Oettinger improving his English/Oettinger erweitert seinen englischen Wortschatz
Transblawg | 21. Mai 2010 — The German European Commissioner Günther Oettinger became famous on YouTube for speaking English badly (earlier entry). His main p…
An article by Stefan Klein in the FAZ yesterday, headed Dümmer auf Englisch, discusses the death of German as a language of science. He mentions a conference where six of the speakers were Germans, three Americans and one British:
Und alle sprachen Englisch oder, im Fall der deutschen Redner, mitunter auch so etwas Ähnliches. Seltsam gewählte Worte und verschlungene Sätze ließen so manchen Vortrag weniger brillant wirken, als er inhaltlich war.
Klein also mentions that of 1976 master's courses at German universities, 250 have English as the sole language. There's also some discussion of terms that are preciser and more easily comprehensible in scientific German than in English.
Wer Wissenschaft nur in einer Fremdsprache begegnet, bezahlt selbst dann mit Verlusten, wenn er dieses Idiom hervorragend beherrscht. „We are dumber in English“, zu diesem Schluss kamen Untersuchungen in Schweden und den Niederlanden, wo Kinder von ihrem ersten Schultag an mit dem Englischen vertraut gemacht werden. Vorlesungen auf Englisch sind dort Teil jedes Studiums, doch die Prüfungsergebnisse fallen im Schnitt zehn Prozent schlechter aus als bei Lehrveranstaltungen in der Muttersprache. In englischen Seminaren stellen und beantworten die Studenten weniger Fragen, sie wirken insgesamt hilfloser. Weder Studenten noch Lehrern ist das Problem gewöhnlich bewusst, weil alle ihre Gewandtheit im Englischen überschätzen.
(In the comments, a retired engineer says that Tragflächen is the right word for the wings of an aeroplane - wings makes him think of duck wings (large meaty ducks?) and gives him an appetite. To say nothing of the 'medieval' system of inches, feet and yards).
This could also be the death of English as a language of any depth.
Erschienen 7. Juli 2007 auf http://transblawg.eu.
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