weber , and other american authors and the german language

svenhauke wrote:grosse admiral ...
aua



Großadmiral

just used the german wiki page

Look at historical works. It is spelled "grosse admiral" quite often.

SWM wrote:[
Look at historical works. It is spelled "grosse admiral" quite often.

No, it really isn't.

The rank Großadmiral is only ever spelled like that, sometimes substituting ss for the ß, but always as a single word.
If you see something like "der grosse Admiral", then it's not a different spelling of the rank, but rather like saying "$Person is a great Admiral" in English. A comment on how that person is regarded, in other words.

phillies wrote:
There was an extensive discussion with the author and several German-speakers (pr so I thought at the time) of Kapitaen der Sterne (as an analogy the Imperial German equivalent title for a naval officer, iirc Kapitaen zur See) before the title was settled upon. It is perhaps significant that the titles are being drawn from the Imperial German Navy (preWW1), not the modern German navy or the K.u.K. pre-WW1 Navy.

KuK = Kaiserlich und Königlich = Imperial and Royal, recognizing that the two crowns of Imperial Austria and Royal Hungary were distinct, even though settled on the same head. Used of the centralized military, foreign policy and financial activities of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Which was more of a federation than a true empire.

/pedant

One thing I always found a bit odd is the use of IANS instead of SMS when referring to IAN warships.

IIRC, it's been discussed before, somewhere, but did David explain why he went for the former instead of the latter?

Mike.

The E wrote:

SWM wrote:[
Look at historical works. It is spelled "grosse admiral" quite often.

No, it really isn't.

The rank Großadmiral is only ever spelled like that, sometimes substituting ss for the ß, but always as a single word.
If you see something like "der grosse Admiral", then it's not a different spelling of the rank, but rather like saying "$Person is a great Admiral" in English. A comment on how that person is regarded, in other words.

That is true today. It is not true in the Prussian period, which Gustav Anderman used as a model for his empire and navy. Some examples in the English language:

A poem published in Blackwood's Magazine, 1918:

And Grosse-Admiral Schultz von Schmidt, Graf von Hansa-Zoom,
Faded away to Donnington Hall, to an English park with a guarded wall

Annual Report of the Secretary of War, Part 2. 1910:

During the Hudson-Fulton celebration West Point was honored by the visit of Rear-Admiral Sir Edward Seymour, G. C. B., Grosse-Admiral Von Koester, and Contre-Admiral Le Pord."

Tales of War, by Lord Dunsany, 1918:

Naturally, it does not seem like tyranny to us, even the contrary; but for an admiral, ein Grosse-Admiral, lately commanding a High Seas Fleet, it must have been more galling than we perhaps can credit to be confined in a canal."

Looking through Google Books for German language books, I see hundreds of citations for "Grosse Admiral" and "Große Admiral" (the ss and eszet were used interchangeably until almost the middle of the last century) in German language books published from the 18th century to the early 20th century. But the earliest citation I can find in Google Books for "Grossadmiral" or "Großadmiral" is 1916.

The evidence suggests that the spelling Großadmiral is only a hundred years old, the change occurring around the time of the fall of Prussia.

[edit]
Further investigation shows that the rank Großadmiral (under whatever spelling) was created in 1901, and only six people were given the rank up to the end of World War I. One of them was Hans von Koester, and I have cited above a official reference to Koester from the United States Secretary of War with the spelling Grosse-Admiral. I do not see any references to Koester with the spelling Großadmiral before 1916; the only references I find are Grosse-Admiral.[/edit]

SWM wrote:[edit]
Further investigation shows that the rank Großadmiral (under whatever spelling) was created in 1901, and only six people were given the rank up to the end of World War I. One of them was Hans von Koester, and I have cited above a official reference to Koester from the United States Secretary of War with the spelling Grosse-Admiral. I do not see any references to Koester with the spelling Großadmiral before 1916; the only references I find are Grosse-Admiral.[/edit]

And the only reference I can find on that topic is in english. If you found a german language reference, I'd like to see it; The problem is that "Grosse Admiral", used as a title, doesn't fit german syntax. It doesn't now, and it didn't back then.

This is a category of error that, in my experience, lots of english-speaking people make when trying to approximate german. They almost always get compound words (like Großadmiral) wrong in subtle ways that a native speaker can immediately spot. Consider it the reverse of the Squirrel test

Unless this series of books is a diplomatic letter defining the relationship between two nations where a slight error could lead to war, this discussion is brutally pointless as we the reader, all know what he is saying.

Relax wrote:Unless this series of books is a diplomatic letter defining the relationship between two nations where a slight error could lead to war, this discussion is brutally pointless as we the reader, all know what he is saying.

Uhmh ?!!?? You got 2000+ posts. At this point you should know, that discussing minuscule details at insane length is what this forum is about.

Torlek wrote:

Relax wrote:Unless this series of books is a diplomatic letter defining the relationship between two nations where a slight error could lead to war, this discussion is brutally pointless as we the reader, all know what he is saying.

Uhmh ?!!?? You got 2000+ posts. At this point you should know, that discussing minuscule details at insane length is what this forum is about.

But that is the whole point of my post.

Personally, I'm not certain what the issue really is - this is Sci Fi set 2000 years in the future, not a period piece. True, G. Anderman set up his empire emulating Fredrick the Great, but 1900 years after that individual lived. If G. Anderman spoke German, it was circa 1700 PD German, NOT the pre-Hoche Deutsch that Fredrick would have spoken. We know that The English spoken by Saganami during his last battle ~300 previously was deem "archaic" in ~1915, So how much drift has English had in 2 thousand years - wouldn't German have the same amount of drift?

Creating a new empire (out of conquered people who worshiped the ground he walked on for conquering them from the horrid life of toil they previously lived), He could name anything any name he wanted and get away with it merrily. And that was ~200 years ago. So even if he used accurate 18th century AD terms and titles (and we have zero evidence he did), how much has changed in the preceding centuries?

And Please note, I am a German speaker, not natively, but my Schule-junge Deutsch (Schoolboy German) has led me into (and out of) several embarrassing incidents over the years where English and German use varies (forex: Knocking a girl down in German is the same as knocking her the other direction here.) On top of that, I've had instructors from Switzerland, Austria, Schlieswig-Holstein and East Berlin (She crossed the wall as a young girl ~1960), and have seen that local variants of the language vary almost as much as English does here in the US, So I'm certain if German went to the Stars, it would drift as much as anything else.