How English beat German as the language of science | Hacker News Reader

How English beat German as the language of science

bbc.com

70 pointsKhalilK79 comments

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.

"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.

Airplanes, aviation engines, jet engines, rockets

Optics 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.

Karl Zeiss is still a big name in optics: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Zeiss

Yes, and not just them: http://www.gtai.de/GTAI/Content/EN/Invest/_SharedDocs/Downlo... It's definitely still an area of strength for Germany.

Are you talking about pre-WW2 or post-WW2?

pre-WW2

On the other hand, German bombing sights were vastly inferior to what was available to the Allies, leading Germany to adopt a dive-bombing doctrine that lead to vastly inferior heavy bombers.

  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.

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

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

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.

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".

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.

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".

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.

>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.

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.

Including the 7 in the US?

Translating idiot: they implicitly meant 'in the rest of the world' instead of 'the world' (probably wrote it that way to begin with actually... and someone else probably 'made it shorter').

> 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.

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.

This has been done to death all over the internet but the general consensus seems to be the that Soviets would have had much harder time defeating the Nazi's without american help but would have eventually won the war regardless.

Not to drag this on further, but it would depend on the role the US/UK played. If they remained neutral the entire time i don't know if Russia would have eventually won. Germany wasted a lot of energy defending the west coast of europe.

The Soviet Union still made a fair number of T34s all by themselves.

Yes. The Soviets largely manufactured (and designed) their own combat vehicles, but everything from trucks on down came in vast quantities from the US. Meanwhile the mighty Wehrmacht was still mostly horse-drawn.

That was probably also because they did not really have a reliable source of fuel once the US gave up neutrality, beyond a synthetic one via coal, in fact I believe both the failure to capture the oil fields in Africa and beyond Stalingrad led to a faster defeat.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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

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.

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).

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

> 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.

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

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

Hah no. I misread the parent comment. I thought they meant as in "we have handy slang such as mobile phone".

> 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'.

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!

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

http://www.duden.de/rechtschreibung/Handy

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

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."

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/

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.

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.)

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.

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.

I 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.

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/

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

That's on you.

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

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

German and French are both easier then English.

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

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.

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.

> 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).

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.

I'm well aware of that quote, having learned of it a few years ago, which filled me with joy.

If you think a better language is one that holds on to its words unchangingly, and harshly judges and beats up new words, then you have free choice between the languages that came from Latin, especially the last flower of Latium.

I have abandoned that netherworld of arrogance to bask in the uncertainty of a language that admits to not knowing what words we might need in the future, and that isn't afraid to follow them down alleys to capture them. That seems to me more in line with intellectual honesty, always learning, revising mistakes.

As for the Latium flowers, the groupthink is that they should be preserved, whereas for English it is that it should continue to evolve. I've picked my favorite. :)

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

> 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.

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.)

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.

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?

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.

Uhh, did you accidentally paste part of another post or something in the middle of that?

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

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.

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.

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."

Just wait until it becomes Chinese.

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

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).

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.

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

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