Re: SI and German Language (irrelevant, was: Wrong SI unit ...)

["Howard W. LUDWIG" <howard.w.ludwig@lmco.com>]

Wilhelm Spickermann wrote:

> On 12-Feb-01 The Ludwig Family wrote:
> > First, in reply to the comment amount German names of units, if they
> > supposedly (as claimed below) do not behave like other nouns and
> > always begin with a capital letter, then why does the
> > Physikalisch-Technische
> > Bundesanstalt (the German equivalent of the American National
> > Institute
> > of Standards and Technology) use the spellings Meter, Kilogramm,
> > Sekunde, Ampere, Kelvin, Mol, and so on in the middle of sentences?

> You and Georg Bauhaus are talking about different "names":

You may well be right, based on the below:

> "Kilogramm" is a german noun and has to have an upper case "K". So You
> are right (and Dmitry was wrong).

The original and follow-up posts were written in English, except for
a few specific examples.  Therefore, I used English terminology.
This spelled-out name is the one and only meaning in English for the
"name" when used in reference to measurement units.

> "kg" has to have a lower case "k". So Georg Bauhaus is right.

Items like "kg" are referred to in English as symbols, not as names.
Do German physicists use different terminology?  Perhaps we are
getting confused by the physics concept of "name" (for which
"kilogram" qualifies, but not "kg" )versus the Ada concept
of object "names" (or, more properly, identifiers for which both
kilogram and kg could qualify).  Isn't overloading of terminology
fun?

> Wilhelm

Howard W. LUDWIG