to believe that six years could solidify a culture of monolingualism; what about languages other than German?

jessaustin• 12 years ago

They'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."

tokenadult2• 12 years ago

The 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/

Htsthbjig• 12 years ago

How 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.

ZenoArrow2• 12 years 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.

WalterBright2• 12 years ago

Airplanes, aviation engines, jet engines, rockets

mmanfrin• 12 years ago

  Remember that before WWII US of America was [...] with a lack of formal education.

Source? American scientists were the only ones staffed on the Manhattan Project. Germans were focused on rocketry, and their work contributed heavily to the space program, but to say the US science was nonexistent seems a bit of a stretch.

dubcanada3• 12 years ago

Science is not that cut and dry. It was German scientists who discovered nuclear fission.

Ma8ee• 12 years ago

Americans like Niels Bohr, Enrico Fermi, Emilio Segre, Leó Szilárd, James Chadwick or James Franck?

leoc4• 12 years ago

It's definitely an exaggeration to say this of the US in 1933 or '39. It might be pretty accurate to say of the US around 1870.

refurb3• 12 years ago

I would have to agree. I know it's only one segment of science, but look at the US pharmaceutical industry prior to WW2. The discovery and mass manufacture of penicillin is only one example.

I would argue that the German pharma industry at the time had a much longer lineage, but I would claim that the US had "a lack of formal education".

orbifold2• 12 years ago

Most of the leading scientists of the Manhattan Project (e.g. Oppenheimer) had received some of their education at a european university or studied under someone who had.

binarymax• 12 years ago

Reminds me of a "joke" that my Uncle told me once:

An aircraft controller was sitting in a tower in Berlin-Tegel, and hears a request for landing by a Lufthansa pilot speaking German. The controller asks the pilot to please repeat the request in English. The pilot asks, "Why must a German pilot of a German aircraft landing in a German airport make a request in English?". A British Airways pilot, listening in on the conversation, interrupts: "Because you lost the war".

mcherm• 12 years ago

Whereas the REAL answer to the question is "So that the British Airways pilot, listening in, can understand the request and has an opportunity to realize that it might cross his flight path."

The use of English as a common worldwide air-traffic control language is widely considered a step forward in air safety.[citation needed] The safety comes from the consistency, not from any particular property of English.

commandar2• 12 years ago

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.

I think that's somewhat of an oversimplification.

Yes, Germany couldn't compete with American industrial output, but a recurring theme with German weapon designs was a tendency to be very difficult to manufacture even if the industrial capacity was there.

They were often beautifully engineered, but relied on complex operating systems that required enough precision machining to seriously rate limit their already strained production capacity.

JoeAltmaier• 12 years ago

Industrial output: at the WWI memorial in Kansas City, they state that for every car extant in the world at that time, there were 7 in the USA.

Nitramp• 12 years ago

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.

Keep in mind - WWII was won by Russia, not the US. Russia however did indeed out-produce Nazi Germany.

refurb3• 12 years ago

Keep in mind that Russia helped beat back the Germans due to the US lend-lease agreement. Without that, I would argue Russia would have had a hell of a harder time.

TTPrograms• 12 years ago

I'm under the impression that a majority of the most prominent scientists were taken to USA post WWII: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip

dreamweapon2• 12 years ago

OP recruited a lot of talented people, but (apart from von Braun) they certainly weren't Germany's "most prominent" scientists, by any stretch. A few Wikipedia-notables (largely due to their participation in OP), but hardly any household names, as it were.

tim333• 12 years ago

I think some people were embarrassed by German after WWII given that Germany's behaviour during WWII left something to be desired. My father and his parents emigrated from Germany, Anglicised their name and switched to English.

dreamweapon2• 12 years ago

How about winning the two world wars and taking all the scientist worth their name out of Germany?

Umm, most scientists "worth their name" either fled, or opposed, or were killed (or like Hilbert, forced into silence) by the NS regime. Other than von Braun and Heisenberg, there just weren't that many titanic figures with influential positions, and who were genuinely (or even tacitly) pro-Nazi after 1940 or so (I'm not sure there were any, in fact).

Of course there were still university professors, and all those technicians working for von Braun's program, and so on -- but the point is that they weren't people of great influence in the international community.

So it is most likely the defection of top minds like Bohr and Einstein that led to Germany's continuing loss of dominance after WW II, rather than the number of lesser scientists who stayed behind to work on actual weapons projects.

reitanqild4• 12 years ago

We 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.)

dubcanada3• 12 years ago

How 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.

reitanqild4• 12 years ago

Trolling 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.

KhalilK• 12 years ago

German and French are both easier then English.

I don't know about German but French? easier than English? Come on!

goldfeld• 12 years ago

Everybody says German is so hard. My mother tongue is neither German nor English, but I've been mistaken for a native speaker of the latter at times. I don't think the GP realizes how much effort goes into perfecting English pronunciation, everything is so arbitrary what with words coming from Celtic, German and French/Latin origins. A written vowel means practically nothing in English, and if it's not the stress you might as well have written a schwa.

