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Journal Ethelred Unraed's Journal: The "intelligence test": Closure, and a dig at the Krauts 14

Journal by Ethelred Unraed
The intelligence test, so-called, is now at an end. Thank you for playing.

Pretty much everyone passed with flying colors...merely by participating. The actual reason for the test was not to see how "smart" you are, but to prove a point: that there is no one agreeable answer to the question of how to pronounce "route" and "router" (or better said, it depends on who you ask...or whom).

I asked this because I've repeatedly been engaged in German-language forums, where German-speakers get hot and bothered over how to pronounce both words...then when I try to explain that even native English speakers can't agree, they turn on me and say point-blank that I'm either stupid or don't really speak English. (I wish I were -- or was -- making this up.)

(As an aside, an English friend studied here in Germany at the local college, and in spite of being a native speaker of English, he was required by his professor to take English courses -- all of them -- to fulfill his degree requirements for geosciences. The dean eventually gave in and conceded that the very idea was patently ridiculous. But I digress.)

You see, German is a very orderly and tidy (albeit at times maddeningly complex) language, at least when compared to English. Obsessively so -- such that from time to time, untidy words and untoward spellings that offend the Teutonic eye are purged by the powers-that-be at Duden (sort of Germany's answer to the OED, Webster's, Random House and any other dictionary in English you can name, all rolled into one, with ayatollah-like powers). Thus, in German, things are nearly always pronounced exactly as spelled. The very idea that a language could be so untidy as to have fundamental disagreements as to how to speak a word (is it "rowt" or "root", "EEther" or "EYEther") is somehow alien to many Germans.

Then the idea that English, with all its weirdness, somehow became the lingua franca of the world, and not a (relatively) rational and orderly and predictable language like German...well, it seems to be a grating injustice in the eyes of the Germans I've spoken to. (Or is that "to whom I have spoken"?)

Now you might be wondering, Ethelred, you big ape, why didn't you just write a JE and ask us to talk about it? The answer is that you wouldn't have proven my point anywhere nearly as well as you did.

Indeed, I salute you all for speaking English as gloriously chaotically as you do. May English continue to steep in its linguistic stew...

...while the eggheads over at Duden tear their hair out over the spelling of "Tipp" (not "Tip", not German enough without that extra "p") or "Bueffet" (have to have that umlaut after the "u", otherwise too Gallic) or "Telefon" (that "ph" is so unsightly and vulgar).

Ordnung muss sein.

...

Incoming rants from Sebi and JtS in 5...4...3...

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The "intelligence test": Closure, and a dig at the Krauts More

The "intelligence test": Closure, and a dig at the Krauts

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  • If having a central authority beaming language patches into your brain is what you want, go ahead.

    English has more in common with pidgin, creole and trade languages than probably any other major tongue out there. Yes, dialects are frowned upon formally but accepted as different styles. Since the streets rule, its like having a vote to see how you'll discourse. Like Ali fucking with Forman by crossing with his right. More than one bullet in the chamber.

    I wonder if they realize how comical their little
    • If having a central authority beaming language patches into your brain is what you want, go ahead.

      Ultimately, I think that's it: the Germans almost always over-engineer things, being control freaks. The classic example is always them polishing the inside of each artillery shell during the war - which made absolutely no (positive) difference to anything, but they still did it anyway, because somebody said they should. A waste of time and effort, of course; somehow, I get the feeling German Linux users mak

      • Aside - minor nitpick about 'bueffet': I've seen umlauts on the U, and an E after the U, but an umlaut after the U is a new one ;-)

        Meh -- I got stuck on how best to describe the spelling such that a non-German-speaker would get what I was referring to. (For those that don't know: the "e" after the "u" is a substitute for the diaresis -- the "snake eyes" dots -- over the "u", since Slashdot doesn't allow special characters.)

        Technically, though, the "umlaut" does not refer to the dots over the letter, but

      • Ultimately, I think that's it: the Germans almost always over-engineer things, being control freaks.

        That reminds me of another story: I've had upper GI fluoroscopes done in both America and Germany. (That's the thing where you have to drink barium -- a radioactive substance -- while they film it going down the stomach and intenstines with a special type of X-ray.)

        In America, they always gave me the barium in the form of a milkshake. As a kid, they even added chocolate syrup to it. Didn't taste terribly

      • Germans almost always over-engineer things, being control freaks.

        over engineering? yes. but striving for perfection does not make one a control freak. there are german control freaks; i was just pointing out there's a distinction between "more effort than required" and "desire to master everything."
        • over engineering? yes. but striving for perfection does not make one a control freak.

          That's the key difference; there is "striving for perfection", and then there is "wasting effort on irrelevancies". In the example I gave earlier, polishing the outside of the shells, so they'd fly further or straighter, would make sense - but the inside, which nobody will ever see until after it's been blown up?

          i was just pointing out there's a distinction between "more effort than required" and "desire to master ever

  • rowt and rowter

    Otherwise, we wouldn't irritate the French, which is, of course, the raison d'etre of the English language. Annoying the Germans and the rest of the world is just a bonus.

    • Otherwise, we wouldn't irritate the French, which is, of course, the raison d'etre of the English language. Annoying the Germans and the rest of the world is just a bonus.

      Hmmm...you don't suppose the real reason that Shakespeare would frequently use nouns as verbs (and vice versa) [pathguy.com] was to annoy the hell out of his grammar teacher?

      Mind, if the grammar teacher was French, it would be all too suspicious...

      (Oh, and actually I'm more like Tet's answer -- I say "root" for "pathway", therefore I say "rooter"

  • ...I have to make the first post in nearly two months. (Now that is weird. Over in Orkutland I would have made some sort of emoticon or similar gesture at this point. Here on Slashdot such acts feel wrong)

    Anyway -- I cannot really disagree with any of the points you have made. There are a lot of variations in dialect in the German language, but everyone knows the accepted and official way of how to pronounce things. Someone from the very west of Austria and someone from the very North of Germany will still

  • As English speakers, our closest living linguistic kin are actually the Dutch.

    Our chaotic structure is, I believe, the result of a "genteel" veneer of French being laid over our plain Anglo-Saxon speech. This got started at the time of William the Conqueror and kept being added for at least a few hundred years after that time. We got not only their nouns but a really nonsensical imposition of their rules of grammar, which are basically Latin rules totally unrelated to our original language. So we're lingu
  • next time they complain about it, direct them here [harvard.edu]. i doubt harvard would make that up simply to prove mr unraed correct.

    if you really want to make their heads spin, point out the existance of even more words with multiple pronunciations [harvard.edu].

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