In supermarkets in Z\u00fcrich (and in other German-speaking parts of the world), aluminium foil is called “Aluminiumfolie” — fairly straightforward, certainly, but since the word “folie” means “madness” in French, every time I see this word, I can’t help thinking of a some kind of craze for aluminium that would justify a name like “aluminium madness”. <\/p>\n
Similarly, the word “Art” in German does not mean what the spelling suggests (which is “die Kunst”); much more mundanely, it means “kind” as in “integral of the third kind” or “Stirling-Zahlen zweiter Art”. But, even more than for aluminium, whenever I read a title like<\/p>\n
\n\u00dcber eine neue Art von nichtanalytischen automorphen Funktionen und die Bestimmung Dirichletscher Reihen durch Funktionalgleichungen<\/a>\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
I can not help translating it as <\/p>\n
\nA new art of non-holomorphic automorphic functions and the determination of Dirichlet series by functional equations\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
(this is the paper where Hans Maass first introduced what are now called Maass forms, and showed how these non-holomorphic modular forms could lead to Dirichlet series with functional equation related to real<\/i> quadratic fields, in analogy with the case of imaginary quadratic fields where holomorphic forms occured — both are now understood as cases of “Langlands functoriality”). <\/p>\n
Equally romantic is Emil Artin’s title<\/p>\n
\n\u00dcber eine neue Art von L<\/i>-Reihen<\/a>\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
for the paper where he introduces what are now called Artin L<\/i>-functions; translating it as “On a new art of L<\/i>-functions” seems so much better than just “On a new kind of L<\/i>-functions”…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In supermarkets in Z\u00fcrich (and in other German-speaking parts of the world), aluminium foil is called “Aluminiumfolie” — fairly straightforward, certainly, but since the word “folie” means “madness” in French, every time I see this word, I can’t help thinking of a some kind of craze for aluminium that would justify a name like “aluminium … Continue reading Felicities of the German language<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":625,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[362,2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1146","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-language","category-blogroll"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethz.ch\/kowalski\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1146","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethz.ch\/kowalski\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethz.ch\/kowalski\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethz.ch\/kowalski\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/625"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethz.ch\/kowalski\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1146"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethz.ch\/kowalski\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1146\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethz.ch\/kowalski\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1146"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethz.ch\/kowalski\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1146"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethz.ch\/kowalski\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1146"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}