Todays’ Germanism in the English language is a rather philosophical, but also a very hands-on one when it comes just to the German language: Ansatz (prounounce: ‘un-zuts, meaning beginning, approach).
Scientists of any field will have dealt with this from the very start of their profession. If a bigger problem is to be solved, you have to start somewhere. You attempt the solution with an assumption and go from there to prove or disprove it. If the assumption turns out to be part of the solution, you call it an Ansatz, a starter that helped to create the bigger picture.
I won’t go into the details of the mathematical or physical world where the English language uses the term. I just remember it very well from a field I studied in linguistics, once, that is called Generic Grammar, an underlying grammar that all languages in the world supposedly have in common. It’s nothing that anybody learns in school.
When I was in my eleventh semester at university, very short of graduation, Noam Chomsky had just overthrown one of his Ansätze, (plural; pronounce: ‘un-zats-uh), a catastrophe for anybody at that stage of studying. It destroyed everything that it had been explaining beforehand. Of course, there were other linguists with a different Ansatz each, some of them hybrids. Well, I was under extreme duress to grasp Chomsky’s latest Ansatz, and found that it, too, had issues. In the end, I came up with an Ansatz of my own that seemed to fit all languages; it introduced a new position in a sentence structure that was binary everywhere else, except in one key position. My professor was speechless and offered me to stay in the ivory tower. We all know by now that I turned her down because I wanted a life of practice, not of theories nobody with a standard approach to the joy of life would ever consider or even want to try to understand. I have no clue what happened to my Ansatz. I should hope it is still out there somewhere, and thriving.
There is also a very practical interpretation of the term Ansatz with which everybody is more or less familiar in one way or another. An Ansatz is the beginning of a solution in science – but it is also that in a very literal sense in the culinary world! If you think of fermenting grain or fruit – the very beginning stage of this before you start clarifying it and distilling it: that mixture is called an Ansatz, as well. Or mix yeast with a little sugar and water, depending on the instruction on the package, this is also called an Ansatz in German. You add it to the dough – and, voilà, it makes it rise. So, this kind of Ansatz is also a beginning to a greater solution or mix that belongs to the bigger picture. I hold with these kinds of Ansatz any day, of course. It’s hand on, I can discuss it with anybody remotely into food or drink, and the outcome is usually quite agreeable to everybody’s palate. Now, I call that a great beginning.
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