(Via Handakte WebLAWg, with German links) The Sky Disc of Nebra may be the world’s oldest chart of the cosmos. It’s every bit as important as Stonehenge, and at the same time a lot more portable.

The disc, unearthed by treasure hunters in Nebra, Saxony-Anhalt, in 1999, weighs two kilos and is 32 cm. in diameter. It is embossed with gold stars, sun or full moon, and crescent moon, and two curved shapes that may represent boats, for in the Bronze Age it was thought that the sun travelled from west to east at night in a boat. Originally the bronze was rubbed with rotten egg, which reacted with the bronze to give a deep violet colour. Even green with verdigris as it is now, it is a beautiful object and might be thought a fake. But scientific examinations have proved beyond doubt that it dates from approximately 1600 B.C., 400 years after Stonehenge. The latest research information and pictures can be obtained at this site in Halle (in German). Here are some pictures with an English text.

The disc has led to two proceedings: civil proceedings about marketing rights, and criminal proceedings against the men who found the disc and allegedly illegally removed it from its site (it was recovered only after painstaking police investigation and arrests at the Hilton Hotel in Basle). The criminal proceedings start tomorrow at the Naumburg Amtsgericht, the lowest level of court. The defendants are four men and a woman aged between 21 and 64. The defence is apparently arguing that the disc was found in Bavaria or the Czech Republic, where the law relating to finders is different.

The civil proceedings started at the Magdeburg Landgericht, the higher court of first instance, on August 28th. According to a report in NGZ-online, the case is the first of its kind. The Land Saxony-Anhalt, the owner of the disc,
is suing the town of Querfurt, near Nebra. The mayor of Querfurt had terms including “Himmelsscheibe von Nebra” (Nebra Sky Disc) registered as trade marks so that only Querfurt can use these terms for marketing purposes.

I reported once on the Berlin interpreter trial. Recently it came to an end. On August 28th Richard Schneider reported it. The main defendant, Kemal E., was convicted of 47 cases of professional fraud and sentenced him to four-and-a-half years’ imprisonment.

The story can be found in the archives of Richard Schneider’s Nachrichtenportal (news portal) at www.uebersetzer-portal.info. The site uses frames, so I can’t give an exact link.

Richard Schneider does always find interesting news, I presume from direct contacts. On September 5th he cited a small article in BerlinOnline , a note in the Berliner Zeitung by Johannes Gernert, describing some journalists attempting to translate ‘Tony Blair sexed up the report’: ‘Journalisten sind eben doch Übersetzer.’

Meanwhile, someone reminded me that Robin Stocks, at the Bonner Übersetzer- und Dolmetscherforum (Bonn forum for translators and interpreters), runs a weblog with news for and from members. I remember when I was first toying with the idea of starting a weblog looking at Robin’s source code and noticing this.

According to yesterday’s Pforzheimer Zeitung, I am told (thanks, Derek!), the Low German word Läägeünnerloage is to be registered as a utility model (Gebrauchsmuster – does not exist in the UK at the moment).

Das plattdeutsche Wort Läägeünnerloage wird doch als Gebrauchsmuster eingetragen.

To search the Pforzheimer Zeitung archives, you have to register and then wait for details by email. I’m still waiting.

Anyway, the Bremen lawyer Klaus Göken represented Twistringer RBM Dränfilter GmbH, who created a sort of biodegradable mat for cattle to lie on. The High German term would be Liegeunterlage (literally lying-underlay), but Twistringer wanted the local dialect version. The German Patent Office refused it, and Göken took it all the way to the Federal Court of Justice, which sent it back to the Patent Office.

The first application was made in Low German in February 2000. There is a provision in German law that the language of the courts is German, so the question arose as to whether Low German is German.

I found an English summary of the beginning of the case (starts on page 6, and the document contains more information about minority languages in Germany). According to this, a second application in High German was accepted:

bq. In its defense the office reasoned that had the Lower German version
been accepted, a precedent would have been set, leading to an
unavoidable abundance of applications in other dialects and minority
languages; this would make official procedures incomprehensible.
The office reiterated that the administrative language and that of the
court must be “an understandable form of German, that is High
German”. However, Göken is planning to address the jury in Lower
German.

Did Göken address the jury (what jury?!? some translator slipped up here, I fear) in Lower German? The Pforzheimer Zeitung, far from the Plattdeutsch lands, is silent.

