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Why the German language has so many great words
- gozur88 11y ago>The only important structural difference between the German and the English in these compounds is whether there is a written space between the two nouns... I still don't understand how creating these huge, unwieldy words is an advantage. If a useful word contains more than about four syllables people tend to shorten it, just like they would an English phrase.
- ekianjo 11y agoThere is none. This is another article made of thin air.
- jacobush 11y agoI dunno. A long Germanic word feels different, than the English composite. (Swedish native here, we compose words just like in German.)
- ant6n 11y agoThat's like saying if a sentence has too many syllables, I'll just pro...
- darklajid 11y agoThe article explicitly tries to explain its idea of an "advantage", stuffing more information into less characters ('English needs a whole sentence to explain the concept of a single albeit long word in German'). Disclaimer: I'm German. I like my native language. But I don't think that it is more concise than English in any use case I can think of and while I feel that the article is interesting and amusing, it's not comparing the real world German to English. The examples are valid, the article didn't seem wrong, but .. I doubt that this has any significance. Unwieldy is a crappy attribute of course. They aren't unwieldy. Foreign, strange to you? Sure, can't argue with that. Unwieldy though? Don't judge what you don't know.
- ra1n85 11y agoAre there any English words that capture an abstract concept with great precision, and do not exist in the German language?
- WalterBright 11y agoLet's see, schadenfreude, oops. Try again: zeitgeist, drat. I'm coming up kaput. Mox nix anyway.
- darklajid 11y agoI wouldn't know any, at 1:30am in the morning. I do know that lots of things become a mess if you try to translate them to German (with my background, on this board: You certainly don't want to learn about German words for mother/main board, stack or similar things. Or - let's do one: "Stack" was taught as "Kellerspeicher" for a while, which is the combination of "Keller"/basement and "Speicher"/memory). Back to the original question: Aren't the general concepts the same, can't you capture the same stuff in exactly the same precision in English? Are we just talking about the way ~some~ concepts can be compressed into a single noun quite well vs. a succinct sentence?
- detaro 11y agoOh, yeah, German CS books can be annoying, especially older ones where every author had their own way of translating things. stack = "Kellerspeicher" = "Keller" = "Stapel" (literal translation of "stack") = "Stapelspeicher". That said, PC components mostly are very direct translations that IMHO work well. main board = "Hauptplatine", hard disk = "Festplatte" (which apparently in the beginning led to confusion to why the IT departments are ordering such expensive catering, but nowadays is established), ... are all easy to map.
- vacri 11y agoI wonder what the German equivalent of "boffin" is?
- deleted 11y ago
- krylon 11y ago> I still don't understand how creating these huge, unwieldy words is an advantage. It can be a great deal of fun to force words together for the sheer perversity of it. In English, on the other hand, I enjoy the less rigid grammatical structure and the ability to use phrases that can be nearly impossible to translate.
- hussong 11y agoUnwieldy is in the eye of the beholder, I guess. As a native speaker, I definitely prefer "Parkraumbewirtschaftungszone" over "Zone bewirtschafteten Parkraumes", "Zone, in welcher Raum zum Parken bewirtschaftet wird". The example may show that once you start chopping up a long word, you tend to end up with a pile of messy inflections and possessive pronouns. In English, you might say something like "paid parking area", but I'd argue that would carry less meaning.
- gaur 11y agoEnglish has plenty of these kinds of compound words: "shoebox", "lapdog", "underworld", "housewife", "footstool", "raincoat", etc. Other compounds like "thoughtexperiment", "cocktaildress" or "middleschool" are written with spaces, simply by convention. We could write them without spaces if we wanted to. The author even says as much: "Both German and English can create compound words out of most parts of speech, not just nouns, and English sometimes hyphenates them or even writes them as one word". So it seems like the answer to the initial question ("So what is it about the German language that allows for such constructions?") is "arbitrary spelling rules".
- kuschku 11y agoWell, the important difference is that German has actually simple, clean rules for spelling in those cases. Why does english make a difference between housewive and middle school?
