3 ms·
English does this a lot with borrowed words too, like orangutan coming from Malay orang (man) hutan (forest), so man of the forest.
by NeedMoreTea 8y ago
English does this a lot with borrowed words too, like orangutan coming from Malay orang (man) hutan (forest), so man of the forest.
- Someone 8y agoThat’s a nice example where English fully compounds the word while German and Dutch, languages where compounding is more usual, use a hyphen (“Orang-oetan”, respectively “Orang-Utan”). Looking at the various translations on Wikipedia (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orang-Utans#/languages https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orang-Utans#/languages), that could be because they took the word from different languages. For example, Bahasa Indonesia has “Orang Utan”, Bahasa Banjar “Uranghutan”