4 ms·
The article explicitly tries to explain its idea of an "advantage", stuffing more information into less characters ('English needs a whole sentence to explain t
by darklajid 11y ago
The 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 ;-)