- dublinben 11y agoBecause the word housewife is hundreds of years old, and middle school isn't. Over time, compound nouns drift closer. They start out as two words, are then joined by a hyphen, and then become a single concatenated word.
- kazinator 11y agoEtymonline corroborates you; it places the origin of "housewife" in the 13th century. (You would think there was basically no other kind of wife until well into the Industrial Revolution.)
- usrusr 11y agoWhich kind of makes sense, since a housewife would not turn into a trailer wife when moving into one.
- kazinator 11y agoIn many cases, words that linguists call "non-compositional compounds" end up, in English, as a single word. For instance a "blackboard" isn't a "black board": it is not simply any old board that is black. I.e. the semantics of the composition is not the composition of the semantics. Some compound words in English have a history which starts as two separate words, then later joined with a hyphen, an finally conjoined without a hyphen. This roughly follows their evolution into a non-compositional noun. "Newspaper" was once "news-paper" for instance. Words like "high school" are the unfortunate exceptions; a high school isn't a school which is high, yet it's written as if it were two words. It's certainly not spoken that way; there is a difference between "high class", "high seas", "high concept" and "high school". The "school" is uttered without the slightest pause in front of it, and de-emphasized. Exactly like "board" in "blackboard", or "wife" in "housewife". For what it's worth, at least English orthography doesn't string together long runs of words into an undelimited string.
- dunkelheit 11y agoGerman is the Java of human languages.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- kuschku 11y agoWhich is an awesome concept, if the alternatives are PHP (english).
- krylon 11y agoEnglish would be Perl, obviously. ;-)
- wolfgke 11y agoThis would imply that lots of English text can only be written, but hardly understood by someone else. No, really: I think PHP is the better comparison.
- krylon 11y agoWell, but English is a very pragmatic language, "importing" ideas (vocabulary, mainly) freely from other languages, with a rather loose (dare I say "messy"? Compared to Latin, at least...) syntax that offers a lot of flexibility, making, as they say, easy things easy and hard things possible, choosing expressiveness over conceptual clarity/elegance. Sounds a little like Perl to me. ;-) OTOH, PHP has taken inspiration from Perl, so I do not disagree very strongly.
- kazinator 11y agoThe german language has long words simply because its written form (orthography) doesn't require spaces between the elements of a noun phrase. So whereas in English we write "law school entrance examination test requirements", the German written transliteration of that will string the words together without spaces. Calling that a "word" makes a strawman out of the concept of a word.
- bad_alloc 11y agoJuraschuleaufnahmeprüfungsvoraussetzungen btw. Although nobody would actually say that. More like "Aufnahmeprüfungskriterien für die juristische Fakultät".
- kazinator 11y agoMy favorite is "memory management": Speicherverwaltung. We can take the sentence: "Achtung, Achtung, Luftlagemeldung!" and substitute into it: "Achtung, Achtung, Speicherverwaltung!" :) Failing memory management can be like an air raid, sort of. The program "bombs" and all. Map a guard page on both sides and dive into shelter! :) The CLISP source file name "spvw.d" is an acronym of this word.
- aurora72 11y agoThe german frequently employs the letter 's' to glue the words together, for instance: Nutzungsgebühr, which is made up of words Nutzung (usage) and Gebühr (fee). Or as in BedienungSanleitung. Actually, they are so much accustomed to the use of 's' if you speak them in English, when they make a mistake, they tend to mistake on the 's', for instance I did hear a German say "it doesn't workS" .)
- gumby 11y agoThis is because German still retains some case, while English has almost completely abandoned it.
- Matt3o12_ 11y agoI've helped some 4th grader learn English and they always explained to me that they used "it doesn't works" because of the rule that after using he, she and it, there needs to be an S (there is even a German saying for English learners: "he, she, it und das als muss mit" – in English, "he she it and the S must come along"). Since they have heard that saying so much, they often miss that they already used the S in "doesn't" and use it again. A lot of practice often helps though.
