4 ms·
Cute, but linguistically it doesn't mean as much as it claims. English happens to be an isolating analytic language— meaning that words tend to be made from a s
by Cushman 16y ago
Cute, but linguistically it doesn't mean as much as it claims. English happens to be an isolating analytic language— meaning that words tend to be made from a small number of individual units of meaning (morphemes), with more complex meaning being conveyed by the use of additional words.
All of those languages listed (that I know of) are what are called synthetic languages, meaning they tend to use words made up of many (in the case of polysynthetic languages, very many) morphemes. Thus concepts that are expressed in an isolating language using several words — happy at his suffering, so bad it's good, mid-life crisis, to use a few examples from the article — might be expressed in a synthetic language with a single "word", but which is still composed of several meaningful morphemes.
Basically, "words" in these languages don't fulfill the same function as words in English, so the comparison isn't really valid, and the fact that there isn't any single-word English equivalent isn't very interesting. Not to say some of those aren't nice words, of course.
- igravious 16y agoThis I noticed right away but I didn't know the linguistic terms for it. (Isn't agglutination something to do with this by the way?) For instance the very famous schadenfreude that everybody has come across at one point or another and arguably has been imported into English at this stage (and so _is_ an English word as such) has two distinct words - schade meaning pity (i think) and freude meaning joy (i think). This example is silly because it is allowable and possible to compose reallylongwords in german from shorter words but not in English. What would be neat is if there were a single undecomposable word in German that has no ready, handy English cognate. I wonder how many "words" on this list or not morphologically discrete.
- thomas11 16y agoGerman here. "Schaden" in this case means harm or damage or misfortune (which causes someone else's joy). It can mean pity in other contexts, though, as in "that's a pity". A nice example of an undecomposable word in German that has no ready, handy English cognate is Gemütlichkeit. From Wikipedia: "Its closest equivalent is the word "coziness"; however, [...] Gemütlichkeit connotes the notion of belonging, social acceptance, cheerfulness, the absence of anything hectic and the opportunity to spend quality time."
- eru 16y agoOr how about the humble "Brot"? No German would recognize what you get sold as "bread" in Britain as proper "Brot".
- igravious 16y agoThanks for that clarification. I was going by my rusty German and Google translate :) Gemütlichkeit sounds like a great word. So German and grand. An interesting word on the list from the page of the article is Dépaysement ... meaning "The feeling that comes from not being in one’s home country" which if you squint closely is un-country-ness in English which indeed sounds odd. But we do we the word _discplacement_ which could be overloaded with this typically gallic connotation.
- theclay 16y agoHow do we distinguish Dépaysement from alienated?
- theclay 16y agoGemütlichkeit sounds a lot like fellowship to me.
- frossie 16y agoYet there are words in English that don't have one word equivalents in many other languages - eg. "home" (as opposed to "my house") While I don't think it tells you much about linguistics, I do think these kind of games give you a little cultural glimpse.