To German native speakers: Why don't we write in German?

[tapir]

You have a different view of the phenomenon when you grew up somewhere where the dominant language was changing. When I grew up, the year senior to me had to learn Russian, my year was given the choice and the year junior to me already had to learn English and our English teachers were often just a bit ahead of us in language acquisition. And world peace and understanding by having a dominant language, how did this work out the last three thousand years?

Seriously, I am not nationalist enough to care about representing my country internationally (or sporting made-up national costumes in pair go events). I am concerned with the German language as opposed to Germany, and this equally matters in Austria and Switzerland, where I currently live. I do know why I contribute in English instead of German, English features the most prolific Go literature available to me, learning in English I naturally ended up contributing in English and I believe the situation is essentially the same for all English contributing native German speakers online.

Obviously there are many problems in the available material in English as well, but when I read [sl=ArticulationProblem]this[/sl] discussion, I don't pity the native English speakers but start to wonder whether as native German speaker learning from English literature I don't have a much bigger problem. If I talk about a pincer instead of saying hasami, even if I know what pincer means "pincer" is mainly an abstract go term for me and the go term is what helps me remembering the common word. Or for a more drastic example: When I came across "funny business" (for aji) the first time this was literally as incomprehensible to me as any japanese phrase would be. It might be the best rendering in English (from what I read about both the Japanese term and the English expression and one of my teachers endorses it, so I do too), but it is literally worthless in German. The expression doesn't work the same way in German and if you use "aji" everyone keeps misunderstanding it in his own way.

Now take the term "Mausefalle" in German (for snapback) it is supported by the whole language, I instantly have the mental image of bait, mice and the painful capture - you can even apply a common proverb: "Mit Speck fängt man Mäuse." If someone misses the snapback, you tease him with the proverb and this will help him remember. It doesn't work the same in other languages, but it doesn't have to. With English terms, however, I have trouble to understand them as soon as they get more "sensual" - if English is to be the language of an international Go community the terms will be bland and dry and the terminology in other languages will be undeveloped. Well, this is bad even for the English terminology, but in German you end up with silly third-hand translations like "Zange" or "Klemmzug" (for pincer) which carry the mental image of touching (and forcefully so) while the move you talk about does the exact opposite - it limits the room for extension but doesn't even try to "hold" the pincered stone and usually avoids to touch it. /Ok, I should stop for today./

P.S.
Please jts read "Index to useful posts for beginners" or "Malkovich Registration Thread" before you ridicule the DGoB forum, all relevant content of the mentioned thread is in the first post, it is an index of book reviews. The problem is that a forum keeps transient, long obsolete comments by default (try removing an old post from L19) regardless of language or culture. The problem that transient comments are kept for eternity is an unsolved problem everywhere in the internet, be it usenet, forum, wiki.

[SmoothOper]

My observation about English speakers is that they tend to open minded, but not willing to actually learn different languages. Many English speakers also don't realize that English is a synthetic language, so a particular word ordering will sound incorrect, but is actually correct syntax, but happens to be a convenient word order for non-native speakers native language(IE subject direct object verb can also correct in English, as well as the Mandarin subject when where how verb direct object). Many English speakers also don't realize that there are native speakers, such as Indian, that have a vastly different approach to the language. The real rub is that many times English as a second language don't understand other English as a second language with different native languages.

[jts]

In the spirit of the holidays, I apologize. Alle Gospieler werden Brüder, alle Buchrezensionen werden übersichtlichen!

[Li Kao]

Because mentally translating from English to German is inconvenient. Thinking about certain topics (programming, go,...) in English is easier for me than thinking about them in German.

[Bonobo]

@jts: Ehrlich gesagt, hätte ich auch gerne ein paar Schwestern

[jts]

Ich hab gehofft, ein Paar Schwestern unter dem Tannenbaum zu finden. Statt bekam ich Bananagrams und einen Fahrradträgerzeug. Am meistens ist Weinachten nicht noch fertig! In meine Zeitzone hat Santa Claus immer noch elf Stunden, mir meinem Geschenk zu geben. (Hehe, Santa hat elf Stunden...)

[tapir]

Maybe I should post this link too: [sl=DeutscheGobegriffe]Deutsche Gobegriffe[/sl] - Mitarbeit erbeten.

[Bonobo]

Maybe I should post this link too: [sl=DeutscheGobegriffe]Deutsche Gobegriffe[/sl] - Mitarbeit erbeten.

Thx I added my suggestion for “moyo”, albeit only in the discussion part, too shy yet to touch the “real thing”.

(For the anglo folks: That’s an SL entry for German Go terms)

[peppernut]

Maybe I should post this link too: [sl=DeutscheGobegriffe]Deutsche Gobegriffe[/sl] - Mitarbeit erbeten.

Thx I added my suggestion for “moyo”, albeit only in the discussion part, too shy yet to touch the “real thing”.

(For the anglo folks: That’s an SL entry for German Go terms)

I understood it as "German Gobe Grips" until I clicked on the link.

[daal]

Maybe I should post this link too: [sl=DeutscheGobegriffe]Deutsche Gobegriffe[/sl] - Mitarbeit erbeten.