- jkire 11y agoFundamentally, English is a flexible enough language that if any of these concepts became common enough they would become ordinary words (probably lifted directly from German). This has actually happened, for example Blitzkrieg (commonly the "blitz"); now this does not simply mean "lightning war", it very much references a particular part of a particular war. Also, Zeitgeist is used in English, but doesn't simply translate to "spirit of the time". Often such compound words mean more than the sum of their parts (as I guess the OP kind of meant), which is what makes them interesting to other languages. OTOH, it seems pretty rare these constructs actually describe something that English doesn't have a word/phrase for already. In fact, I would say that its not so much that German has such constructs in their language that makes them interesting, and more that as a different culture they have different words to describe different concepts. Edit: I should probably point out that I am a native English speaker that can speak fluently Norwegian. "Ohrwurm" and "Wunderkind" are such nonsense examples in this case; they are literal translations (just without the space, and are understandable from any Scandinavian language), and they are pretty much anti examples. Using foreign words that mean exactly the same as the English equivalents is nothing but pretentious, and doesn't support his central argument at all.
- dublinben 11y ago>Also, Zeitgeist is used in English, but doesn't simply translate to "spirit of the time". Except is generally does. That is still the primary definition in any common dictionary, and the understood meaning of this word.
- to3m 11y agositzpinkler! I had no idea this was actually a word. 15 years ago, when I was a young man in my early 20s, I lived in the top floor of a house, sharing that floor (and that floor's bathroom) with two other people: a German chap, and an English girl. Fast forward about six months and somehow one day a conversation took whatever turn would be required for it to be appropriate for me to say: "Well, I almost always leave the seat down, because I almost always sit down to take a piss." Cue a sudden burst of laughter from the German - who says they don't have a sense of humour? - because it turned out he did exactly the same thing. Good to know it wasn't just me at least, I suppose. "Well" said our floormate. "I always wondered how such a pair of inconsiderately dirty bastards were still so consistently good at politely leaving the seat down." There were 3 men in the house, and the 3rd man would occasionally use "our" bathroom. So the very next day the German guy put a sign up on the door in order to keep him out. SIT PISSERS ONLY.
- hussong 11y agoThere's also "Heimscheißer" -- someone who strongly prefers taking a dump in the comfort of his own home, and may even be incapable of doing so elsewhere, except for emergency situations.
- wolfgke 11y agoOr "Gehemmtpinkler" - a person that is unable to urinate at an urinal if he thinks that somebody might be looking at him or even is in the same room.
- 1wd 11y agoSince that word is somewhat noted for its use in the German dubbed movie American Pie, I just wondered what the original uses instead. Apparently: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=shitbreak http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=shitbreak
- amelius 11y agoIncidentally, it is probably also the best language to swear in :)
- gumby 11y agoCantonese is the best language to swear in!
- miracle_code 11y agoNo, Dutch is!
- junto 11y agoIs there any language that can compare to the amazing variety of expressiveness offered by the word "fuck" though? http://www.angelfire.com/or/mckennap/fuck.html http://www.angelfire.com/or/mckennap/fuck.html P.s. Angelfire... Now that brings back memories.
- mindcrime 11y agoIncidentally, it is probably also the best language to swear in :) I thought that was French![1] "It's like wiping your ass with silk. I love it". [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1BHuYOb8fM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1BHuYOb8fM
- etqwzutewzu 11y agoObligatory quote from Charles V: "I speak Spanish to God, Italian to Women, French to Men, and German to my Horse."
- dschiptsov 11y agoReally, more than Sanskrit?)
- draw_down 11y agoColloquial English, at least in America, has the idea of a "punchable face." Perhaps not as catchy as the German word (which is just a couple words jammed together anyway), but they're similar. I really hate this phrase. I just generally find it repulsive, but also 99% of the people who say it would never hit anyone.
- wjj 11y agoI heard German has more abstract words , is that true?
