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>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
by 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[deleted]
- detaro 11y agoThat's a good example. The closest I can think of is "Tüftler", but that really doesn't capture the science-y aspect and is more hands-on. More the guy building a fusion reactor in his garage, less the group designing a radar device in some government lab.
- gozur88 11y agoYeah, I read their explanation and don't really see it. Sure, if you're typing something out you don't need to hit the space key as much, but... meh. I meant unwieldy in the sense that they have a lot of syllables. I assume Germans can pronounce these words without tripping over them.
- hussong 11y agoWell of course we can! We can also buffer arbitrarily long sentences with only one verb at the very end without any signs of impatience ;-)
- 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.