Re: CHAT: opposite of "verneinen"

Hi!

"Mark P. Line" <mark@...> writes:
> > I wouldn't let google decide what's good language so easily.  Further,
> > the feminime word is totally uncommon, I've never heard it.
>
> I'm not interested in delineating "good language".
Why not?

> I'm interested in delineating actual usage. For that, google is an
> excellent tool.
You misunderstood me.  By 'good' language, I merely meant 'acceptable
by most native speakers', not 'good' the the sense of some official
rule set devised by people not used to recent use of their language.
That seems to match the usage that you want to delineate.

Google is an excellent tool for statistics, that's right.  But you
have to use and interpret it correctly.  E.g. you have to have a look
at what kind of results you get and see whether the hits match the
context you expect.  The first n hits for 'geek' contain it in the
compound 'geek code', which *is* in common use.  It does not mean that
it is known what the components mean.

I learnt now that 'the geek' in English today has more of the same
meaning as ?'der Geek' in German.  Ok.

But you still might want to use a word that is understood when
speaking German, don't you?  I only learnt the precise meaning of that
word (in English) quite recently and have been in computer business
for quite some time, so I have been in touch with English and computer
slang.  Still, the word is uncommon in German.  And Google will show
it to you.  I really feel you misinterpreted its results.

As I wrote earlier today, I think 'Hacker' might be a more appropriate
word in German, because that one *is* known.

> 'geek' *used* to mean something like 'Streber', and that's probably what
> somebody found in an English-German dictionary somewhere. That's not what
> 'geek' means to most English-speakers today.
Ok.

But still (see above).

> meaning of geek (der Geek, somebody who dreams in Unicode). It was funny
> because we all know that John is ein Geek but not ein Streber.
As you can see from me misinterpreting the word, a) I did not know the
precise current meaning in English and b) did not accept the word in a
German sentence to understand what John really meant.  This shows that
(at least for me) that German sentence did not transport the
information it was intended to transport.

> We're used to ignoring the "loanword" status of lexical items once
> they've been established in common usage. 'Der Geek' and especially
> 'die Geekin' seem uncomfortable to some German speakers
[@H\H\H\@m]!

> precisely because they are so recent and still in process.
Not uncomfortable.  They are too uncommon to be understood.

Whether they are too *recent* so that they they are *currently* to
uncommon will be known in a few years.

**Henrik

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