Noobie Question No. 7: VIDOM, FIKUS, SCNOO etc. Where did they get these names from?

[Roger Hicks]

Hi Roger,

I think we already had that on page one of this thread - go easy on those aperitifs . . .

Regards - David

Dear David,

Good point. That's what comes of not bothering to re-read the first page, in between tending to the barbecue and drinking kir.

Sorry!

Cheers,

R.

 

[rxmd]

True but look at what he says about the German way of speaking German. How each region, even town has their way of saying things and so on. I won't quote chapter and verse but I was reading it the other night.

And it still happens today; I said something to a friend of mine at work years ago and she stopped dead in her tracks and said that no one had said that to her since she was five years old and only her uncle used that expression (luckily she wasn't blushing). And everywhere I'd been in Germany it was the standard greeting...

Also, some of my colleagues had fled from Germany in the 1930's and spoke a different version of the language to everyone else. And then there's Hamburg and Berlin...

The same things happen in most countries with extreme local variations in some cases. At work we always had problems with speaking to Marseille - especially if our people were born and bred in Paris, for example.

Going back to the code words; we need someone who speaks and understands the German spoken around Wetzlar in the 1920's to go through the list and comment on it. Then we might get somewhere.

There's a certain amount of logic to the list if you pick things at random, for example, the leather cases but it soon breaks down as you go through the list and see more and more exceptions. I'm using "Codewords Description and Index as at September 1938" by Hove - of course - but there's other lists in the catalogues of the 50's, 60's and so on. I've not got the full set for obvious reasons.

Regards, David

PS Having typed all that I remembered that I have a modern-ish Canon SLR called a Kiss something or the other in the collection. Would you expect those logical Japanese in the marketing dept to allow that? But then who would buy a camera sprayed pink? But they sell them...

To be honest most of that doesn't make much sense to me.

German certainly has a fair amount of dialectal variation, but that doesn't concern the written language, and it's also not any more pronounced than, say, dialectal variation in English - certainly nowhere near languages like Arabic or Chinese.

And you certainly don't need a linguist with proficiency in the 1920s Wetzlar dialect to find that OZXVO, OTQNO, UXOOR and PLOOT are not anywhere near German words, no matter how one is intrigued by the idea that Germans must do everything systematically and that there must be a hidden meaning to this.

 

[David Hughes]

I can't comment on J K J's comments; he was writting in the 1890's.

But what I mentioned about my experiences at work was true and caused problems at times. My people spoke the language at work but seldom wrote it; we had standard multi language forms for that and the five letter code I used to ask for agreement earlier. (TUNHO was standard C&W code for "do you agree" and used at the end of one of my posts; mainly to see if anyone recognised it.)

As for an expert in 1920's German, I was thinking of the themes running through the codes and looking for the jokes and so on. I've known people put a lot of effort into putting private jokes into official documents.

And the 1920's was added because we don't always call things by the same name these days. What I call a lens hood was called a lens shade or sunshade, f'instance. And these days there's so called macro lenses that have nothing to do with u = v = 2f. Try as I may, I still see macro as meaning 1:1.

Regards, David

 

[David Hughes]

To be honest most of that doesn't make much sense to me - II

To be honest most of that doesn't make much sense to me - II

Hi (again),

This happened very recently and ought to illustrate the differences caused by nation and age.

In the papers we read about something written " 9/11 " and spoken of as " nine eleven ". I gather it's a reference to the date September the eleventh but I'd read that as the date November the ninth.

At my age I often say 9/11 as "nine and eleven" and then I have to explain to people that it means "nine and eleven pence" to people of my age. If they are still puzzled I then explain that it's a short version of "nine shillings and eleven pence" or a little over 49p in today's money. To confuse the issue further it would often be written 9/11d because in those days the abbreviation for a penny was "d" from the Latin "dinae". As every schoolboy knew...

Every now and then the explanation has to be expanded by pointing out that a penny more on the price meant paying ten shillings, which was paper money and therefore expensive.

It's rather like a crossword clue where nothing's obvious but it makes obvious sense if you are in the know. A lot of Leica code words could be like that but we may never know.

Regards, David

 

[LeicaTom]

My favorite is LOOGI K which is the code for Leica IIIC with Ball-Bearing based shutter and Elmar 50mm lens, (up to June 1945, when it was replaced with the code LOOPN)
the funny part about it is that 500 of the Leica IIIC K's did go to American GI's at the end of WW2 IN 1945 🙂

Tom

PS: ...and wasn't HEKTOR the name of one of founders dogs? Funny 😀

 

[littlefields]

The five-letter codes Leica (and many other industrial manufacturers) used were for sending orders by telegraph. My father (who owned several machine companies) told me that the idea of these codes was clarity in ordering. If one or two letters were missed, the others would still be decipherable as the item being ordered. Here's a link to a list of various code books and code styles used:
http://www.jmcvey.net/cable/scans.htm#3JAIAAAAQAAJ

 

[David Hughes]

The five-letter codes Leica (and many other industrial manufacturers) used were for sending orders by telegraph. My father (who owned several machine companies) told me that the idea of these codes was clarity in ordering. If one or two letters were missed, the others would still be decipherable as the item being ordered. Here's a link to a list of various code books and code styles used:
http://www.jmcvey.net/cable/scans.htm#3JAIAAAAQAAJ

Hi,

They also/mainly had the advantage of not being in any language, although the book of them would be published in whatever language was needed for the explanations.

Another point was that only certain codes were approved by each country as a security measure. In the 50's, 60's and 70's Cable and Wireless's 5 letter code was mostly used between countries for official purposes. By the 70's Telex was all that they were used for and the code books were getting rare as they were out of print. If you had one you could auction it on the day you retired...

Regards, David

PS, BTW, no one who has read the quick guide (Instructions in Brief) for the M2 will believe that Germans are logical. My copy lists;

A, Taking the picture
B, Changing the lens and
C, Inserting the film...