English vs German
When we make contrasts between variations of the same language family, we are of necessity making hay of very minor advantages or disadvantages of each.
English consists of ‘common german’, augmented by ‘political class french terms’, and ‘intellectual class latin terms’.
We choose words from each ‘class’ and this choice infers a great deal about both the speaker and his audience.
Many of these terms have very precise meanings and are not open to interpretation because of it.
So it’s a low context, high precision, terminological language.
German is a compound language, which is naturally descriptive and often operational. English is a selective and appropriative language.
Germans have a penchant much like french, to load poetic meaning and double entendres in these descriptions, where in english this is harder, and we usually use more literal or full sentence structures for the same reason. Where germans have certain experiential words, english tend to have descriptive sentences.
English uses more precision in time, and more precision in blame (action and accountability).
In other words, english is a legal, financial, and political language, and german is a social and craftsmanly (engineering) language.
And that is because english is a SLIGHTLY more High Precision, Low Context language, and german is a SLIGHTLY less high precision low context language. And even so, that difference tends to be limited to Scandinavian Contractualism (Anglo Saxonism) versus central german moralism.
In other words, germans are evolved more from farmers and armies and scandinavians more so from sailor(pirates) and navies.
Hence Prussia = Sparta, and London = Athens.
In most cases, if we could fix the german time grammar, a compound language is preferable to a terminological language. And german is superior for social discourse.
And the ability of germans to retain ‘the oath’ by the very structure of their language and semantics, without having to adopt american (anglo) legalism to enforce it is an asset. And the more I study this problem the more I want to combine the two. (What americans think of constitutionalism is what germans think of morality, but both are just referring to the prehistoric germanic ‘oath’.)
FWIW: there is a bit of myth that americans considered choosing German as the national language. This is incorrect. It’s that so many of the people spoke german, that they considered issuing the declaration and constitution in german as well as english. But since translation is an iffy thing, and how to do it was undecided, they simply failed to do so – by one vote.
However, again, I want to stick with the point that the english adopted french(class) and jewish(financialism) sentiments after 1830, and that america outside of new england, remained german in culture while speaking west germanic english. And this is what separates the rather ‘peasant’ culture of white english lower classes, and the rather ‘french’upper classes, from the american’s who are, at present, still decidedly PRUSSIAN.
And if I have my way we will study frederick rather than jefferson.