roboterfußball

German is a wonderful language. It's mystifying because it can alternately sound identical to English and utterly incomprehensible. And despite being overly technical, rule-driven, and almost completely lacking in romance – not unlike the Germans themselves, of course – it's just damn amusing to read.

I jotted down a few snippets of German on a trip to Berlin a few years back. My favorite is: "Dast ist AIBO. Der interaktiv Hund-Roboter." You can't help but hear it as if spoken by a jolly older man, most likely wearing lederhosen and sporting a bushy moustache. Makes me giggle every time.

But it's the Germans who are laughing now, having developed a world-dominating AIBO soccer team (or "football side," for you Euro types). If you'd like to take on the Germans with your own roboterfußballteam, you better sign up quickly. The fate of autonomous humanoid robotic sports may hang in the balance. And yet it would be appropriate for futuristic robotic athletes to speak German, since most other languages are a bit too colorful for automatons. At least we'd get a good chuckle out of their Teutonic Robot Voices while they kick our old-school human asses around the field.