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New Book Review

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"Pupukaka"
"I thought that was the Dutch word for "food." "
"You will soon receive an innocent looking package from eBay. But looks deceive; you have been warned! "
"If it's Dutch cuisine, there may be issues with HazMat requirements."

So that's why I never see Dutch restaurants around here. I thought it was just the clogs and gouda cheese were out of style. The windmill blades over the doorway would be an OSHA problem though.
 
I don't think it is bad for Germans to use whatever word they prefer. What we call a grid they call a gitter, which translates as lattice.

My Langenscheidt Concise German Dictionary gives loads of English translations for Gitter including "grating, lattice, trellis...radio, etc. grid", so I don't think you've made much of a point there. The problem is that English has a very rich vocabulary but different words for basically the same concept have different connotations so you have to know which is the correct one to use in a particular context.
There are also several types of transconductance. The one we are interested in, gm is the grid-anode transconductance, and that is known in RDH as the mutual conductance (p.14). P.17 tells us that the slope of the characteristics is the mutual conductance. The concept, "slope" is not a million miles from the concept "steepness", and you will find "slope" all over the place in British electronics textbooks of the valve era. So I have no problem with the Germans/Dutch translating "slope" as "steepness".
I think overall that the book is an interesting contribution to our knowledge-base but economics have dictated that a professional translation would have been too expensive, so we have to be happy that it is available in an English translation that has some problems.
Nobody ever translated Hiraga.
 
AX tech editor
Joined 2002
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Hello,

We will let someone else eat it.

S may not be too far off the mark after all. The common unit for Transconductance is S where 1 siemens = 1 ampere per volt. For tubes gm in tubes the unit is millisiemens.

DT
All just for fun!

That's generally a no-no in engineering I believe.
S = 1.2 S looks much more confusing than, say, Gm = 1.2 S ;)

jan didden
 
S=1.2S
1=1.2 (divided by S)
0=0.2 (subtract 1 from each side)
0=1 (multiply by 5)

This is what happens when you use confusing symbols! This might not confuse a Russian or German, but the book is supposed to be in English. On this (English language) site we will soon have newbies popping up and asking us about the anode steepness of the 6DJ8. Native English speakers who have not read this thread will at first be confused, and then may think it is something to do with anode impedance?

Maybe this thread should be merged with the Engrish one?
 
Elektor apparently took my criticisms of Menno van der Veen's book seriously, so perhaps if they're looking in on this thread, the next edition will be translated somewhat better. One hopes that the translation will be into proper American English rather than that curious and musty British English.
 
And I always thought it was American English which had frozen on the way we used to speak here three centuries ago! (And then messed about with the spelling!)

Of course English has its origin in the coastal region around the Netherlands and Germany so maybe they could argue that by using transliteration instead of translation they are returning technical English to its roots!

I can cope with American English, although I don't speak it myself. I edited a book written by Joe Carr (his last for the UK market) and in places had to try to say things the way he would have said them when I inserted or rewrote a sentence or two here and there. Hopefully nobody can see the joins between his words and mine!
 
I have yet to come across an Anglo valve manual that uses Siemens or milliSiemens as a value of gm : they virtually all use mA/V, so I think the possibility of S = 10mS is highly hypothetical.
And American English is mustier than British English in its retention of 17th and 18th century vocabulary and grammatical usage.
 
I'd highly recommend H.L. Mencken's "The American Language." Besides being an entertaining tome (Mencken had a mordant wit and a flair for the poetry of prose), it shows in a scholarly and comprehensive way how American English evolved into its distinct and now dominant form over the centuries.

And yes, I have only seen S for transconductance in datasheets from European tube companies.
 
American English is not dominant because of any inherent quality but because of American political and economic hegemony particularly since the Second World War ; and I think you would have to give the Brits some brownie points for spreading it around the globe in the first place, why even to the US itself.
 
That's generally a no-no in engineering I believe.
S = 1.2 S looks much more confusing than, say, Gm = 1.2 S ;)

But S=1.2 mA/V looks quite fine to me.


For good reasons. I won't elaborate because it would be rather off-topic, and I don't want this conversation to turn nasty.

I second the idea to join this thread with Engrish one.
 
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