Talk:List of nature parks in Germany

Copyedit

This article may need a copyedit. It was recently, collaboratively translated from German. It isn't the most colloquial English, but it should at least be correct and readable. One problem is that a lot of the terminology is specifically German vocabulary for the German landscape that does not have any English equivalents that I know of. (Imagine, conversely, translating mesa and arroyo into German. And, yes, I know those both passed from Spanish into English as common usage.) An example of this is Mittelgebirge and Mittelgebirgslandschaft. We've ended up translating this into things like "low mountains" and "low mountain landscape"; I'm not sure that is felicitous. - Jmabel | Talk 18:27, 1 February 2009 (UTC)

It's a funny concept that exists in German. I guess cause there are more mountains. They need to comply with certain height and gradient expectations. I think low mountains is the closest English has to that. A bit like the Munro/Marylin thing in Scotland but that wouldn't be appropriate either. Akerbeltz (talk) 18:34, 1 February 2009 (UTC)

The U.S. is hardly short on mountains, but we just don't have a distinct height-related term between "hill" and "mountain". Much of our specialized vocabulary for geology - at least in the West - comes from Spanish, but I believe this isn't a distinction that language makes, either.

Do German-language authors use the word Mittelgebirge when writing about places other than Europe? I've never encountered it in any other context, but I'm not sure I've ever read anything in German where I would expect that to arise. I ask that because, for example, I don't think English speakers would be likely to refer to a mesa or an arroyo or even the clearly native-English-derived badlands with reference to European geology. - Jmabel | Talk 05:21, 3 February 2009 (UTC)

Hm I don't think they even refer to mountains as Mittelgebirge outside the German speaking area. Calling a mountain in Spain a Mittelgebirge would sound really weird to me. Probably best to just call them mountains.

English does get uptight about such things, though not colloquially. Remember The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill But Came Down a Mountain and the Scottish thing about Munros and Marilyns. Akerbeltz (talk) 13:40, 3 February 2009 (UTC)

In fact we do use the term outside Germany in a physiographic context for some areas in France, in the UK, in the States or elsewhere for an extensive region with rounded hills/mountains with heigths between 500 and 1500 m (there is some dispute over exact figures and some more particularities appended to the concept). I think the concept arises from the distinctive tripartite division of German landscape: from north to south the lowlands, the Mittelgebirge and then the Alps. Each of these regions has distinctive characteristics and, apart from the German part of the Alps, a large area. The contrast between the Mittelgebirge and the Alps is very marked: on one hand the mostly rolling hills and round mountains of the Mittelgebirge, comprising a large part of Germany, and on the other hand the ragged and sharp mountains of the Alps, rising like a wall above southern Germany. --Jo (talk) 07:40, 5 February 2009 (UTC)

Umm Ok, I'll take your word for that. It must be in highly specialised contexts though, I have lived in Scotland for more than 10 years now and never come across the concept in any hillwalking/mountain climbing context. If it's a technical term in some English contexts, perhaps it should remain mostly confined to the page on Mittelgebirge? Akerbeltz (talk) 10:30, 6 February 2009 (UTC)

I'm not sure if there is any English context at all except in translations or in the context of describing this German concept.--Jo (talk) 15:27, 6 February 2009 (UTC)

Different point - how about either dropping out the word Nature Park or abbreviating it to NP in the table? It's just squashing the whole thing unnecessarily (in my view anyway). Opionions? Akerbeltz (talk) 14:51, 3 February 2009 (UTC)

In the prose, I used just "park". But are you talking about the "Names" column? I say just drop it, that's what we're already doing for most of them. - Jmabel | Talk 21:33, 3 February 2009 (UTC)