International Mother Language Day

On February 21, International Mother Language Day was commemorated.

Mom, why is it called mother tongue?
Because fathers have nothing to say? (©Kidnetting)

Well, do they dominate the Fatherland?

Eighty percent of people in Germany speak only German as their mother tongue in their own homes. This was announced by the Federal Statistical Office last Tuesday on the occasion of International Mother Language Day. Another 15 percent are so-called multilingual and use at least one other language at home.

Instead, Red Baron previously blogged about the Tag der deutschen Sprache (German Language Day).

In our mother language, we think and feel, generating a people's national identity.

Take Poland, divided among neighboring states and twice eradicated from the European map. For them, their mother tongue remained the binding force and hope “Jeszcze Polska nie zginęa (Poland Is Not Yet Lost).”

Take Germany, divided into many small states and under Napoleon's rule. In this deepest humiliation, as German poets termed it, they saw in our everyday language a sign of hope as Turnvater (father of gymnastics) Johann Friedrich Ludwig Jahn powerfully formulated, “Germans, feel again with manly high-mindedness the value of your noble, living language, draw from its never-ending Urborn (initial spring), dig up the old springs and leave Lutetien's (Lutetia, Latin for Paris) standing pool in peace!”

Where the language is spoiled, consciousness and culture suffer, like in the aftermath of the Thirty Years’ War. Günter Grass wrote about the “anger about the mucking-up of the German language. Hoof prints and wheel tracks of French and Swedish military campaigns had carved the tongue's sensitive ground.”

The Fruchtbringende Gesellschaft (Fruitbringing Society), with the emblem of a palm tree founded in 1617, tried to guide the German language back into its “innate purity, adornment, and acceptance.” “Only the poets still knew what was worth calling German. With many hot sighs and tears, they had tied the German language as the last bond,” concluded Grass.

Therefore, the active cultivation of language and the learning of the mother tongue should be the first concern of schools.

©Euronews

Europeans are pretty good at languages: about 65 percent of the continent’s population can speak at least one language other than their native tongue. As a comparison, only about 20 percent of adults in the US can.

There are significant variations among regions. Nordic countries excel at bilingualism, while Southern Europe struggles a bit more. Perhaps unsurprisingly, countries where English is the native language, don't appear interested in learning a foreign language, with only 50 percent of Irish people speaking another language. The worst European score is attributed to the UK, at a slim 34 percent.

Countries with several official languages, like Switzerland, Luxembourg, and Belgium, are generally better off, so I am astonished that Germans are on equal terms with the Belgians. 

How to learn a second language well? Live in a country long enough and mix with the native people. For instance, two German parents raised their children in the Swiss Romande. They would only speak German at home and would let their kids become fluent in French by being exposed to the language everywhere outside their house, including schooling. So my children’s mother tongue is French.

They communicate well in German since they were exposed to the colloquial German spoken at home, but they were missing lots of vocabulary and sophisticated constructions of phrases. This deficiency they quickly straightened out in their professional life.
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Fasnetmendigumzug

Last Monday, under bright blue skies and nearly spring-like temperatures, the Shrove Monday Parade marched through Freiburg’s old town.

In total, 114 guilds and music groups with around 3,400 fools paraded in the presence of more than 100,000 spectators. All of Freiburg fool guilds were present. In addition, groups from the Lake Constance area, from Swabia, Guggenmusik from Switzerland, and even a group from Kiel (Schleswig-Holstein) participated. Everyone had just been waiting for the comeback of the big Fasnetmendig parade, which had been canceled in the past two years because of Corona.

The Badische Zeitung streamed the parade, with four employees reporting on the event. Here are some screenshots, mostly uncommented, all copyrighted BZ:

    

860 kilometers away from home: The Fish from Kiel

They got her captured on Minster square

The most beautiful steeple in the world in the sun.

A choo choo train

Blowing their horns

Salamander invasion

One salamander grinds one of the reporters hard

Freiburg's drag queen is interviewed

Import from Cologne? Funkenmariechen?

More witches

The city hall is firmly in fool's hands

The sailors from Waldsee (forest lake)

Permitted cultural appropriation?

A jester

Still more witches

The devil and #MeToo

The marching band of the Freiburg fire department concluded the parade

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Shaken Not Stirred

Who doesn't remember how James Bond ordered his Martinis? In Freiburg the new slogan is gespritzt nicht gestrichen (injected not spread).

Around the corner from Red Baron's apartment, a travel agency moved out, and a local bread chain moved in. No it‘s not Pfeifle but Reiß Beck. What follows is a new Pretzel Story. 

 
This morning I passed by Reiß Beck and saw a buttered pretzel promoted for one euro a piece between 7 and 9 AM. The particularity was that it was not sliced and spread, but the butter was injected.

