Ordering English books in Germany/Englische Bücher in Deutschland bestellen

Claudia of the Fool for Food foodblog has an entry about the cheapest way to get English-language books if you live in Germany (German). In her case these are books about food and cooking.

Grundlage meines Tests bildeten acht Kochbücher, die 2007 oder 2006 auf den Markt kamen. Verglichen habe ich amazon.de, libri.de und buch.de.

Alle Bücher zusammen kosteten zusammen bei:

amazon.de 211,60 €
buch.de 190,34 €
libri.de 194,53 €

She discusses amazon.co.uk and amazon.com too. It can be worth ordering from amazon.co.uk even despite the postage charge.

Holger Harfst Verlag CDs criminal law /Strafrecht

I’ve mentioned Holger Harfst Verlag and Jerry Harfst before.

They have now published 5 CDs relating to German-English criminal law and road traffic law.

Wir möchten Sie auf unsere Fachbücher und Translation Tools hinweisen!
Neu auf CD erschienen als Übersetzung in die englische Sprache:

CD 1: Wörterbuch D/E mit über 27000 Termini, Paragraphen und Textpassagen
Strafrecht, Rechtshilfe, Steuern
CD 2: Strafprozessordnung (2004) + Jugendgerichtsgesetz (2004) +
Jugendschutzgesetz (2003) *
CD 3: Straßenverkehrsgesetz (2004) + Straßenverkehrsordnung (2004) +
Straßenverkehrszulassungsordnung (2002) *
CD 4: Ordnungswidrigkeitengesetz (2004) + Strafvollzugsgesetz (2003) +
Waffengesetz (2003) *
CD 5: Strafgesetzbuch (2004) + Betäubungsmittelgesetz (2003) *

* Die in ( ) erscheinende Jahreszahl ist das Jahr der Neufassung

Die Daten erhalten Sie im praktischen .doc und .pdf Format, was eine
schnelle Suche nach Wörtern und Pragraphen durch die integrierte
Suchfunktion der jeweiligen Software ermöglicht.

Unnötiges Abschreiben entfällt. Sie können die Daten per Copy & Paste
übernehmen – einfach und komfortabel.

Full programme of the publisher and details on ordering /komplettes Verlagsprogramm und Bestellmöglichkeit:

http://artware.mailbox.de

Grand jury

Wikipedia says:

Die Grand Jury ist eine aus 12 bis 23 Personen bestehende Jury (im Gegensatz zur ‘Petit Jury’, die immer nur aus 12 Personen besteht und erst im anschließenden Gerichtsverfahren auftritt), die vom Staatsanwalt einberufen wird zur Entscheidung, ob ein Verbrechen begangen wurde und zu ermitteln, ob das Beweismaterial ausreicht, Anklage gegen bestimmte Verdächtige zu erheben. Grand Jurys gibt es heute nur noch in den Vereinigten Staaten, und auch dort nur auf Bundesebene und in weniger als der Hälfte aller Bundesstaaten. Im Vereinigten Königreich wurden sie 1933, in Neuseeland 1961 und in Kanada in den 1970ern abgeschafft.

John Sifton, a human rights lawyer, was a member of a grand jury in Brooklyn recently and describes the experience in Michael Froomkin’s discourse.net.

“You couldn’t get out of it?” friends asked. Colleagues were also incredulous. I am a human rights lawyer and a private investigator and I work on a lot of cases involving detainees at Guantanamo Bay or secret CIA prisons-facilities in which grand juries are not used. Few believed that prosecutors allowed me to serve. Others were amazed that I didn’t lie outright in order to avoid service, as others apparently have. (Various lies suggested: “I’m a Quaker, etc.” “I’m a vociferous racist; I just can’t be impartial,” and “I typically have to urinate every five to ten minutes.”)

The truth is, it isn’t easy to get out of grand jury service. Grand juries aren’t like trial juries. Unlike trial juries, there is no adversarial process, no judges and no lawyers for the defendants; the only officials present are Assistant District Attorneys (ADAs), who run the process with a subtle but steely fist. The ADAs aren’t as anxious about particular jurors as attorneys might be with trial juries. Unlike with a trial jury, votes are not as momentous, and a single juror is not as vital.

In conclusion:

I don’t mean to suggest we were a perfect jury. We were not. Some of the jurors among us struck me as hopelessly illogical. But at the end of the day, we made good decisions. It was fitting and proper that the State of New York and local government of Brooklyn trusted us to listen to secret information from police, and then deliberate and make important decisions about how to deal with criminal suspects.

Why the federal government can’t trust citizens to do the same with high level terrorism suspects-this, understandably, was a subject we never settled.