Memorizing genders in German is very easy with a mnemomic method. Learning it has frankly been a walk in the park, everything is orderly and put together in discernible components.

mjevans2• 12 years ago

I've often heard the phrase 'English borrowed' in relation to words obtained from other languages.

English needs to /steal/ and should have stolen in all such cases. Sure, take how the thing is said and even the meaning, but strictly adhere to a single simple set of rules without exceptions for encoding that verbal language to written form and for decoding it back to speech.

innguest2• 12 years ago

For all its warts (horrible, horrible spelling) English is

English is not my native language but I love its spelling and I think it's ideal. I'm not referring to saxon words, though, but the majority that comes from Latin, Greek and French.

I'm also glad English has no Academy prescribing its usage; lack of genders is super nice; easy article rules another plus; if we could get rid of the preposition madness it would be perfect (i.e. in/on/at are not uniformly applied as inside/on-top-of/at-point-of).

chiph• 12 years ago

English isn't a nice language:

The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and riffle their pockets for new vocabulary.

- James Nicoll

New words & phrases get adopted by common usage. Old unused words & phrases get discarded like used condoms.

Dewie• 12 years ago

English spelling is just horrible bearuacracy (no, I didn't bother looking that word up).

noiv• 12 years ago

For all its warts...

Each language has its warts. But kids learn them all in nearly the same time. There are better criteria: I like Future II and composites in German, in English almost every noun can be turned into a verb, French is full of nice sounding idioms. Some languages lack future or conjunctive at all, in others the verb conjugates with the speaker's confidence. The richness of colors is another topic. The list is endless, all the thousands of natural languages have a different expressiveness. The trends towards English kills a lot of the total human cultural expressiveness. I wish my brain had a greater window of learning them without effort, so I could easily choose an appropriate language fitting any given context.

reitanqild4• 12 years ago

Hehe, I managed to insult both fans of English as well as fans of German. That wasn't my intention, but hey, since quite a few of you seems to disagree; -come on, give me a few good technical (not historical or doesn't sound/look right) reasons why:

- English can't have one way to write f sounds instead of f(ish)/ph(oto)/(rou)gh. (I'm quite aware of the history, I'm pointing out that the resulting rules are uneccessarily stupid.)

- German and a few others need to give different genders to knives, forks and spoons as well as anything else. Why does anything except living creatures need to carry a gender? Why does ein/eine/einer/ein need to change depending on different rules except as a dead giveaway that you are not a native speaker? ;-) (Yes, as a speaker of one of those languages I'm quite aware that it just doesn't sound right without.)

simias• 12 years ago

On the other hand german pronunciation is mostly predictable (compared to english and french at least) and the only thing that's really tricky to learn in your list is gender. For the rest, the german case system is really not that hard (especially compared to languages like russian, arabic and many others). I doubt you have 44 forms for "a" in german, although I haven't counted them lately...

Quite frankly I don't think language difficulty is the key here, otherwise we'd be having this conversation in spanish. I'm a native french speaker and I think the only reason english is easier to learn than german for us is that english is basically everywhere around us.

ufmace2• 12 years ago

Speaking of language weirdness, as a person with little knowledge of anything but English, can anybody answer if there's any commonality between the genders assigned to inanimate objects in different gendered languages? Presumably there's some language branching through history that determines what gender, say, a chair is in various languages. How far back does that go, and do languages of different families commonly have wildly different genders for things?

reitanqild4• 12 years ago

It seems to waryMaking nitrogen tri-iodide in high-school had a much better payoff wildly between languages. At least between Nordic languages and German.

danohuiginn• 12 years ago

Coincidentally, 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.

BillChapman• 12 years ago

I 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• 12 years ago

Because too many men from continental Europe were slaughtered during WW1. In many ways Europe has not recovered until 1960.

scribu• 12 years 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• 12 years ago

In 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

tokenadult2• 12 years ago

The 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=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• 12 years ago

In 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• 12 years ago

How 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.

niklasni12• 12 years ago

Did this guy just call German 'the language of Ibsen and Hamsun'?!

notvplez• 12 years ago

No, 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).

niklasni12• 12 years ago

Right.

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• 12 years ago

German 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

sjtrny2• 12 years 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• 12 years ago

Yeah, in the UK a cell phone is a mobile phone.

nemetroid• 12 years ago

Just to clarify, are you saying that the word "handy" is used to mean "mobile phone" in Australia?

seven• 12 years 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• 12 years ago

I 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• 12 years ago

The 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• 12 years ago

Just wait until it becomes Chinese.

0xdeadbeefbabe• 12 years ago

Nein quarterly is going to be sad/happy about this.

tsotha• 12 years ago

This 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."

How English beat German as the language of science

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