Since I had read an article in the Badische Zeitung the other day by Rene Zipperlen about the problem of spreading cool and hard butter evenly on a sliced pretzel, my curiosity made me enter the shop and buy the last butter-injected pretzel at 10 AM for 1.80 euros.

 

My loyal readers know the difference between a Swabian and a Bavarian pretzel. So my first observation was that I had a Bavarian type of pretzel on my plate, not a Swabian*. It was not sliced, but butter was visible at the injection point?
*Do you think a Badener would eat a Swabian pretzel?

In his article, Rene calls the pretzel the queen of baked goods, a miracle of alchemy. Crisp in the arms, toasty, and with a white belly bulging deliciously out of the bundle, sprinkled with salt.

The crowning glory of the pretzel is the buttered pretzel, although a battered one: Frozen slices of butter are put on, or butter is injected with the spout in indiscriminate lumps. The actual existing pretzel is far from a mindful equal spread of butter.

So what I had this morning was a pretzel with injected butter in its belly while its arms were spared.

But salvation is to come soon, as Rene wrote. The state of Baden-Württemberg has donated innovation funding to Engineer Joachim Doninger for his butter-spreading pretzel machine. Doninger's technology, to be launched still this month, needs ten seconds to properly cut open and smear a pretzel. Pictures from the production line show a pretzel oozing butter everywhere, even in the little arms. Rene observed this with horror and as a no-go: The arms would have splintered if they were crispy.

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Waldsee

We read in Wikipedia Waldsee (forest lake) is an eastern district of Freiburg with a population of around 5,400 inhabitants. It is named after the local recreational area of the same name. It lies between the districts Wiehre and Oberau in the west and Littenweiler and Ebnet in the east.

Joachim Scheck is surrounded by 60 "followers."

Last Saturday, the CEO of VISTAtour, Joachim Scheck, guided a tour through the district. He went back in history and told us that the area called Mösle around today's Waldsee once had played an essential role in the town's drinking water supply.

 

One of the original well pits

Numerous well pits (enclosures of springs to prevent contamination by surface water) served as drinking water reservoirs. Wooden water pipes (Deicheln) led the water into town, supplying running wells in Freiburg with fresh water.

 

War memorial at Möslestraße.
Remember those taken away from us
 in the world's vastness and our homeland.
1914 - 1918 1939 - 1945
The citizens of the Wiehre

The lake in the forest is an artificial product of the 19th century and originated from two harvesting ice* ponds of the former Neumeyer brewery. In 1878, the Association for the Beautification of the City of Freiburg and its Surroundings took aim at the area around the ponds. The association - an initiative of entrepreneurs and members of Freiburg's "high society" - created local recreation areas around Freiburg where stressed-out city dwellers could relax from their working lives.

*During the cold winters in the past, breweries cut ice blocks from frozen lakes and stored them in caves or deep basements for beer cooling in the following summer.

Looking west: The Dreisam Valley around 1880. In the background, Freiburg.
Left the two forest lakes. A train approaches the Möslestraße stop.
The buildings in the valley's center are those of the Gasthaus zum Schiff (read below).

In 1883, the main lake was enlarged and surrounded by terraced gardens, grottos, and fountains, and two years later, the surroundings named Möslepark took shape.

The shabby rest of the small lake

With the opening of the Höllentalbahn in 1887, crowds of citizens got off the train at the stop Möslestraße. They made the pilgrimage in their Sunday best to the lake, occasionally illuminated with Bengal fire at night. So, contemporaries went into raptures, "When the artificial waterfall soon glistens red, soon green, and foams enchantingly beautifully down into the pond." In 1906, the forest lake glistened in the evening in the light of electric arc lamps and thus met the requirements of modern times."

Waldsee recreation in 1928

Waldsee on February 11, 2023.
The ice is too thin to be harvested.

The district of Waldsse was built into the Dreisam Valley in the 1920s and the 30s

Following was a stroll through the Seepark housing settlement where the "German" Alsace expellees found accommodation after the First World War. The city provided plots of land in Emmendingerstraße, Emil-Gött-Straße, and at the corner of Weiherhof and Tivolistraße, on which the Society of Displaced Alsace-Lorraine Residents built the so-called Alsatian houses.

Built 1775 to 1777

Our guided tour ended at the Gasthaus zum Schiff, where in the 18th and 19th centuries, rafters floating firewood from the Black Forest on a channel passing nearby took a rest.

The crowd waiting in front to get into the vaulted cellar

Tour participants were eager to see the historical vaulted cellar, but Red Baron went home instead. Thank you, Joachim, for the guided tour.

