In truth, I had the same reaction and I expect the downvoters are unacquainted with the associations to Nietzsche's concept of ubermench and its appropriation by the Nazi's as well as the phrase in the German national anthem "Deutschland uber alles" which was mistranslated intentionally by the allies for propaganda purposes (per Wikipedia: German grammar is sufficiently precise to distinguish "über alles" i.e. above everything (for me), from "über allen", meaning "above everyone else". The latter misleading translation was purposely chosen by the Allies during the First World War for propaganda purposes.)

Anyway, because of those associations, my view of Uber the company is that it has chosen to market itself for those better than the unwashed masses, the rabble, the hoi polloi. This may of course have not been their intent with their marketing, but that, FWIW, is where I go unconsciously when I hear the name.

Also keep in mind the historical context: The lyrics where written as a poem in 1841 and go on like "wenn es stets [...] bürderlich zusammenhält" (if it always sticks together brotherly), to encourage the German states (Austria, Prussia, Bavaria etc.) to unite as they will be "über alles" and survive against France only if they do so.

Nevertheless the first verse describes the old borders, and the second mentions German women along with wine and singing, and would therefor today be killed by gender activists anyway :D

Is "gender activists" the new phrase to use when insulting strawman (strawwoman?) feminists?

I don't know. I did not want to insult anyone, so I avoided the general term "feminist", because not all of them want to enforce every aspect of gender-neutral language, which can be quite annoying in a language like German, where everything has a gender. Of course this case (listing women next to wine and singing) is quite extreme.

For the record, I don't think you succeeded in not insulting anyone.

That is too bad. But if you try hard enough, you can feel insulted every time someone says something. So I suppose it is not really possible to succeed, especially on this topic.

If everything German reminds you of the Nazis, you're going to have to get used to being reminded of the Nazis an awful lot.

And that's on you, not people who use German words.

I didn't have the same reaction, but I get the reference. Quoting Wikipedia:

>The term Übermensch was used frequently by Hitler and the Nazi regime to describe their idea of a biologically superior Aryan or Germanic master race;[13] a form of Nietzsche's Übermensch became a philosophical foundation for the National Socialist ideas. Their conception of the Übermensch, however, was racial in nature.[14][15] The Nazi notion of the master race also spawned the idea of "inferior humans" (Untermenschen) which could be dominated and enslaved; this term does not originate with Nietzsche.

So every time you read "over" you think of overlord?

That might be true for someone who didn't speak much English and was very familiar with the Allied invasion of Normandy.

You think so?

I speak German and travel around the world quite a bit, German is probably the language I use the least, by far.

I use Spanish and English a lot, in Africa with English and French you can get by. In Asia you find written Chinese a lot(common to China, Japan, and Korea), English in India(so many languages there).

In most cases, this should actually cause bad reputation for the countries, these languages originated. The difference is, that England and other countries glorify things, they fucked up in the past.

This is a particularly disgusting instance of Germanophobia. I guess that tens of millions of people use the German language every day makes you uncomfortable, as well?

There are some German terms that have taken on a particularly distinctive significance in terms of the Nazi era, like Lebensraum, Endlösung, ausrotten, Anschluss, even if they have a more generic literal meaning. (That's true of terms in other languages that have a strong connection to other historical events too.)

I don't find that the preposition über has such an association for me -- maybe because I've used it in day-to-day contexts when speaking German as a foreign language, like "nach Hamburg über Zürich fliegen" -- but someone upthread pointed out that it may remind some people of Nietzsche's Übermensch, an idea that the Nazis associated with their concept of the Herrenvolk.

It's possible for some people to perceive a connotation that others don't perceive at all. I was working with some Brazilians on a document that used the term "solução final" as a non-Nazi reference, to mean something like 'definitive solution' or 'complete solution'. I strongly urged them to change the term to avoid the unintended Holocaust reference, but they assured me that Brazilians in their circles used that term completely neutrally, and that readers wouldn't take any reference to the Holocaust at all.

There are certain words (particularly Führer on its own) and phrases that modern Germans avoid due to Nazi associations, but Anschluss is absolutely not one of them. It's a common, general term.

Nor is "ausrotten", at least not in its literal meaning. I'm not sure about how appropriate its use for the figurative meaning is, but its connotations are pretty violent regardless of its Nazi use.

Thanks for the clarifications, I probably should have drawn clearer distinctions.

That's kind of saying you don't like bikinis because of [1]...

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Crossroads

Better not ask anyone to "concentrate," because that would be a transparent and villainous reference to concentration camps.

As a native speaker, it sounds nothing but cheesy or big-headed to me in a company name but if your connotation makes you afraid you should stay away from using some italian prepositions as well.

In addition to it being super cheesy and cringe worthy to me as a native speaker how am I supposed to pronounce it when I am speaking German?

If say Uber I sound like an idiot that can't pronounce the ü.

Another German chiming in: Please stop using foreign words. I won't buy the keyboard and label everyone that does as .. weird. I would never enter a contract with a company that thinks the word über is cool (it is not) but is unable to write it ('schade').

Just.. don't. Occasional German references in English contexts are usually cringeworthy. Uber is ridiculous from this particular point of view, just because their name is absolutely useless. Unless you're trying to make the xth Nazi reference and think that German sounding bull.,.. might so the trick, please reconsider. The shop in this article at least knew then spelling and had a decent explanation. The other (HN loved) company is just... sad. I would suport the real über if they offer a way. Uber? Ridiculous, even before this article. But hey, who cares about the language you steal your laughable name from, right?

Uber isn't a German word. It's (originally) a colloquial word in some (American) English sociolects. It's based on German "über" and started as a loanword, but like many such words it has taken on an entirely unrelated meaning of its own.