Thx I added my suggestion for “moyo”, albeit only in the discussion part, too shy yet to touch the “real thing”.

(For the anglo folks: That’s an SL entry for German Go terms)

Your suggestion "Gerüst," was also the first thing that popped into my mind - but I guess Germans understand "Moyo" just as well or poorly as the rest of us. And that's the thing: for those of us who don't know a CJK Language, we're stuck with second hand terms anyway. For Germans and others who can read and write in English, there's simply more material, people and information available, and whether you say "thick" or "dick" (that's a German word, please don't censor!), you're probably equally off the mark because it ain't 厚い (whatever that means!). In any case, I think it's great that you Germans, as well as other Europeans and CJK speakers all use English to make your thoughts available to a broader western audience. Thanks for making the effort!

[Fedya]

I understood it as "German Gobe Grips" until I clicked on the link.

It's not just Grips, it's SuperGrips!

[Alguien]

And world peace and understanding by having a dominant language, how did this work out the last three thousand years?

Well, the percentage of people living in peace is quite better than three thousand years ago.

I'm not saying having a common language would solve all problems, but I believe it would help. I believe if everyone spoke the same language there would be less war and less pain.

I really believe it would be harder to convince Americans that all brown people in the world are terrorists if they spoke English. That way, "please don't kill our children" wouldn't sound so close to "Infidel! I kill you!".

Also, all of that knowledge that is now accessible to anyone because of the internet wouldn't be nearly as valuable if it wasn't heavily concentrated in two or three languages.

[billywoods]

Now take the term "Mausefalle" in German (for snapback) it is supported by the whole language, I instantly have the mental image of bait, mice and the painful capture - you can even apply a common proverb: "Mit Speck fängt man Mäuse." If someone misses the snapback, you tease him with the proverb and this will help him remember.

A few unordered thoughts, for and against:

• There's nothing wrong with you doing this as a comment in brackets. You could perhaps even translate this proverb into English ("in German, we have a proverb...") to help more people.
• The GTL is designed to be a repository of reviewed games - that is, I should be able to go to the GTL and look at other people's reviews of other people's games. For that reason, it's convenient to have a common language - otherwise, everyone has to learn all languages.
• Western go servers, Sensei's Library, etc. are pretty much all in English. Standard go terminology is mostly Japanese and English (or poor translations of English). This means that all online go players will have seen English-language terms before, and have a good enough knowledge of English to understand well-written reviews. (Rudimentary English - "good for white", "black dies", and the like - is enough.) On the other hand, I can read German fluently, but don't know any of the go terminology.
• We are not judging you for your written English. We are grateful to you!
• British and American people are bad at learning languages, partly through laziness (we are unbelievably lucky that everything 'international' seems to mean that it's held in our native language), partly due to a poor education system (our teachers can barely speak the languages they're teaching). (I don't like that any more than you do, believe me. I find it shameful.)
• Native English speakers use terms like "funny business" when talking to each other because it's far more down-to-earth than this exotic "aji" nonsense, but they shouldn't use opaque colloquialisms around non-native speakers. If they do, however, don't take it as rudeness - they probably don't realise it's hard to understand. (See my previous point. If you don't learn a foreign language, you have no concept of what it's like to know - or not to know - one.)
• I don't think discussions of world peace are useful.

[SmoothOper]

And world peace and understanding by having a dominant language, how did this work out the last three thousand years?

Well, the percentage of people living in peace is quite better than three thousand years ago.

I'm not saying having a common language would solve all problems, but I believe it would help. I believe if everyone spoke the same language there would be less war and less pain.

I really believe it would be harder to convince Americans that all brown people in the world are terrorists if they spoke English. That way, "please don't kill our children" wouldn't sound so close to "Infidel! I kill you!".

Also, all of that knowledge that is now accessible to anyone because of the internet wouldn't be nearly as valuable if it wasn't heavily concentrated in two or three languages.

In theory, if you learned another language you would have less strife in your life, since you would be able to speak and understand others, but your conclusion is that others must speak English, which leads us to conclude that you are the cause of War.

Admin: Personal attacks are not allowed in this forum.

[tapir]

* Western go servers, Sensei's Library, etc. are pretty much all in English.

SL is mostly (99.7%) written in English but perfectly open to other languages (see: http://senseis.xmp.net/?topic=1280). It probably wouldn't be sustainable to go completely multilingual (having every major page in several languages, multilingual interface). If someone would produce some hundred pages in another language within the current framework we would in my opinion go for a friendly fork for practical reasons.

KGS is completely multilingual, that the EGR is the default room is the only remnant of KGS being "in English".

I have no problems at all with native English speakers, I don't feel judged, treated badly or whatever, quite the contrary. It is just that there are different problems - if you want to spread Go to elderly people or kids you can't rely on a foreign language. If you don't develop terminology, literature etc. in your language, you can't teach them. Obviously, other people are doing this already, it just seems that people like me - internet addicted go players who learned in English - tend to rely on English way too much to be of much help in spreading Go locally.

P.S. People hoping for an international language and world peace by language should consider learning Esperanto. It is somewhat like Go, five minutes to get started, but a lifetime to master.