On Oct 01 2004, Martin Trautmann wrote:
Germans tend to use those, and comparable translations in English writing
as well - and maybe the receiver wonders about. I was told that any kind
of greeting in the states may be accepted as some kind of very formal
attitude. Thus the reader will feel more distracted/distanced here?
Since you asked, I'll give my view, but I'm not American, so it's not
authoritative ;)
Email is much more informal than paper letters. Greetings in email are
nice on personal email, but for near realtime discussion lists it's
just extra junk, like big signatures. In an email discussion, it's
important to know who wrote the quote you're responding to, but
otherwise formalities just waste the reader's time and effort.
I'm on at least one other list which uses full quoting and replies on
top. The damn emails grow exponentially in size, but it makes sense in
a world where threading is nonexistent and replies can occur several
weeks after the initial post.
On the other hand someone in Germany may feel weird if any stranger would
send him an letter and sign this with 'Love, ..."
I think you're getting too much spam ;-)
Behavior has changed significantly via email - where everyone uses the
direct 'you' ('du' instead of 'Sie', 'third' person 'thou'?). But I do
note those differences e.g. on salutation or on perfectly different
quoting behavior, where fullquotes in German newsgroups / usenet are an
almost obvious sign of a newbie, while most of the people want short and
helpful quoting only.
This may be the influence of English, where email originated, on the
German behaviour (also occurs in French). The polite forms
(e.g. 'thou') have disappeared in English, and formality is expressed
differently, but there is still a big difference between
informality and familiarity. Public emails don't tend to be familiar.
--
Laird Breyer.