…an attribute which this post could not be accused of possessing
Cycling back home from the industrial estate where I work in an otherwise romantic Heidelberg, I cross a bridge that soars over a main road with its gemütlich evening rush hour jams, and, in the same leap, over an idyllische railway line to Mannheim. The bridge, though acting here only as the scenery for the introduction to this post, would be worthy of a blog post itself in the hands of one more knowledgeable and appreciative of its design. It is certainly more complex than normal, with a second cycle path spiralling up between road and rail to meet mine.
The thing is, when I’m cycling back from work, this tributary deposits riders cycling up it directly onto my side of the road. This isn’t of itself a problem - I can move over to leave them room. But when I do this, we both end up cycling on the wrong side of the road, also known in England as the correct side of the road.
Over the years I have imagined myself commenting to the other riders: “Oh, you’re English too?” Only I’ve never dared. Not only because I’m quite so brazen, but because the grammar of saying it in German is so tricky to get pithily right that we’ll have crossed before I’ve had a chance to parse it, especially if the person on the other bike is a lady.
Yes, it is with a weary sigh that I note that German, like Latin and some others I could probably research for you, is a language that feels the need for three genders. Echoing our stereotypes of German structuredness, the language can be viewed as a series of matrices, with lattices of cases and word endings that can either be viewed as ladders to a higher plane of language, or linguistic snakes that will land you in grammatical trouble wherever you misstep.
Mark Twain certainly had great fun pointing out the bizarre logic of this supposedly highly logical language in his essay “The Awful German Language”
What this baroque structure does offer is an unusual form of efficiency. Word endings become signifiers to what action is being done by whom to what, if at all. So, in the name of efficiency, I could refer to an English lady as an “Engländerin” - two distinct words implicated by the ending of just one.
The flip side of that efficiency, however, is a certain fragility: if, after drafting a phrase, I want to change the subject noun to a word of a different gender (or, in the more likely scenario, I find that the gender I had assumed was wrong), I have to wade back through the whole sentence, changing and correcting word endings scattered throughout it to something different. If I was fed up with Eine kleine Nachtmusik I could go for a small nightcap instead - Ein kleiner Schlummertrunk, meaning I have changed all three words in that sentence (and that’s without the accusative case of me actively wanting one, which would end up as Einen kleinen Schlummertrunk…)
So German and its relatives are efficient when things go right, but each error results in a cascade of compound grammatical catastrophes. I find English to be more robust to errors: a glitch in one portion of a sentence doesn’t have to mean a complete rewrite. “The” is “the” whatever grammatical chaos is going on around it.
So this post is really all about efficiency and where it should be applied.
There seem to me to be three distinct strategies available:
- Being highly efficient in one way
- Being efficient enough in multiple ways
- Enabling functionality in as many ways as possible
Mechanical components are generally efficient in one way, but if they go wrong, they are broken and need to be replaced. Highly-strung systems will also break with the loss of a first component, and may even result in losing a chain of components, as in a German sentence.
Systems can add robustness through redundancy. This is generally at the cost of efficiency, but usually can be said to be efficient enough.
Enabling functionality in multiple ways is reflective of the organic, of the free-form, of the gnarly - yes, of language, too. It’s not often possible to attain this in mechanical engineering - I’m struggling to think of an example here, but perhaps sacrificial anti-corrosion coatings is one, where a scratch leads to corrosion of one material that results in the protection of another.
But when we’re designing our product, irrespective of its apparent simplicity, we can always consider the efficiencies going on around it. We need to design for safety, for cost-efficiency, for energy efficiency - for a product’s whole lifecycle. And if we can step away from the fragile and towards the organic in considering the world our product inhabits, we can perhaps go a long way towards attaining the maximal efficiency over the long term. Nature managed it, anyway! Escaping from the semi-philosophical and going back to my bike problem; because of this ability in German to feminise words, either I could ask “sind Sie auch Engländerin?”, which would be efficient, but would, through that word auch meaning also imply that I was also female, or I could ask “sind Sie auch Engländer?” implying that she was male. Mixing things up to avoid the problem ("kommen Sie such aus England?" - do you also come from England?) would be an option, but none of the alternatives is as concise as the original thought.
So I have never dared ask… And I expect that’s fine by the good ladies of Heidelberg.
