Greatest German ever ?

Structurally yes Japanese is an easier language to learn, it makes more intuitive sense than english. You would be able to pick up japanese to speak faster than english or a romantic language... IMO. However the amount of characters that the Japanese language it makes it far far more difficult to learn than any other language, with the exception of maybe Chinese.
 
Oh... I'd pick either Martin Luther or Otto Von Bismarck. Without Bismarck there wouldn't be a germany.
 
noyhauser said:
Oh... I'd pick either Martin Luther or Otto Von Bismarck. Without Bismarck there wouldn't be a germany.
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The winner was Adenauer, 2nd was Luther, 3rd came Marx. Bismarck was 9th, just behind Gutenberg.

I didn't vote, because you really can't say that one person had such an importance. History is made by many people, but usually coincidence plays a major role.


TwistedMac said:
..no i must disagree...

look in an english dictionary and compare it to any other language.. (i've heard it comes second only to japanese :?) the amount of words you can use to seperate something that in, for example, swedish only has one word is staggering..
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I see. When you said "english is fantastic, you can express just about anything, it's just so versatile.", I thought more in the direction of adaptability or usability. All living languages have the ability to adapt to new circumstances & form new words or word formations.
The sheer number of words doesn't say very much, though it seems (see below) that English has more words than most other languages. Since there are a lot of redundancies & words not commonly used anymore, it's hard to estimate versatility on these grounds.
 
Maciamo said:
English has 500.000 words or 2 million if you include technical term. That is much more than the average of European languages, with French having barely 70.000 words and German 120.000.
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It seems generally agreed that English has the most words in the world, though I doubt that the difference is as great as given here.
The problem with all this is, what you can count as a word, how "word" is defined. Defined as "basic morpheme", estimations go to around 5000 (plus loanwords) for German. Do you count active vocabulary only or passive vocabulary, the 1st is maybe a few thousand while the latter is estimated between 12,000 & 100,000. Do you count inflected words? Do you count words or meanings? When are loanwords part of the language, should they be counted at all? Do you count what's in a dictionary, then which dictionary to go for?

Here's a small list of German dictionaries:
Duden, 1. Auflage (1880): 27000
Duden, 22. Auflage (2000): 120000
Wahrig, 7. Auflage (2000): 250000
Grimmsches W?rterbuch (1838?1961): 350000
Mackensen (1977): 170000
Wahrig in sechs B?nden (1980?1984): 220000
Duden in zehn B?nden (1999): 200000

for comparison:
Webster's Collegiate (1993): 160000
Webster's Third (1961): 450000
Oxford English Dictionary (1989): 290500

As you see, all vary widely, not only the German ones. Interesting to note that Wahrig in six books has less words counted than the Wahrig 2000 in one book.

The project to build an electronic database with a "complete" German vocabulary (full forms, with inflected words et al.) based on factual usage is at 5 million words at the moment. By far not finished.

All what was written above is probably similar in all major living languages.

The dictionary list is taken from
http://faql.de/sonstiges.html#wortschatz
It's German, but I think you can understand German, so it should be interesting for you, Maciamo.

A similar text on the futility of counting words, in English:
http://www.sls.lib.il.us/reference/por/features/97/language.html
 
I don't see what this topic is about.
Offending German and French?
Oh well, have fun.
*tries to speak "understandable" english just for twisted mac*
 
My favourite German is Chris H?lsbeck, a video game music composer who more or less provided the soundtrack for my youth. Yes, I'm that much of a dork. :p I also like Erich K?stner, my favourite German writer.
 
Pray said:
I don't see what this topic is about.
Offending German and French?
Oh well, have fun.
*tries to speak "understandable" english just for twisted mac*
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i got a bit sidetracked.. i think i was trying to offend the german.. >_<

j/k.. i never try to offend anyone but i do anyway (it just comes natural =P ), it's just the way it goes, don't mind my insane rantings :balloon:
 
To get back to the original post in the thread, my vote has always gone to Johann Sebastian Bach.
 
Mozart upsetting Austrians? They should be happy for them, cause it might as well have been Arnie!! :blush:
 
I'd defenetily vote for Bismarck. He made Germany wat it is now, without him, some of Germanic states might have been absorbed by some other European Country.
 
some say he's hungarian, some that he is mongol, i'll just stuk with him being some turkic guy.
 
howabe said:
Yep. Conquered the area from the Rhine to the Black Sea, which includes part of Germany... Thta makes him German enough for me lol :p
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Oh well, if you see it this way...

That would make Napoleon a German, too. Wonder, what the French think of this. :atchoo:
 
In Belgium and in the Netherlands, as far as I know they don't dub over movies. They just put subs. Also on Tv, american tv shows and movies are not dubbed, only subs. In italy and france however, they dub everything. I have found that Italians are much better at dubbing than French.
 
Duo said:
In Belgium and in the Netherlands, as far as I know they don't dub over movies. They just put subs. Also on Tv, american tv shows and movies are not dubbed, only subs. In italy and france however, they dub everything. I have found that Italians are much better at dubbing than French.
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Yes, Italian dubs are generally quite good dubs, I saw this myself (or rather, heard it :D )

It's not true that we Germans dub everything. With anime, only those that are aired on TV are dubbed (and even there are already some subs), but the Dvd releases are generally sub-only :cool: That's it what truly matters.
 
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