Or what it says about the specific subset of words that are used in crossword puzzles. I find this article very interesting because it does outline some general trends in language usage (the migration in foreign language words, for example), but one could also draw the conclusion that Ulee's Gold is America's favorite movie from crosswords.
Maybe this already exists but I could see crosswords, etc (ex, Jeopardy-like A&Qs), being used as a learning tool for things like geography and history, allowing students to mentally visualize subject-specific associations (ie, including backwards and sideways) rather than just memorize first-this-then-that type facts.
One could throw in identical problems here and there, either stated exactly the same way or differently, in order to create spaced-repition learning, as well as an inside-out understanding of the subject.
To give a random example - US geography, and if the student enjoys it or does well, let them continue on with it and grade them on the successive tests for State-specific or foreign country geography, for example. Throw in historical changes to make it multidisciplinary. In other words, let students explore their interests within the larger subject, rather than standardizing everything for everyone.
It's heartening to hear you think it's a good idea, because I actually run a foreign languages learning site which uses bilingual crosswords for vocabulary memorization, and until now it has experienced an extremely lukewarm reception from teachers. Well, I had a hunch this kind of learning puzzles were a better fit for autodidacts anyway.
Uber (a car service) is no longer clued as a German preposition (over or above)
Perhaps because it isn't? The latter is written with an umlaut.
(Note that umlauts can actually be a distinguishing factor for very different meanings, e.g., "schwül"->humid vs "schwul"->gay. In the case of "uber", there is simply no such word in the German language; the preposition is "über".)
(Note also that in cases of typed German where there is not umlaut key available, the standard way to transcribe is to insert an "e" after the vowel. So you would write "ueber" for the German preposition.)
Edit: And why don't they look up the transliteration rules before? I mean: I only know few words of Esperanto, but I know the transliteration rules for the letters in the Esperanto alphabet that are not ASCII characters: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto_orthography#ASCII_tr...
We like their food, and we are never squeamish about culturally appropriating any tasty food or food terms or language in general. Everyone loves tacos, no matter their feelings on illegal immigration or whatever.
Also see ancestry, there are 50M people of German ancestry in the USA, and only 80M people of Germany ancestry in Germany itself. We're a big enough fraction of the total that if we feel like changing language rules, we have enough people to make it stick, at least as a weird local dialect.
> we are never squeamish about culturally appropriating any tasty food or food terms or language in general.
Only if they're sufficiently Americanized (c.f. (a) the kind of Chinese food you get in this country and (b) Anglophones getting really fussy about sportscasters pronouncing Hispanic names using Spanish vowels)
Changing letters without first trying to understand why they are there in German (the same holds for my Esperanto example) simply shows that one is clearly not interested in the language/culture - in other words: An utter disrespect. On the other hand: Trying to understand, but simply failing is OK (yes, conjugating and declining words is quite ugly in German; even some Germans do it wrong).
> We're a big enough fraction of the total that if we feel like changing language rules, we have enough people to make it stick, at least as a weird local dialect.
To be able to challenge the language rules, you first have to understand them quite a bit. It is quite a difference between challenging language rules vs. simply not understanding them.
Eh you have to understand that in dealing with loan words the goal isn't to produce cognates. It is a natural well established process in English, and pointedly doesn't carry over pronunciation or diacritics. This is so that the words text is freely interchangeable as there is a long period where the term is sometimes written with diacritics (and italicized) and sometimes not. über and ueber would seem different to people and risk confusing them.
I understand your concern, in German as in most languages words are being homogenized and losing diacritics, first among the youth and informal use, and then even sneaking in to ads and "real" use. It has caused a lot of concern, and a fair amount of pushback, but you can't expect other languages' systems to follow the reactionary rules or care about the internal politics.
To add one point: Already by the change from Fraktur to Antiqua in Germany in the middle of the 20th century lots of subtleties got lost. For example, the words Wachstube (which can either be read as Wach-stube or as Wachs-tube) are spelled differently in Fraktur (since there exists two kinds of s), but the same in Antiqua (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:Wachstube.svg). Also some pairs of letters that form a common sound are indicated by a ligatur in Fraktur (as ch, ck, ſt and tz), but not in Antiqua (cf. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fraktursatz#Ligaturen_und_Tren...).
Yes, but English often drops diacritics when borrowing words from other languages. So "café" became "cafe". The English rules around anglicization of imported words makes fidelity to the originating language's spelling/pronunciation optional.
Sometimes this has led to the same word being imported more than once. English imported "hostel" from French, and then after "hostel" become "hôtel", English imported it again as "hotel".
This is generally true, but I found one counterexample in borrowing from German: loess, in geology, from German Löss. Maybe this was a particularly educated borrowing or one initiated by a fluent German speaker, or maybe it would have been especially confusing to call the material "loss"?
This is not strictly true, Thursday puzzles (and sometimes Sundays) often have boxes where you need to put in multiple letters, whole words, numbers, or other trickery.
By the new German spelling, "Schloss" is written with two s, since the o is short. In the old spelling, it was written "Schloß".
On the other hand, for "Straße" the new spelling does not change the ß to ss, since the a is long.
The best possible way to handle the ß is not transcribing it. In crossword puzzles it is transcribed as ss. In general, it is discussed whether one should rather transcribe ß as ss or sz (since ß is originally a sz ligature).
"Kann das Zeichen „ß“ nicht dargestellt werden, weil es in der verwendeten Schriftart oder dem Zeichensatz fehlt, so sollte es durch „ss“ ersetzt werden (aus „Straße“ wird „Strasse“). In den (behördlichen) Fernschreiben wurde das „ß“ bis in das frühe 21. Jahrhundert durch „sz“ ersetzt. Dies war unter anderem bei Familiennamen wichtig („Straßer“ wurde im Text zu „Straszer“)."
One possibility is the unit "gauss" (which, like the person, is Gauß in German).
I was trying to figure out whether the spelling "Delikateßen" was ever standard (it would have been "-essen" even before the spelling reform, I think). I found some old books with a Google search that did use that form, but I don't know if it was ever standard or was a variant spelling.
Of course the use of the German proposition as a hint has decreased -- I would think the clue "car service" is being used with greater frequency these days
http://donohoe.io/projects/crossword/#/hacker
Its funny to see how terms changed over the years. A few interesting ones:
http://donohoe.io/projects/crossword/#/aol
http://donohoe.io/projects/crossword/#/google
http://donohoe.io/projects/crossword/#/facebook