8 ms·

English has plenty of these kinds of compound words: "shoebox", "lapdog", "underworld", "housewife", "footstool", "raincoat", etc. Other compounds like "thought

• kuschku 11y ago
  Well, 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 ago
    Because 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 ago
      Etymonline 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 ago
      Which kind of makes sense, since a housewife would not turn into a trailer wife when moving into one.
  • kazinator 11y ago
    In 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.
    • ams6110 11y ago
      I do sometimes see highschool written as one word.
      • kazinator 11y ago
        I think it should be condoned and encouraged.
      • labster 11y ago
        This is doubleplusgood spellwise.
    • kuschku 11y ago
      Well, German also often adds an s or n as delimiter in between. Not as good as CamelCase, but easier to pronounce.
    • vacri 11y ago
      > a high school isn't a school which is high High school is high. It's higher than middle or primary school. It's not 'geographically elevated', but that's not the only common meaning of high.
  • gandarojin 11y ago
    > Well, the important difference is that German has actually simple, clean rules for spelling in those cases. In German, there are the “Fugenlaute”, sounds that are inserted between the words that a compound is made of. And it is not always clear, what these sounds should be. Some examples: * “Schaden(s)ersatz” (compensation for damages) – some put an “s” between “Schaden” (damage) and “ersatz” (substitute), some don’t. * In the German constitution the word “verfassungsgebend” appears, but some would call it “verfassunggebend”. There are even words that have a different meaning depending on the “Fugenlaute”: * “Landsmann” / “Landmann” (Land = country / land; Mann = man): “Landsmann” is a man from the same country; a “Landmann” is a peasant or farmer. There really aren’t “rules” that apply. There is a lengthy article in the German Wikipedia about this topic: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fugenlaut https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fugenlaut
    • kuschku 11y ago
      Landsmann is NOT a Fugenlaut. That’s a Genitiv. For most cases, Fugenlaute are completely meaningless, and both spellings accepted.
• smartician 11y ago
  Did you read the full article? The author then proceeds to explain how German allows for more complex constructs than just concatenating two nouns.
  • boken 11y ago
    There are plenty of English compounds that don't fit that description: forthright, downright, forthcoming; wisecrack (but "wise woman"); blackboard, greenback, greengrocer, yellowbelly; drive-by, drive-in; tapout, all out, balls-out, blackout, checkout. A couple common vulgarities do exactly what Sitzpinkler and Sockenfalter do, though admittedly the English -er is no longer "male-specific." (It once was.) I think an article on German compounds would have been worthwhile on its own. To develop interest in it, however, the author has found it necessary--as many others have--to write of one language's richness as a factor of another's lack. English is actually quite pithy on some of the concepts he claims "require a mouthful when translated" from the German: "that which is in the process of becoming" (das Werdende) is (with varying nuance) nascent, incipient, inchoate, germinal, budding, springing, arising, dawning, crepuscular, in embryo, in the bud, in the gristle, forming, fashioning, styling, or becoming. To give rise to a noun to describe that thing which is nascent, incipient, etc., does not require the ham-fisted (there's a good, playful compound!) stroke which Duncan has used: he's playing it up! If you want a single word for it, bud, germ, etc., have their figurative uses as well. And if he wanted a dictionary definition for das Werdende, he could have dropped the relative pronoun and two prepositions and written, "a nascent thing." (In actual writing, thing would usually be replaced by a more precise identifier, and the phrase would be the richer for it.) There are some rare words, like inchoant, which also do the trick, and whose inception (or kick-off, throw-off, lift-off) looks rather like that of das Werdende.
    • kafkaesq 11y ago
      Right, in English one has some leeway for forging compounds, also. It's not nearly as prevalent of a thing in as it is in German.
      • ithkuil 11y ago
• jacobolus 11y ago
  In high school, I took French classes, but my friends’ introductory German textbook had such vocabulary words (yes, they needed to memorize the proper spelling and gender of these to prepare for vocabulary quizzes, and invent sentences where the words would be appropriate in context) as: “Feeling that the end of the world is near”, “kite flying festival”, “commemorative coin with Maria Theresa’s face on it”, “ship from the Hanseatic League”, and “cemetary for homeless, nameless people”. These are on a whole different scale from “shoebox” or “raincoat”. (Personally I suspect that the textbook authors were just trolling everyone.)
  • ekianjo 11y ago
    It's still nothing but a combination of other words without space in between. In Japanese (or Chinese), do you consider that mixing kanji together to form a more complicated word is something unusual ? It's very much the same concept as what Germans do. Nothing new, really.
    • kuschku 11y ago
      Well, english doesn’t have participal construction of nouns. German does. Any verb can be, by adding a prefix, converted into a noun meaning "he/she/it who does". And you can similarly convert nouns into verbs.
  • dotch 11y ago
    Endzeitstimmung - Feeling that the end of the world is near. What a great word. Endzeit being composed of the nouns Ende (end) and Zeit (time) which form the word Endzeit, wich is the time when the world ends. And then composed with Stimmung (feeling).