       

Newly built Gasthaus zum Schiff in the evening sun.

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Four Days a Week

The Beatles once sang Eight Days a Week, which meant love, but some people only want to do it four times a week, i.e., work. Indeed a few enterprises introduced the four-day workweek in Germany.

Most approaches don't reduce the number of working hours but distribute them over four instead of five days resulting in an additional weekday that can be used entirely for leisure activities. Some enterprises couple the four days with additional flexibility in how those working hours are spent during a day.

©HDI/faz.net

Three days off, four days at work is tested in the UK in a pilot trial and is also desired by an increasing number of people in Germany. Almost 63 percent would welcome the concept of a four-day week with full pay compensation, 14 percent even without compensation.

One driving force behind the acceptance is that people not only want to work but like to balance their private lives while still earning a good income.

The older generation, for whom the promise of a first job often triggered tears of gratitude, mourns the apparent declining work ethic.

©imago/PhotoAlto/MDR

Indeed, there are fewer younger people, and they have become more selective. They are no longer interested in careers for which they have to work themselves to death. An acceptable work-life balance is their mantra.

This is not only true for academic professions but likewise for bakeries. Young people no longer feel like getting up early; nurses are less willing to work shifts in hospitals etc. Nowadays, younger people are even turning down job offers because they first want to travel around the world for six months or can't take their dog to the office.

O tempora, o mores?

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ChatGTP

ChatGTP operates completely free of ideas like true or false, nor does it know what names or people, or birth dates are. All that such neural networks do is: calculate probabilities. The software then has a data set of, say, 50 or 100 million words in all inflections. And whenever you type a word in the chat window, the software starts to make a probability calculation: What word, statistically speaking, might come next? 

That's all, so I read on the Internet, and still, AI is one giant leap for mankind.

Almost all the articles Red Baron has read so far about ChatGTP deal with the adverse effects of the software. There is also a lot of criticism of AI-generated unreflective content and misinformation.

It seems that even intelligent commentators are poking around in the fog on AI because, after all, no one knows the real impact it will have on educational institutions, on all of our public lives, and indeed on each and every one of us.

It is still relatively easy to recognize texts generated by chatbots since sentences are conspicuously simple in construction, like my earlier text, sorry, generated by ChatGPT:

Conservative women certainly play an increasingly important role in the United States. While there is still a long way to go before true gender parity is achieved, conservative women are increasingly gaining influence in politics, business, and other areas. They are also making their voices heard in the media, and their presence in the public sphere is growing. However, it is too early to say that conservative women have conquered the US.

This is general knowledge found on the Internet,* intelligently and artificially edited. That means that students already copying from the Internet can now also have their copied texts composed.
*but as I read not taken from Wikipedia

I understand why New York City school officials issued the following warning:

"DO NOT USE CHATGPT OR ANY OTHER AUTOMATED WRITING TOOL FOR SCHOOL PAPERS. THIS IS CHEATING AND WILL NOT BE TOLERATED. IF YOU ARE CAUGHT USING CHATGPT OR ANY OTHER AUTOMATED WRITING TOOL FOR SCHOOL PAPERS, THERE WILL BE SERIOUS CONSEQUENCES."

As you can see, I am also moving between generalities, but in the following, I will describe two cases where ChatGTP makes longstanding traditions obsolete.

As a pupil, Red Baron had to write many homework essays. I wonder if this is still practiced today, but this exercise is useless in the age of chatbots.

Independent creative writing is of considerable ethical relevance because the formation of a self-confident personality is crucial for our complex society. That is well said, but this writing must now be practiced differently.

It is not only in education that we must put the familiar to the test and adapt to the new possibilities, although it is still foolhardy to write: All students should learn how to use AI wisely in the classroom. The clever handling of chatbots should soon be as much a part of general education as the ABCs and multiplication tables. Can our present teachers master this task?

Term papers are also standard in law school. Again and again, I heard that spelling and style left much to be desired in the papers handed in. If only the deadline wasn't too close, style and spelling programs helped in the past. With ChatPTG, however, the situation moves to a higher level.

Let's assume that a law student feeds his information and his hopefully correct thoughts for a legal exercise case given to him into ChatPTG. The robot will put them in a logical order and link them in a meaningful sequence and argumentation. Even more, ChatGPT builds given information and thoughts logically on each other and leads to reasoned conclusions. This is precisely the technique that every law student should learn while writing his term papers!

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said, "ChatGPT is like an e-bike for the brain. It gets you very far, very fast." A wise teacher added to this thought, "You don't learn to ride a bike on an e-bike."

Schooling and university education must be rethought. New pedagogical approaches need to emphasize skills such as critical thinking and creativity, things ChatGPT cannot do (yet?).

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