20:00 Nov 8, 2011 

Natürlich hast du recht, Kontext ist immer gut. Und ja, die deutschen Bezeichnungen werden nicht nur in der Grundschule verwendet, wenngleich ich schon meine, dass sie vor allem auch aus pädagogischen Überlegungen heraus verwendet werden (sicher bin ich mir nicht). Aber die grundsätzliche Frage, nämlich ob es englische Entsprechungen für malnehmen, teilen usw. gibt, ist Kontext-unabhängig. Das wollte ich eigentlich nur ausdrücken.

19:14 Nov 8, 2011 

In strong contrast to katiadegennaro, I absolutely think that context is essential - and helpful - here as well. If you want to know which register to use in English, you need to find out which one is used in German. Reading the very small excerpt you provided (at least it's a start), I think Armorel's suggestion is a very good one, but we can't be sure without more context.

By the way: The reason why Wikipedia calls those terms "deutsche Bezeichnung" is that that's just what they are. Perfectly ordinary German, not just something used in primary school.

19:02 Nov 8, 2011 

in this case context is actually not needed. These four terms are used in primary school for the basic arithmetic operations. As I am no native speaker, I simply don't know if there are correspondent words in English. In Italian, they don't exist, maybe because Latin is closer to Italian than German is, maybe because the pedagogical approach is different. Wikipedia simply calls the 4 terms "die deutsche Bezeichnung" of the arthmetic operations: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grundrechenart

19:02 Nov 8, 2011 

"Es handelte sich [...] um Rechenmaschinen, die lange vor Bau der ersten Hollerithmaschine in der Lage gewesen waren, mit Hilfe von Walzen, Zahnräder und Hebeln Aufgaben der vier Grundrechenarten - zusammenzählen, abziehen, malnehmen, teilen - zu lösen."

The grown-up narrator is looking back on something he saw as a 17-year-old schoolboy.

18:42 Nov 8, 2011 

I'm baffled by the "impossibility" of providing context. Just a sample sentence in which the words appear would be highly illuminating - or even a mere indication of whether the words appear singly and one at a time or in the sequence of four listed in the question.

18:32 Nov 8, 2011 

Sigh. There's always context. For starters, in order to answer your question about how colloquial or archaic these terms are, and as the terms on their own are not necessarily colloquial or archaic, the context in which they appear might help a lot. You could at least have quoted a full sentence, or a small paragraph.

18:01 Nov 8, 2011 

I think Horst's was the most useful contribution to the discussion - sorry Armorel for not being able to provide more context, but as mentioned it's a novel, so there's not really any way to give context except by giving you a whole chapter at a time.

17:27 Nov 3, 2011 

was sagt man im Englischen, unter Eltern und Kindern, für "Einmaleins" oder "ABeCe"?

10:10 Nov 3, 2011 

Ich sehe das genauso.

23:27 Nov 2, 2011 

are neither colloquial, nor archaic. They are the terms used in teaching arithmetic to children in the first grade, or maybe Kindergarten... If there are -- I don't know of any -- applicable words not derived from Latin, it might help, even if there no such child-language is used in teaching?