I'm pretty sure I've seen "uber" (with either spelling but pronounced in English) on the web and on IRC as early as the 1990s. It likely spread beyond the online use when the web became mainstream.

Disclaimer: German native speaker who used to spend way too much time around linguists.

Yeah, Wiktionary calls the English loanword (without umlaut) /ˈuːbər/ and the German /ˈyːbɐ/. I think it's been a fairly ironic productive prefix in some people's informal English for a while, often hyphenated, like "uber-cool", "uber-interesting", ?"uber-dangerous". (Latin "super" is cognate with German über as well as Greek "ὑπέρ" (hyper)!)

Yes, its use is pretty similar to super/mega in German.

And you can't mention the German "super" in 2014 without pointing out this viral marketing campaign: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jxVcgDMBU94 (explanation: http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2014/02/24/supergeil_ede... )

Playing devil's advocate here, but couldn't the company have picked its name from the Latin ubertas? (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ubertas)

This, too. The point is that "Uber" by virtue of being a proper name in English is entirely unrelated to the German word "über", even if that may be where its etymological roots lie. This is a perfectly natural process.

I mean, you wouldn't catch anyone on German television pronounce Zuckerberg's name as /ʦʊkɐbɛɐk/, even if it may be of German (Jewish, I presume?) origin.

PS: I think the Duden and Wiktionary are full of shit -- I've never heard anyone in Germany pronounce "Berg" with an actual "r". Maybe I'm missing some subtleties of German phonetic transcription here, but that's an /ɛɐ/ diphthong if I've ever seen one.

Laughable names are what we do in Sillicon Valley. Our biggest companies are named after a child's gurgle (Google) and a "crude or brutish person" (Yahoo). The more laughable your company's name is, the better off you are. It's like wearing something really unfashionable in public. If you can pull it off, you must have confidence.

i thought google was derived from googol, as in the large number.

I'm against companies taking over simple words. I think Uber is worse than Apple. Apple is a common noun. In German über is a common modifier. Much more confusing than adopting a noun. I don't think it would fly if Uber started in Germany so I don't appreciate them using the name in English-speaking countries to get started, and having it expand.

Since the company name themselves uber without umlauts, there is not really a reason to spell it with ü, it's not a german word anymore. Still, I pronounce uber as über when speaking in german because it does sound idiotic otherwise.

Similarly, as I'm currently living in Latin America, I got used to pronounce english words and names in a spanish way. At first it feels very stupid, but locals will understand you better and you don't have to suddenly switch language flow and phonology in the middle of a sentence.

> Similarly, as I'm currently living in Latin America, I got used to pronounce english words and names in a spanish way

As a native English speaker who can speak decent Spanish, this was a very interesting experience for me as well. Getting used to saying your own language's words with another language's accent is very instructive. Also hearing English words with a thick Spanish accent was a bit of a head trip for me - at first you don't even recognize them when spoken to you, then after a while you sort of "get" the phonetics enough that you can think of the words as sounding like that.

All in all one of the more interesting aspects of learning to speak a language competently, or alternatively, something that makes the difference between sounding like some American kid in a Spanish class and making a real effort.

In my opinion phonetics are way underrated in language learning, especially with those learning it on the go while traveling.

I always encourage other travelers to focus on pronunciation and getting rid of ones native language accent right from the start. Not to sound more skilled than you are or to hide your origin, but it is necessary to get into the flow and rhythm of a language, which will in turn improve your listening skills and ability to adapt to different accents of that language immensely.

And in geographically widespread languages like spanish or english you have to adapt a lot. As long as you pronounce things in one major regions accent natives have few problems understanding you, even if you make a lot of grammar mistakes. On the other hand, you can have perfect grammar, but with a really thick e.g. english accent, you're sort of limited to talk to people who also speak english and are able to do that head trip.

German here. Please don't call them "Über" in German. It's an English word, so it sounds wrong to pronounce it any other way than either in English (i.e. /uːbər/) or English-as-if-it-were-German (i.e. /uːbɐ/ vs. über /yːbɐ/).

Yes, but consequently, you'd have to pronounce the cities of e.g. Spain and France or the Swiss breakfast invention Müesli correctly as well instead of adapting them to German.

In my opinion beeing understood is more important than beeing correct and whatever people adapt to is ok in my book. I even learned to tolerate the horrid ways north americans pronounce places in latin america. Languages change and mix all the time. For the good and the bad. I just don't care enough about uber, and I'll just stick to the way people pronounce it once I'm back to Switzerland.

"Uber" is perfectly pronounceable in German (I even gave a phonological example: /uːbɐ/). If umlauts weren't frequently stripped in English, there would be no reason to assume "uber" should be pronounced in any other way than how it is spelled, except hypercorrection (in other words: saying it wrong).

I'm not saying the word shouldn't be adapted at all, quite the opposite. I'm saying "correcting" the pronunciation to the one of the original German word it is historically based on is a bit silly because the English meaning of "uber" -- while the word itself may be derived from German "über" -- is actually quite specific and entirely different.

Now that I think about it, your "Müesli" example actually backfires. In (German) German, where "Müsli" has become a generic description for nearly any mix containing oats and milk (basically what you'll find on the German Wikipedia), the original Swiss word Müesli is often used with a much narrower and more specific meaning (equivalent with the original meaning of Birchermüesli, I think).

But anyway, for consistency I demand that you refer to Apple as Apfel (or Apful, if you want to stick with the original Old High German) and Microsoft as Mikrosanft (or -sacht? Etymology is a bit harder with this one) in spoken German, too.

This is literally the stupidest comment that I've seen on HN in my several years of browsing this site.

If you're a troll, congratulations.