Ask HN: Is there a mismatch between Math in German and English? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is there a mismatch between Math in German and English?

8 pointsk__10 comments

I had a bunch of math at university in Germany, but after I looked into functional programming at the level of Haskell, I felt completely lost.

Monad (Monade) seems to be a philosophical concept in German and Monoids have a completely different name (Halbgruppe -> Semi Group)

Also, if I enter some terms into translators I don't get meaningful translations at all.

Is there a mismatch or is it simply, that most mainstream media (google.com, leo.org, etc) don't bother with such concepts and make them harder to find?

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"Semi group" exists in English, too. Monoids are simply special semi groups.

I don't know what you're expecting. I certainly don't see a mismatch between languages.

If you're confused by terminology, enter a term in the German Wikipedia and click on "English". You'll see the equivalent lemma in English.

Thanks for the tip.

My procedure was simply entering these words into translators.

Technical terms are often faux amis[0] between languages. Just because this technical term in this language looks like that technical term in that language, it doesn't mean that they are the same thing.

Although they might be.

The same is true in natural languages. In English, "Preservatives" can be added to jams, etc., but don't say in French that the jams you have are "sans préservatif"[1] because that means something completely different. Other, similar faux amis are less amusing.

With regards Google Translate, you can try, but pretty much all of the technical terms will be screwed up. Google Translate works by statistical methods, and there just isn't enough material to make it work. In fact, anything other than the simplest sentences will be translated badly, and the only reason it works "well enough" is because of the astonishing native language abilities of the human brain.

Translation is hard, language is weird.

</rant>

[0] French: "False Friends"

[1] Correct term is: "sans conservateurs"

Yes, so it's probably everything right with Math and my language skills suck, haha.

Probably most of the math is right, you're just (quite reasonably) expecting something that turns out not to be true. Languages, both natural and technical, evolve, and don't always converge.

You simply need to spend more time learning about, and then internalizing, the mappings between languages, and sometimes the mappings are neither exact nor precise.

Yes, I already knew that. But coming from a relative new field of computer science, where most terms simply aren't translated into German and the English terms are used, I probably expected something different.

Or they have been translated literally and stuck, even though there had been a German word for it in the first place.

Example:

The computational side effect is translated as Seiteneffekt, which is a word no sane person would use outside that context. It makes you think of an effect that takes place on a sheet of paper ("Seite") or - when you just hear it - some acoustic phenomenon involving strings of a guitar ("Saite"). Other side effects are much rather called Nebenwirkung, Nebeneffekt, Begleiterscheinung, or something like that. You would not think of "side = Seite" here. "On the side" would naturally be "nebenbei" or "nebenher", except when it is literally "on his side" as in team, then "Seite" makes sense.

There are multiple other sometimes funny examples. The benefit of this is that you create a more specific term, the downside is that you sound like an idiot to normal people when using them.

'Old' math often was written in different languages (with 'old' being fairly recent. I know mathematics students used to learn a bit of Russian in order to read papers even back in the 1980's, not only to read older papers, but also to read recent ones)

In this case, the original term appears to have been the French semi-groupe. http://jeff560.tripod.com/s.html:

"The term SEMIGROUP apparently was introduced in French as semi-groupe by J.-A. de Séguier in Élem. de la Théorie des Groupes Abstraits (1904)."

(via https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semigroup, which also claims the first significant paper was in German. So, halbgruppe might be the better term)

"Monad" in English and "Monade" in German are the same, they can both mean the functional programming concept or the philosophical concept. You can just ignore the philosophical concept, it's not relevant to mathematics.

I'm still fascinated how the world 'billion' can have two meanings, depending on language https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billion

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