(Via Making Light)

Neue Mitte

Speakers last night (Lothar Berthold did not speak, for lack of time, but has just published a book on the Weinstraße/Rudolf-Breitscheid-Straße):

Dr. Christofer Hornstein, architect – talking not about architecture, but about town planning:

1. Fürth needs pathways from E to W. These are:
Alexanderstraße (small)
Moststraße (a bit more impressive)
Rudolf-Breitscheid-Straße (the main one)

The city council has tried for many years to create a passage between Schwabacherstraße and Friedrichstraße, another E – W link, but this failed by reason of property owners’ refusal. But it was the right idea.

The Neue Mitte shopping centre would cut off this link.

2. Architects’ drawings from the investor, Sonae Sierra, created a false impression:

the ends are glassed in and Rudolf-Breitscheid-Straße appears to continue as a pedestrian zone (albeit closed late at night)
but it would be a gallery, opened up to provide a view down, and probably escalators
on top of this, the direction passers-by would be guided in would be a horseshoe shape almost at right angles to Rudolf-Breitscheidstraße
the glassed-in ends give the impression of transparency, but there would certainly be advertising there (see Saturn)

3. Quotes from the regulations (Hausordnung) of the Erlanger Arkaden:
no cycling, and bikes may not be pushed through (so much for fahrradfreundliche Stadt and cycling mayor)
persons may only remain on the premises for permitted purposes
the management has the right to ask people to leave

This was an excellent brief introduction, and (as yet) not reported in the Fürther Nachrichten, perhaps because they were busy interviewing and photographing the main speaker outside.

Dr. Alexander Mayer introduced the materials in his latest newsletter (see my recent entry)

Dr. Holger Pump-Uhlmann, co-author of a book Angriff auf die City

Es ist erschreckend. Bald schon wöchentlich gehen Meldungen über neue in Planung oder im Bau befindliche innerstädtische Einkaufszentren durch die Gazetten. In manchen Städten werden bedenkenlos historische Stadtgrundrisse zerstört, Baudenkmale beiseite geräumt und die Verödung traditioneller Einkaufszonen in Kauf genommen, um neuen Einkaufszentren Platz zu machen. Obwohl seit Jahren kein Wachstum im Einzelhandel zu verzeichnen ist, werden ständig weitere Verkaufsflächen geschaffen. Es scheint, dass diese Umformungen um jeden Preis verwirklicht werden sollen, auch wenn damit der Verlust einer über Jahrhunderte gewachsenen Stadtkultur verbunden ist. Im vorliegenden Aufsatzband beschäftigen sich namhafte Architekturkritiker, Stadtsoziologen, Stadtplaner, Geografen, Consulter, Makler und Betreiber von Einkaufszentren aus unterschiedlichsten Blickwinkeln mit diesem Thema.

The talk was nothing like as aggressive as the above publisher’s blurb or the local paper make it appear. Topics were:

history of forms of shops
department store has been on the way out for years
followed by big centres outside towns
currently the trend is to shopping centres inside towns

Building in town is a good idea, but above a certain size, a centre bleeds the rest of the town shops dry
car parks should be small enough for shoppers to consider parking elsewhere, so they do not just visit the shopping centre but walk through the rest of the town too
figures on effective floor areas pro inhabitant, and on distances from other attractions, were given
procedure of investors like Sonae Sierra: they nearly always approach the town council themselves with a plan they say is final, and insist there be no publicity, or they will withdraw
financing of investors: at least before the banking crisis, they made 8% on their investment (for how long?) – they quickly sold to other investors, who undertook obligations for a period of years (how long?), so that the first investor soon had no financial risk at all
investors were expanding into eastern Europe, but financial problems there mean they are concentrating on Germany again
as in a snowball scheme, the investor is constantly looking for new projects
no criticism of the investor, and the constant expansion is sensible business behaviour
but town/city councils are naive
the town should draw up a plan and invite tenders
the building of a shopping centre in an existing city is too complex for councils to assess – they need to call in experts

Problems of the existing City Center:
badly planned: usually there are entrances only at both ends of shopping centres, not in the middle
there is usually an attraction in the centre, but that is not the case here (see picture)
the lowest level is too dark

It could be improved, but apparently there are problems with the private owners.

If a city centre begins to die, the sequence of shops is:
Fachgeschäft (specialist shop)
Billigfilialist (cheap chainstore, e.g. McGeiz I suppose)
1-Euro shop (there’s one of these next door and one across the road)
Insurance agency
Piercing salon (maybe there are more of these in Braunschweig than in Fürth?)
Empty

The arguments about the size of the centre seemed convincing to me. Of course one would need to read the book. According to the Fürther Nachrichten, Pump-Uhlmann was involved of a long-term study of twelve cities with shopping centres. If it was found that purchasing increased in only 5 of them, that’s nearly 50 per cent.

The bigger problem is planning an alternative. Passages or arcades on the Wölfel land, a small centre on the Fiedler area and something else on the Commerzbank site – who is going to plan this?