- kafkaesq 11y agoNot necessarily more "abstract", but for various reasons here are more words imbued with double- or multiple meanings. That and there's intrinsically more positional freedom for certain categories of words; e.g. Werdende in the above article is essentially the same word as the verb participle werdend, but placed in a position (that of a nounified adjective) which basically doesn't work in English. The analogous construction in English would be "the becoming" or "the expecting", implicitly referring to a thing or person. Other than lyrical cases ("The Shining"), you pretty much wouldn't use that formulation in English.
- phabian 11y agoReading Kafka in german is so much more modern and musical than in english or any other language. Kafka in english sounds almost sentimental, less modern. At least thats my feeling. In english translators often break his long paragraphs and sentences. Samuel Beckett said that he used to read most of Kafka in german, especially the Castle - Das Schloß.
- krylon 11y agoI once had the unusual task of helping to translate a lengthy set of requirement specification documents for a migration between to ERP systems from German to English. My overall impression is that German lends itself far easier to lengthy, nested, convoluted sentences. You can build long sentences in English, too, but their structure tends to be ... flatter? So in translating, I would often break up monstrous monolithic sentences ("Bandwurmsatz", as we say in German) into several shorter ones. It is different, I guess, when translating literature, but translating literature is probably really, really hard anyway. So try to have pity on those poor people who had to translate Kafka. I generally prefer to read literature in its original language, but English is the only foreign language I know well enough to do that... :(
- Matt3o12_ 11y agoThese contractions seem to add a lot of ambiguity though. Since "Backpfeifengesicht" is not commonly used, I thought it described a person who has been getting a lot of slaps across the neck so that his face took that form. Without context, these words are sometimes hard to understand unless they're commonly used. Another example is Sitzpinkler. While this word is not ambiguous, it still sounds funny. I'd never use that and probably say "a person who pees while sitting". It might be used on some sign, although it makes the place where such a sign is found sound cheap because that word is really colloquial. Nevertheless, it does create some great words such Schadenfreude, and Werdende. While i would never use Werdende, i believe it is used a lot in lyric (poems and that stuff). Schadensfreude is a really nice word through. Disclaimer: my native language is German.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- etqwzutewzu 11y agoin French there is an expression for backpfeifengesicht, "tête à claques" (i.e., the kind of face that deserves to be slapped) that is commonly used
- usrusr 11y agoExpressions like that can sometimes be traced to a single literary source. They also spread through translated versions. In that case, even a "naturally occurring" expression in one language could spawn an expression coined by literature in another. Without further data, it might be entirely possible that Backpfeifengesicht was composed by a single translator trying to transfer the well-known-expression nature of "tête à claques" into german.
- aoloe 11y ago"Faccia da schiaffi" in Italian... To me, the German expression feels the weakest of the three mentioned languages...
- timlod 11y agoLots of the words mentioned in the article are not of common use in German. They are great words, though! For the attentive reader: https://www.google.de/maps/@53.5660642,9.9655336,3a,15y,64.52h,87.29t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1se6uYPPS5hUxnuu2LG88hsw!2e0!7i13312!8i6656!6m1!1e1 https://www.google.de/maps/@53.5660642,9.9655336,3a,15y,64.5...
- sn41 11y agoSanskrit is similar. There are elaborate rules for combining, called "Sandhi" [1] [2] which shows how nearby vowels or vowels near consonants change to form a combined sound "aa+e = aie" etc. This allows the formation of fairly long words, for example - "kimkarthavyathaavimoodatha", "not knowing what to do next". [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandhi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandhi [2] https://ubcsanskrit.ca/lesson3/sandhirules.html https://ubcsanskrit.ca/lesson3/sandhirules.html
- danans 11y agoSanskrit has analogous structures, but they are not called Sandhi. Sandhi refers specifically to phonetic combinations of adjacent sounds in subsequent words, not a semantic or morphological combination. These phonetic processes are almost completely independent of semantics. The analogous structures in Sanskrit to the articles German examples are various types of compounds, like tatpurusha, dvandva, etc.
- pjungwir 11y agoI only have a little German, but I was so glad to read an article that mirrored my feelings learning the language, which no one around seemed to share. Not just that they smash words together, but that they do it with such humor and whimsy. The author gave far more interesting examples, but some of my favorites were Fledermaus (bat: a flying mouse) and Hackfleisch (ground beef).