  • kuschku 11y ago
    > Personally I suspect that the textbook authors were just trolling everyone. While that happens very often, surprisingly all the words you said are actual German words, and Endzeitstimmung, Drachenflugfestival (oder Drachenfestival, if you want to make it shorter) and Hanseschiff are quite common German words anyone would understand. Fun fact: In German, except for a grammatical weirdness, Dragon and Kite are the same word. The word is also the same as Deltoid.
• m_mueller 11y ago
  I think here's where you're missing the point: The article describes how authors like to, and are able to, coin new compound words in German and readers can understand them without the need for explanation. IMO this is something that's harder to do in English. The main reason for that is not that compound nouns exist, but the ability to turn everything into a noun and then combine it with others. Example: green - grün - Begrünung ("planting with trees and grass") - Strassenbegrünung ("planting trees and grass along the street"). You may be able to use "greening" here, but at least AFAIK it is not common in English since it seems a bit strange to turn adjectives into nouns like that. In German I don't even think that anyone needed to explain that word - you immediately think of the older word "Bepflanzung" (planting) and notice that it's probably meant in this context. It's all about reusing known pre- and suffixes.
  • gajomi 11y ago
    > The article describes how authors like to, and are able to, coin new compound words in German and readers can understand them without the need for explanation I guess to some extent the comparison is going to be subjective (and my German is so bad I can't really do so with confidence), but I think a big component in the discussion has to do with dialects. Were someone to say "street-greenin'" in my hometown, the phrase would be understood right away, and is entire grammatical in many American english dialect, but no in the standard dialect. Now if you walk on to a university campus and say that you are interested in neotransphilic interpersonalization most people will have little trouble getting at what you mean (though they might agree as to the specific meaning, and role there eyes at you if they study English). This is rather high brow, but these kind of fun and games with prefixes, suffixes, and a regimen of contractions are also common in 1337 and other dialects. But again, they are not part of the standard dialect. I would be curious to see a comparison of difference in compound words across different German dialects.
    • m_mueller 11y ago
      I think there's a difference in what is perceived as 'standard' between the two languages. English basically gives you a very rich vocabulary that has pretty much preset terms - common, legal, official and academic - for all concepts. German basically gives you a set of rules, a set of word stems and the rest is "Usus", i.e. the way it is commonly used, which is weaker than being part of an official standard. So different regions may have different official terms for the same thing because there is no standard to tell them otherwise - consensus is only reached through interaction. I think that's similar to how it works with English in the UK though. Now, when it comes to the initial rules, they are common to all dialects, albeit with some variations (vowel / consonant shift etc.). So the "Be" in Begrünung would be universally understood as indicating a human activity in this context, rather than a passive process.
• wolfgke 11y ago
  I personally feel that German compound words often express much more abstract concepts than their English counterpart. To give a really infamous example: Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz > https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rindfleischetikettierungs%C3%BCberwachungsaufgaben%C3%BCbertragungsgesetz https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rindfleischetikettierungs%C3%B... I'll add hyphens to ease the understanding of this word and also put the s that are epenthesis and thus not important into square brackets. Rind-fleisch-etikettierung[s]-überwachung[s]-aufgaben-übertragung[s]-gesetz The first thing to note is that adding an "ung" to the stem of a verb usually means "the abstract process of doing what the verb describes". Even this simply property makes it quite easy to express rather abstract concepts that are quite clumsy in English. Now we'll decode this word: Rind: agricultural term for "cow" ("Kuh") fleisch: meat So Rindlfleisch = "meat of cows" (beef) "Etikettierung": The German word "Etikette" means "label" (it also has other meanings, but they are not important here). Form this we can derive the word "etikettieren" (to put a label on something). From this verb, as I explained above, you can derive "Etikettierung" - the abstract process of labeling something. What is the something here? Of course the beef. "Überwachung": The verb "überwachen" means "to supervise" or "to monitor". You know the rules to find out what "Überwachung" means (the abstract process ...). Just one remark for those who are interested: "überwachen" consists of the prefix "über" and the verb "wachen" (to wake, to keep watch). "Aufgaben": Could be simply translated with "tasks", but this, in my opinion distorts the meaning a little bit. I'll rather divide it into "auf" + "Gabe". "Gabe" is a slightly old-fashinoned word meaning "Something that was given to you by someone else" (derived from the past "gab" of "geben" (to give)). So "Aufgabe" is more correctly translated with "something that was given to you by someone else to do". "Aufgaben" is simply the plural of "Aufgabe". "Übertragung": The verb "transfer" expresses in my opinion quite the same meaning as "übertragen", since the Latin prexix "trans" corresponds quite well to the prefix "über" as it's used here and the Latin verb "ferre" from which the "fer" in "transfer" is derived means "to carry" (in German: "tragen"). So (you know the rules) "Übertragung" is the abstract process of transfering something. What do we transfer: The answer is clear: The "Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgaben". Gesetz: We could simply use the English word "law", but "Gesetz" is derived from the verb "setzen" (to set). Thus "Gesetz" carries the slight connotation of "something that was set into force by some authority". Exercise ;-) : How should "Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz" be translated into English?