Timely Snow

[the original post, which is intact below for historical interest and as a measure of a) my lack of German expertise, and b) the socially-correcting nature of the internet, is premised on a very dumb German mistake]. I’m reporting it because there are several traps here that the unwise and unwary can fall into (that would be me, and hopefully it won’t be you).

Many thanks to “instructivist” for pointing out the fundamental language mistake in comments to the original posting.

If one were to use the correct form, “meine Mutter ist Ärztin” the results are quite different. Herein hangs two useful warnings.

1. I had tried using “Google language tools” to translate whether it was “Arztin”, as I thought it ought to be, and it didn’t recognize it. It (overly) helpfully recognized “Arzt.”

Even worse, if you ask it to translate, “My mother is a physician” you get “meine Mutter ist ein Arzt, ” which is wrong in two ways.  I knew it was wrong in one way (the matter of the article), but not in the umlaut.

Now, here’s where things get even weirder. I’m doing this from Berlin, and Google recognizes that I have a German IP address and preferentially presents German information. It may matter, but the results I’m getting violate class inclusion, in which I am a firm believer. That is, if you search for:

“Mutter ist Ärztin” (using the quotes), it reports about 258 hits.

If you search for

“meine Mutter ist Ärztin” (again, using the quotes), it reports 921 hits. Clearly I have no idea what Google search is reporting in these statistics.

The only (weak) defense I’ll give is that I didn’t claim this was “research,” and I did intend the “measure of social disparity” title to be a joke. I just didn’t realize how much it was a joke on me.

mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.

Here’s the original post, although you’re more than welcome not to read it.

When my daughter was in high school, her German class took a summer trip to Germany. She had to write to a German pen pal and I tried to help her. We weren’t sure whether occupations take articles or not (i.e., John F. Kennedy really should not have said, “Ich bin ein Berliner!”).

So I decided to use Google to see if it’s “meine Mutter ist Arzt” or “meine Mutter ist ein Arzt” (Mom’s a physician). I found nothing for either, but then figured out to switch Mutter to Vater to answer the question (no article).

With a female Chancellor, perhaps things have changed. So I repeated the search.

“meine Mutter ist Arzt” now yields 27 hits (things like “My mother’s a doctor so she can write me prescriptions.”).

“mein Vater ist Arzt” yields 649 hits.

So 4% of parental doctor hits are female.

In English, “my mother is a physician” gives 150 hits (“my mom is a physician” gives another 182 (although some are for Physician’s assistants)).

“my father is a physician” gives 571 hits (“my dad is a physician gives 592 hits).

So 20.8% of mother/father and 23.5% of mom/dad doctors are female.

(Of course, it would be more typical for a U.S. kid to use “doctor” rather than “physician,” but the “doctor’ hits seem to include academics as well as physicians).

Thought you’d want to know. I’ll check back in a few years and see.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 25th, 2006 at 2:52 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.