- CurtMonash 11y agoMy father, who was German, used to claim that almost any hyphenated phrase was actually a single word. Most especially, he used to claim this when we played Scrabble.
- kuschku 11y agoThat’s why for German scrabble there are quite different rules. Because, if you want, you can turn anything into a word. Someone who turns anything into a word: female: Allesinworteverwandelnde, male: Allesinworteverwandelnder, etc. You can just string things together. It’s exactly like you name things in Java. Bus. BusStop. BusStopPosition. BusBusStopInteraction.
- allendoerfer 11y agoTLDR: English and German both have compounds, but German additionally has simple rules to form and decline nouns from participles. E.g.: werdend = becoming Werdender = someone (male), who is becoming Fun fact: These participles always have a neutral plural, so they are gender neutral and are thus abused all over the place. In official documents the German language is losing all of its proper nouns, until everything is built out of participles. E.g.: Studenten = students (male) Studentinnen = students (female) Studierende = people, who study
- kleiba 11y agoAnother fun fact: for political correctness, an artificial gender-neutral way of referring to both male and female students has long been the "internal capital I" [1]: Studenten (male) + Studentinnen (female) = StudentInnen Recently though, the Green Party has gone a step further in Germany, and now uses in all of their documents the so-called "gender-star" [2]: Student*innen This is because it was felt that the version with capital-I only focused on males and females, but still excluded trans-sexual, trans-gender, and inter-sexual people. This practice has even led to a new verb in German: "to gender", i.e., to use politically correct gender-neutral language. [1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binnen-I https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binnen-I [2] http://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/die-gruenen-machen-geschlechtsneutrale-sprache-zur-pflicht-a-1063228.html http://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/die-gruenen-machen...
- wordbank 11y agoSpanish countries do it for years with "@" or "x" like "estimad@s" for "estimados" and "estimadas" at once. And Latin America is not very politically correct, it's just respectful for all genders.
- Shorel 11y agoIn writing only, and very obnoxious as well for a culture that fights for their grave accents and correct language way more than their English counterpart. Otherwise tell me how do you say niñ@s out loud.
- jusuchin 11y agoI think the greatest thing about the German language is its practicality. "Ausgang" or "exit", literally from the words 'go out' or 'gone out' but that describes the action and noun. It is the description of the word that becomes the word. "Escalator" is "Fahrtreppe" or "Rolltreppe", literally moving/going stairs or roll stairs.
- ithkuil 11y agow.r.t exit, that's just because english borrowed the word from another language: From exeō (“exit, go out”), from ē (“out”) + eō (“go”).
- etqwzutewzu 11y agomy favorite one: rosinenpicker, a person who eats the raisins in the cake
- antman 11y agoLets not forget the funny Mark Twain essay “The awful German language”. For those that haven't read it: https://www.cs.utah.edu/~gback/awfgrmlg.html https://www.cs.utah.edu/~gback/awfgrmlg.html
- junto 11y agoOne of my favourites is "Reißverschlussverfahren", which describes the way in which two lanes of traffic should merge like a zip closing. https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reißverschlussverfahren https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reißverschlussverfahren
- taejo 11y agoEnglish has the exact same term with the same meaning: "zipper method" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipper_method https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipper_method
- dash2 11y agoMy favourite versions of Sitzpinkler, the many ways to describe a "big girl's blouse" in German: Sporttaschenvergesser - Sportbagforgetter. A guy who always "forgets" his sports bag at PE class. Vorwärtseinparker - Forwardparker. A guy who parallel parks forward, rather than by reversing in. Warmduscher - Warmshowerer. Rather than manly cold ones.
- asdfyolo 11y agothe second one is also called "Turnbeutelvergesser" (has the same meaning) but used more often/commonly. ...as far as i notice.
- kleiba 11y agoAnd has arguably a better ring to it, since "Turnbeutel" is more readily associated with children than "Sporttasche", making the term slightly more ridiculing.
