[cbmuser]

> The article was fascinating, especially the historical examples from different programming languages, and I buy the plausibility of a German speaker using “else” this way... I work with German speakers and they do it all the time. From the small amount of German I know, it feels like there might be some parallel with “als”.

I‘m a native German.

It was certainly not „als“ as this translates to either „than“ as in „more than“ or „when“ as in „when I came home“.

My guess is that the original German text used „falls“ for „if“ and „sonst“ for „else“:

„falls A > 0 dann X“

„sonst Y“

[dahart]

I shouldn't speculate I guess. :) Als sounds like a cognate to else, but maybe it's not related.

Looking up etymology for "else", I see it comes from old High German's "elles". https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/else#Etymology

> „falls“ for „if“

This one is interesting in the same way that it might lead me to the wrong conclusion. Is 'falls' related to 'falsch' at all? The English 'falls' is used quite differently, though you can start to see the relationship. For example something like "this falls somewhere between the two".

Language is fascinating! I love learning about how the colloquial meanings of certain cognates between languages sometimes have rather different meanings, especially between German and English since English is a Germanic language. It illuminates the interesting path some of my everyday words evolved from, and it's often rather different than one might guess.

[schoen]

> Is 'falls' related to 'falsch' at all?

Nope, according to Kluge's German etymological dictionary, "falls" is from a Germanic root most literally meaning falling (down) (just like English "fall"), while "falsch" is borrowed from Latin falsus, which in turn comes from the Latin verb fallere, to deceive (like "fallacy"). (Wiktionary also traces the two of them to different Indo-European roots.)

There's an interesting side note that German Fall (the origin of "falls") means "case" (both in the grammatical sense, related to noun forms, and in the senses of "a logical possibility" or "a fact": Wittgenstein's Tractatus starts out with "Die Welt ist alles, was der Fall ist" -- "The world is everything that is the case"), and in fact the English word "case" comes from Latin "casus" (originally literally 'fall' as in the act of falling down), and the German use of Fall in the senses having to do with logic and grammar was a conscious loan translation which Kluge says was devised by Christoph Helwig in the 17th century (intending to translate Latin "casus").

Kluge says that the grammatical sense of Latin "casus" for noun cases was itself a loan translation in Latin from the Greek πτῶσις (literally, 'fall(ing)') which was used by "Stoics" to refer to noun forms by analogy with the possible ways that dice could "fall" when you rolled them. (I don't know why the Stoics would have been the first to write about grammar this way, but maybe...) Apparently the word ptosis is now mainly used to refer to drooping eyelids (!).

Anyway, the idea of different ways that dice (or nouns or fate or situations) could "fall" are different "cases" is a commonality among many languages but the relationship is apparently conscious, on the part of educated people like Christoph Helwig who were trying to find ways of translating technical terms.

That also means that if the German programmers in the mid-20th century were trying to translate "falls ... dann ... sonst" the best English translation would plausibly have been "case ... then ... else" rather than "if ... then ... else". :-)

(English "else" is usually used to translate "sonst" in "was sonst"/"sonst (et)was", but "otherwise" is usually used to translate "sonst" as a conjunction. So you could also imagine that the "else" was inspired either by the dialectal form some other people in this thread are mentioning, or by someone who just didn't realize that "otherwise" would be more usual in this context for Americans.)

[1wd]

Furthermore: "otherwise" translates to "andernfalls", which is basically "im anderen Fall" i.e. "in the other case".