

How English beat German as the language of science - KhalilK
http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-29543708

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Htsthbjig
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.

~~~
mmanfrin

      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.

~~~
Ma8ee
Americans like Niels Bohr, Enrico Fermi, Emilio Segre, Leó Szilárd, James
Chadwick or James Franck?

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nishonia
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.

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scribu
> 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.

~~~
tokenadult
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...](http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=16175793893966768030&q=Meyer+v.+Nebraska)

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.

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legulere
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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shitstorm)

~~~
sjtrny
> 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.

~~~
redacted
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!

~~~
ginko
Handy is not a slang word. It's a regular part of the German language.

[http://www.duden.de/rechtschreibung/Handy](http://www.duden.de/rechtschreibung/Handy)

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

~~~
tokenadult
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/](http://www.xibalba.demon.co.uk/jbr/ranto/)

------
Rizz
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.

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reitanqild
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.)

~~~
dubcanada
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.

~~~
reitanqild
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.

~~~
aaron-lebo
I didn't figure out its vs it's until this past year, and I'm 27. It just
didn't seem particularly important to bother with...

Out of the 50 most used English words, all but one are from Anglo-Saxon. Out
of the top 200, all but 13 are from Anglo-Saxon. On the other hand, out of the
entirety of the English vocabulary, only a small portion of them are Anglo-
Saxon. English has a Germanic core but has borrowed happily from other Indo-
European languages.

I hope I'm representing these numbers right. Been listening to the History of
English podcast [1] which, if you like this stuff, is absolutely fascinating.
The first episode is worth listening to just to hear Old and Middle English
spoken.

1\. [http://historyofenglishpodcast.com/](http://historyofenglishpodcast.com/)

~~~
pavel_lishin
> It just didn't seem particularly important to bother with...

That's on you.

~~~
aaron-lebo
Never said otherwise. You this hard on everyone or just fellow UTD alumni? ;)

~~~
pavel_lishin
Had I known you were a woosher, I'd have been harder :)

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

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danohuiginn
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
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.

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tsotha
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."

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sjg007
Just wait until it becomes Chinese.

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niklasni1
Did this guy just call German 'the language of Ibsen and Hamsun'?!

~~~
notvplez
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).

~~~
niklasni1
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.

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0xdeadbeefbabe
Nein quarterly is going to be sad/happy about this.

