A comment on the German in ACTI (and other Honorverse books)

kuldan5853 wrote:Hello all,

I'm very sorry that my first post in this forum (of which I have been a silent reader for 10 years) will be a negative one, but when reading ACTI recently (the final release, not the eARC), I noticed that either David or the Lector really struggled with the German in this one. There's been typos in people's Names, (consistent throughout the book) typos in ranks, and some names that would never be used in actual German and/or sound very cringy (like the Destroyer "Gewalthaufen", literally "violence pile").

I'm not sure it only started to annoy me this time around because the Andermani featured so prominently in the book, or if I just ignored it better in the past, but I'd wish that for some of those, a native speaker would have been consulted..

I dated a German woman for quite some time. She was a professor in America who grew up near Stuttgart. Amongst other disciplines, she taught a variety of foreign languages. She was actually a linguist.

She said there is a huge difference between high standard German and the low German which she spoke. She said that she had to develop an ear for her own language when encountering German near cities like Austria. Arnold Schwarzenegger I suppose. But if it doesn't come easy even for some native German speakers - a professor who actually teaches German to boot - then it highlights the diversity of the language and warns of the pitfalls of which you address.

I wonder what form of German the author's consultant speak. And for that matter, what form you speak.

At any rate, if the author holds true to either low or high German, it could ruffle feathers either way. Also, for the language not to evolve many centuries into the future on an isolated planet could also become the subject of criticism.

So, it could have been a conscious effort of the author's to handle it as he did, to be both realistic and neutral.

Besides, didn't Mark Twain call it "that awful German language." ?

cthia wrote:She said there is a huge difference between high standard German and the low German which she spoke. She said that she had to develop an ear for her own language when encountering German near cities like Austria. Arnold Schwarzenegger I suppose. But if it doesn't come easy even for some native German speakers - a professor who actually teaches German to boot - then it highlights the diversity of the language and warns of the pitfalls of which you address.

Arnold Schwarzenegger was not allowed to dub his own character in the German version of Terminator 2, because of his Austrian accent.

tlb wrote:

cthia wrote:She said there is a huge difference between high standard German and the low German which she spoke. She said that she had to develop an ear for her own language when encountering German near cities like Austria. Arnold Schwarzenegger I suppose. But if it doesn't come easy even for some native German speakers - a professor who actually teaches German to boot - then it highlights the diversity of the language and warns of the pitfalls of which you address.

Arnold Schwarzenegger was not allowed to dub his own character in the German version of Terminator 2, because of his Austrian accent.

She often rolled her eyes at Arnold's German.

We took a cruise down the Rhine Valley River to see the Black Forest. On the cruise, we met some Germans who lived near Austria and one was from Vienna. On one occasion I could see her forehead wrinkle. I thought the guy was hitting on my girl. She said she was asking for clarification of what he was saying, and vice versa. She said it happens a lot when discussing technical matters.

BTW, what I wrote in the previous post should have read "in cities near Austria."

kuldan5853 wrote:some names that would never be used in actual German and/or sound very cringy (like the Destroyer "Gewalthaufen", literally "violence pile").

That term is (late) medieval and specific but genuine.

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gewalthaufen

aairfccha wrote:

kuldan5853 wrote:some names that would never be used in actual German and/or sound very cringy (like the Destroyer "Gewalthaufen", literally "violence pile").

That term is (late) medieval and specific but genuine.

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gewalthaufen

Using that as a reference to other articles on Wikipedia:

• Pike square - The pike square (German: Gevierthaufen ("square crowd") or Gewalthaufen, (crowd of force)) was a military tactic developed by the Swiss Confederacy during the 14th century.
• Howitzer - from the Czech word houfnice, from houf, "crowd", and houf is in turn a borrowing from the Middle High German word Hūfe or Houfe (modern German Haufen), meaning "heap". Haufen, sometimes in the compound Gewalthaufen, also designated a pike square formation in German.

So the usage of the name makes 100% sense when we are talking about the Andermani.

aairfccha wrote:

kuldan5853 wrote:some names that would never be used in actual German and/or sound very cringy (like the Destroyer "Gewalthaufen", literally "violence pile").

That term is (late) medieval and specific but genuine.

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gewalthaufen

Thank you - I have never stumbled across this word in almost 40 years on this planet, so I (honestly) did not think to "just google it" ...

ThinksMarkedly wrote:
"Lose" and "loose" is galling, but it's something that editors do look for, so while some might be missed, the majority will be gone before we see the final version. One that doesn't and that gets me most worked up is confusing "compliment" with "complement."

Here's how to remember it: the crew's complement is complete.

Editors may look for it but I still seem to see 'loose' misused all over the place. Maybe it's on the internet where there are few editors. I really don't understand why it's so common either, the two words don't mean anything remotely similar.

The most common version of the second one seems to be 'complimentary' for 'complementary' and I've even seen that one in some BBC News articles. Yuk!

Randomiser wrote:Editors may look for it but I still seem to see 'loose' misused all over the place. Maybe it's on the internet where there are few editors. I really don't understand why it's so common either, the two words don't mean anything remotely similar.

Because they sound the same and have very similar spellings (homophonous and parographs, though I don't know if that second term exists).

And, yes, self-published content has much worse spelling problems.

The most common version of the second one seems to be 'complimentary' for 'complementary' and I've even seen that one in some BBC News articles. Yuk!

I can tell you I won't be complimentary in that case.

Randomiser wrote:

ThinksMarkedly wrote:
"Lose" and "loose" is galling, but it's something that editors do look for, so while some might be missed, the majority will be gone before we see the final version. One that doesn't and that gets me most worked up is confusing "compliment" with "complement."

Here's how to remember it: the crew's complement is complete.

Editors may look for it but I still seem to see 'loose' misused all over the place. Maybe it's on the internet where there are few editors. I really don't understand why it's so common either, the two words don't mean anything remotely similar.

The most common version of the second one seems to be 'complimentary' for 'complementary' and I've even seen that one in some BBC News articles. Yuk!

I struggle with lose and loose myself. I know the difference but something about those "o"s make me lift my hands from the keyboard to stop and think.

Don

_

n7axw wrote:This makes good sense. Language drift is inevitable. The difference between American English and English English is due to geographic separation as well as time of separation. We get accused by the English of using a bastardized form of the language when really we have just drifted apart.

Well, except for spelling differences. There Webster made a deliberate (and successful) effort to push existing ideas of spelling reform in his eponymous American dictionary.

The most obvious one being around unstressed pronunciation of an ending "ou"; where his dictionary dropped the "u" and instead used just "o" (e.g. "color" vs "colour", "flavor" vs "flavour", etc.).