Dwelly online

Simon at Omniglot reports that Dwelly’s Gaelic Dictionary is now online. Not only that, but there are plans to update it.

The copy of Dwelly’s Illustrated Gaelic to English Dictionary I have (I don’t speak Gaelic, but when I was investigating Europe-wide cuts of meat it was recommended to me) is dated 1994. There aren’t that many illustrations, but they are useful. For instance, under breacan an fhéilidh there are pictures of the traditional belted plaid (the kilt being an English invention – see OUPBlog today). Diagrams of meat cuts are under closach – but no graphics online (yet?).

1911 census/Volkszählung 1911

Since I do some family history, I was excited to find the 1911 census for England and Wales, or most of it, was made available online yesterday. Some parts, relating to infirmity, are regarded as personal and therefore only being made available in January 2012, but as for the rest, there was obviously a decision to break the 100-year rule – I was expecting to see this material in 2010.

Official 1911 census website.

Information page.

Useful information on how to access the site.

One thing I found mystifying – an aunt of mine, who I haven’t researched before, was aged seven, her father was a butler and her mother or both parents seem to have run a boarding house. One of the boarders, no relation, had the occupation ‘electrical sketch proprietor and comedian’. Maybe the OED will help me with the first part of that.

Shopping centre plans in Fürth/Bürgerinitiative Eine Bessere Mitte für Fürth

I’ve already mentioned the mayor’s secret plans to replace part of the centre of Fürth by a huge new shopping centre. Now a protest group has formed, in favour of a better plan: Bürgerinitiative.

Here are some of them disseminating information in Rudolf-Breitscheid-Straße last Saturday:

On Thursday January 15, i.e. tomorrow, there is to be a talk by an architect, co-editor of a book on the effect of shopping centres on city centres, Dr. Holger Pump-Uhlmann, preceded by something about the history of the Rudolf-Breitscheid-Straße, formerly Weinstraße, with pictures, by Lothar Berthold, who publishes books on the history of Fürth.

The latest newsletter from the Stadtheimatpfleger, Dr. Alexander Mayer, summarizes the plans and contains a lot of photos with clear indications of which buildings would be demolished if the project Neue Mitte went ahead as planned (and the potential investor is apparently not prepared to give way on the main points). It’s Rundbrief no. 47.

John DeFrancis and Derek Bryan

I see that John DeFrancis died on January 2, 2009, and that he had an exciting life (via languagehat).

Biography:

John DeFrancis, emeritus professor of Chinese at the University of Hawaii, began his career in Chinese immediately after graduating from Yale in 1933 by spending three years studying and traveling in China. Apart from academic study, his learning experience included grassroots contact with the language and people in the course of a 4,000-mile trip in Northwest China and Mongolia that involved trekking 1,000 miles across the Gobi Desert by camel and floating 1,200 miles down the Yellow River on an inflated sheepskin raft.

It was his books that were used in class when I learnt Chinese. I started in 1969, when they were fairly new, and went through the three sets of three volumes (basic text plus character text and reader) in evening classes, first at Holborn College in Red Lion Square. We eventually did the Cambridge O Level and A Level exams, which unlike the London exams were intended for non-native speakers, so instead of four novels at A Level we did something like four short stories or extracts from longer books. I think I still have the books somewhere in Upminster. We did a story by Lu Xun, can’t remember which, and something by Ba Jin.

Later I attended courses in my spare time at Cologne University (classical poetry) and Bonn University (where the diplomats studied). But I never made the leap to fast reading or real fluency, although I reached the point where it would not have been hard.

The DeFrancis books fascinated me with their setting in a world quite unlike Chairman Mao’s China, a world where a young American student could strike up a friendship with a young Chinese student in Beijing.

Our teacher was Derek Bryan, who had left the diplomatic service after his sympathetic view of Communism became known – I see he has made Wikipedia and didn’t realize he was a friend of Donald Maclean’s, nor that he helped resolve the Yangtze Incident (he was in China from 1933 to 1943). Derek wasn’t a Communist – he was a Quaker – and he was an ideal person to introduce China. One problem, however, was that he too often corrected DeFrancis, saying ‘you wouldn’t say it that way’ – I had the feeling that we should rely on the book slightly more and find out for ourselves later what was more natural. Another problem of learning Chinese was the big gap between the vocabulary of Mao and the People’s Daily, and everything published in China, and literature, because every unfamiliar character took such a long time to look up.

I see that Derek and DeFrancis were born in 1910 and 1911, but Derek died in 2003, so he only reached the age of 92 (perhaps I should brush up my Chinese again).

DeFrancis’s books were more approachable than the ones from China, which at that time were also heavily politicized. I see most of them have been revised – here is a list of his books.

Derek Bryan: obituary in the Guardian; remarks on a visit to China in 1999.