German Culture and Electronic Text Communication

Zusammenfassung

In the German-speaking regions of Europe the literary language can point to a long tradition which goes back to Greek and Roman Antiquity (the centuries just before and after the birth of Christ). The main constituents of this written literary tradition are

• the synthetic structure of the literary language: with the letters of the alphabet we form syllables, with syllables words, with word sentences and with sentences we construct the complete text.

• In contrast to the spoken language, the numerical system was taken over from the Arabs. Whereas the Roman numerals can only be added with difficult and can hardly be computed by machine, the Arabic numerals are characterized by their strict adherence to the decimal system and their allocation of a fixed position to ones, tens, hundreds, thousands and so on.

• Until the close of the Middle Ages (16th century A.D.) the language of culture in Europe was Latin. This meant that the clearcut grammar of the Latin language has become part of the heritage of cultured thinking in Central Europe. Subject, predicate and object are assigned fixed positions in the sentence structure.

• With Luther’s translation of the Bible, German, which was until then used in a variety of regional dialects and mainly as a spoken (i.e. not written) language, became a literary language, too.

• The invention of the art of printing by the German Johannes Gutenberg made it possible to reproduce texts in large numbers. Before then anything written was produced by hand, was often, indeed, practically painted. With the products of the printing press it was now possible to reach the general public, whereas previously written works were the preserve of an academic public (mainly monks).