Here is a brief dpa report (in German) dated September 3rd. The above page on Klaus Göken in German. A report from the Institute for the Low German Language (in High German). The Pforzheimer Zeitung, but not the link in question. And something in English about utility models in Germany.

The item itself has been almost forgotten in all this language disputing. It is selling very well, creates warmth and there are 10% to 15% fewer deaths among piglets as a result.

I am very late reporting this – the Federal Court of Justice really decided the point last November. Here is a German report from www.jura-lotse.de. It has probably been blogged. Sure enough, here is a report from Handakte WebLAWg.

NOTE: You may really be looking for my other entry on where IKEA gets the names. That’s because my entries were renumbered a couple of years ago and you have followed an old link.

Robert Brady in Blogcritics touches on one of the sad aspects of being an ‘expatriate’: in Japan, he will never eat cherry pie, but even if he goes back to his native land, he will find the cherry pie he once knew has been superseded by food that is supposed to be better for you:

bq. In Japan, after some tofu and broiled fish, for dessert there is perhaps bean paste, inside or outside some white or pink or maybe (whoopee!) green rice paste, or possibly rice crackers with seaweed, maybe an apple slice (be still, my heart!), and people live a few years longer, though it is not clear to me exactly why they would want to do so under such circumstances. It couldn’t be for more dessert.

With the large number of viruses and worms in circuit nowadays, it’s becoming hard to find names for them.

Wired News has a report on the topic.

A virus is usually named by the antivirus researcher who first discovers it. Names may not be those of businesses or brand names and should not be those of celebrities. Some names fall into predictable categories and some, like Klez, seem senseless or whimsical. One virus was named by its discoverer, George Smith, after a childhood memory: “Heevahava”:

bq. “I grew up in Pennsylvania Dutch country, and a heevahava was the farmhand given the job of holding the bull’s pizzle during the collection of semen,” explained Smith. “Locally, heevahava was used as an insult meaning ‘dolt’ or ‘idiot.'”

Following on from this August 7th entry:

TextCount is one of several programs used by translators to count text.
How does TextCount compare with MS Word in counting? After all, the latest versions of Word give a word count, a count of characters without spaces, and a count of characters including spaces.
However, Word for Windows is less predictable than TextCount et al.

WinWord does not count: commentaries, footnotes, headers, and footers.
TextCount can be set to count them or not to count them.

WW does not count text fields.
TC does

Letters/characters: WW counts these whether entered by the user or the program
TC counts only those entered by user via keyboard.

Several spaces between two words: WW counts them all, however they were entered (but older WW versions count no spaces)
TC always counts one space only, even if there are several.

Several tabstops after each other: WW counts them all, even if they are wrongly used.
TC always counts one tabstop only, even if there are several.

To see an extreme example, download the two files
ANZEIGE5.DOC Download file

and WCount.Doc Download file,
open them in Word, and click Tools, then Word Count (German: Extras, then Wörter zählen). You may be surprised by the results.

The file
Info.doc Download file
is in German – it summarizes the way TextCount counts.

If you want to count words, you have to set the settings so that maximum word length is 0. The program’s default setting is 8, which means that any words over 8 characters in length will be treated as more than one. However, I can think of no context where I would want a maximum word length.

Another problem is how to count a German word with hyphens, such as “14-Zoll-Bildschirm” (14″ screen). You can choose whether words with hyphens in them should be treated as multiple words.

TextCount is not the only program on the market, for example Count’It. Paul Thomas prefers that and also named Practicount, which he says is good for counting PowerPoint files.
But this entry is not to say that TextCount is the best – all I want to do is to explain why TextCount counts more reliably than Word.

Here are contact details for TextCount:
Linguaware
Erhard Strobel
Leisaustr. 8
D-81249 München
Tel.: 089/871 30 852
Fax.: 089/871 30 853
E-Mail: info@linguaware.de
www.textcount.de

And for Count’It, the address is probably
Ingenieurbüro Gil Déniel Software, Brunostr. 26, D 50259 Pulheim,
Fax: +49 2238 15362, and the email may be gdeniel@compuserve.com

There’s a good article by Thekla Kruse in the ADÜ-Nord Infoblatt 6/2001, pages 12-13 (in German).