Re: CHAT: German elements (was: Re: Basic English)

At 09:02 +0100 14.12.1999, Grandsire, C.A. wrote:
>I already knew that Germans used self-made
>words for the elements and all other things of Atomic Physics and
>Quantum Mechanics (like Wasserstoef for Hydrogen, if I remember
"Wasserstoff" /"vas@r'Stof/, actually.

>correctly). I find it strange and confusing (especially for German
>students), especially when you know that the Greek-Latin-like names are
>international.
Native names are of course a lot easier for kids to learn, understand and
remember.  If you then learn Latin & Greek the international terms will
become as transparent as the native ones, of course! :)

The great Danish philologist Rasmus Rask -- who among other things became
the father of modern written Icelandic, discovered Grimm's law even before
Grimm did it and designed the first known naturalistic Euroclone IAL --
coined native grammatical terms.  He used them in both Danish and
Icelandic, and especially the latter still uses them.
    When I discovered that the main difficulty our kids have with learning
German is not to understand the concepts themselves -- which are normally
explained easy enough by comparing them to the way Swedish does things  --
but remembering which term refers to which concept, I informally translated
and used the Raskian terms into Swedish, and it is obvious that
"thing-word", "deed-word", "now-form", "then-form" etc. are easier to
remember.  Of course it isn't the *nativeness* of the terms that makes them
easier, but their *descriptiveness*; thus "der-, die-, das-word" proved
much easier than any attempt at a Swedish term independent of the actual
German tokens involved.  Even tho Swedish has gender it doesn't make much
sense to connect gender to sex, since Swedish words for male and female
beings normally belong to the same gender.


/BP

 B.Philip Jonsson  <bpj@...> <melroch@...>
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