- rndgermandude 11y agoMy fave is Brötchenüberderspühleaufschneider. Somebody who slices rolls/buns over the kitchen sink to avoid getting crumbs everywhere.
- krylon 11y agoAs a native German speaker, I do appreciate the ability to join words like that. English, on the other is awesome for forming phrases that are nearly impossible to translate. "To go to town on somebody" is one I really like, for example. Also, English is much better for cursing, for some reason. People cursing in German always sound really, really lame (except for Bavarians).
- c0l0 11y agoYou should definitely give the Viennese form a try: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xd811Miduik https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xd811Miduik
- wingerlang 11y ago> English, on the other is awesome for forming phrases that are nearly impossible to translate. "To go to town on somebody" is one I really like, for example. I think all languages do this. Why would English be specifically better at it than german?
- sergiosgc 11y agoThat example, specifically, all languages do. What I find unique in English is that it is very onomatopoeic. What is a "boom box"? It's a box that does the sound "boom". When you "crash" your car, that's the sound that occurs. A staple, when applied, sounds like "staple", as much as a zipper produces the "zip" sound when pulled. It is quite unique.
- gandarojin 11y agoThe German word for “staple” is »Tacker«, which is onomatopoeic. If you wanted to say that two cars crashed, you could use: »Zwei Autos (prallten|krachten) gegeneinander.« Both »prallen« and »krachen« are onomatopoeic. Onomatopoeia is common in German as well.
- sergiosgc 11y agoOn the other hand, from a non-german speaker perspective, German is, for lack of a better word, aggressive. Cursing in German sounds definitely more meaningful than cursing in, say, Italian. A couple of months back, a bank failed in Italy. On a news piece, a lady was cursing (really cursing) at bank owners. It was one of the most aggressive speeches I've seen. Yet, if you listened to the "music" alone, it was an incredibly sweet speech.
- BogusIKnow 11y agoOne of my philosphy professors at university said Heidegger and most of German philosphy is only an expression of German language, like "Das Sein, Das Seiende, ..."
- masswerk 11y agoMy personal favorite: "Hängematte" (hammock) – a hanging mat (something to be hanged + mat) While actually borrowed from Haitian "hamáka" (it entered German first in the early 15 hundreds as "Hamaco" or "Hamach"), it was soon adopted in the form of a similar sounding native compound. (Also compare the Dutch "hangmat".) Just few native speakers realize, it's not what it reads.
- gpvos 11y agoThis word actually was originally formed in Dutch (hangmat, also from hamaka) and was borrowed by German slightly later.
- masswerk 11y agoYes, this also what I once learned at university, but newer accounts tend to skip this step of transition.
- gpvos 11y agoWhat I wrote was actually somewhat speculative. More recent Dutch etymology research ( http://www.etymologiebank.nl/trefwoord/hangmat http://www.etymologiebank.nl/trefwoord/hangmat ) says that there is an early German find Hengmatten [1627; Pfeifer], more than 40 years before the first Dutch find (1669). Still, Philippa et al. claim, the German must be a loan translation from Dutch, both because it is a sailor's term in the Dutch Golden Age, and because a direct German derivation seems less plausible as it would have more sound changes.
- tiatia 11y agoOne disadvantage of this is that it actually makes a decent spelling correction (e.g. MS Word) more difficult.
- detaro 11y agoOpenOffice was great in having strange combinations in its dictionaries, and no sense for if they might fit or not. I remember it once being insistent on correcting something over a large edit distance to Steinzeitauto ("stone age car"), which is a correctly formed word, but really only useful if referring to the "The Flintstones".
- yason 11y agoFinnish is nice for this as well. The grammar is mostly about inflected forms so you can keep things together in a single word, you can most often find a way to write words together, and even creating completely new yet understandable words by joining existing words together or applying onomatopoetics is doable.
- neugier 11y agoI made an account just to tell you the most wonderful word creation of all: "Neugier", the german for "curiosity, is made out of the words for "new" and "greed", you could translate it as "greed for new things".