While trying to translate an article I wrote in English to German, I noticed that many things did translate very poorly unless I significantly differed in style.
This is especially prominent in scientific papers. In English, you would focus on short, easy to understand sentences. In scientific German, it is absolutely necessary to write very difficult, convoluted sentences to avoid ambiguity. This made the text significantly longer -- and harder to read. However, the texts conveyed more detailed information and were overall more precise.
My personal theory is, that the German language enforces logic and grammar more rigidly than English, which makes it sort of more like a programming language. Therefore, the complexity of a sentence is directly tied to the complexity of its content. In english, I feel that it is more easy to simplify things (deliberately!), which makes it easier to understand. On the other hand, German behaves similar to programming languages: The more compact German is written (without losing information), the less readable it will get -- try Kant for example.
Hence, the primary reason for German text being longer than English text is often that it is written in rather simple (long) style. You could write it more concisely, but you would lose ease of reading that way, which is inappropriate for museums, of course. (Or you would lose information, but germans are somewhat disinclined to do that: one THIRD of the worldwide tax laws are German, only because we don't like to lose precision...)
By the way, that is why I prefer to buy English books for learning something, as they are easier to read, while I prefer German books as reference, as they tend to be more precise.
For the matter at hand however, I think that the spoken language is sort of the "operating system" of the mind. It can only think within the boundaries of the language and only the cleverest of minds can really expand their thoughts beyond that limit -- by using the language in new ways. Most major philosopher did that (i.e. Kant, Schopenhauer, Freud etc.).
Example from Kant:
"Handle so, dass die Maxime deines Handelns jederzeit als allgemeingültiges Gesetz gelten könne." (Act in such a way, that the "Maxime" of your actions may be applicable as universal law at all times. Where "Maxime" is a new word meaning sort of the "gist" or "idea" of an action)
This is not normal German: It is something new, more concise and more precise than normal German. It feels a lot like a sentence in a programming language. It would take significantly more words to express the same content in normal language without losing precision.
So by learning English, I learned to express things in a more understandable way. By learning C, I discovered quite many "syntactic" inaccuracies in normal spoken sentences. Matlab thought me to think in vectors. Why should Swedish be different? Or Lisp? Or Whatever?
While trying to translate an article I wrote in English to German, I noticed that many things did translate very poorly unless I significantly differed in style. This is especially prominent in scientific papers. In English, you would focus on short, easy to understand sentences. In scientific German, it is absolutely necessary to write very difficult, convoluted sentences to avoid ambiguity. This made the text significantly longer -- and harder to read. However, the texts conveyed more detailed information and were overall more precise.
My personal theory is, that the German language enforces logic and grammar more rigidly than English, which makes it sort of more like a programming language. Therefore, the complexity of a sentence is directly tied to the complexity of its content. In english, I feel that it is more easy to simplify things (deliberately!), which makes it easier to understand. On the other hand, German behaves similar to programming languages: The more compact German is written (without losing information), the less readable it will get -- try Kant for example. Hence, the primary reason for German text being longer than English text is often that it is written in rather simple (long) style. You could write it more concisely, but you would lose ease of reading that way, which is inappropriate for museums, of course. (Or you would lose information, but germans are somewhat disinclined to do that: one THIRD of the worldwide tax laws are German, only because we don't like to lose precision...)
By the way, that is why I prefer to buy English books for learning something, as they are easier to read, while I prefer German books as reference, as they tend to be more precise.
For the matter at hand however, I think that the spoken language is sort of the "operating system" of the mind. It can only think within the boundaries of the language and only the cleverest of minds can really expand their thoughts beyond that limit -- by using the language in new ways. Most major philosopher did that (i.e. Kant, Schopenhauer, Freud etc.). Example from Kant: "Handle so, dass die Maxime deines Handelns jederzeit als allgemeingültiges Gesetz gelten könne." (Act in such a way, that the "Maxime" of your actions may be applicable as universal law at all times. Where "Maxime" is a new word meaning sort of the "gist" or "idea" of an action) This is not normal German: It is something new, more concise and more precise than normal German. It feels a lot like a sentence in a programming language. It would take significantly more words to express the same content in normal language without losing precision.
So by learning English, I learned to express things in a more understandable way. By learning C, I discovered quite many "syntactic" inaccuracies in normal spoken sentences. Matlab thought me to think in vectors. Why should Swedish be different? Or Lisp? Or Whatever?