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tele-phone... tele, greek for "far", phone, from the greek for "voice". German for telephone: Fernsprecher, or "far speaking" So how is that better or worse t
by rswail 6y ago
tele-phone... tele, greek for "far", phone, from the greek for "voice".
German for telephone: Fernsprecher, or "far speaking"
So how is that better or worse than "speaking box".
Finnish is a weird outlier that is similar to Hungarian but different to most other Germanic/Latin/Greek derived European languages.
- Mediterraneo10 6y agoI completely agree with your point against the GP that compound words are not at all seen as "needlessly long" by speakers of those languages. But with regard to Finnish, while Finnish is a Uralic language and not an Indo-European one, the Finnish language today is replete with calques on Swedish and German, because those were the prestige languages in the region when the modern Finnish literary standard was being created and new words coined.
- tomjakubowski 6y agodas Telefon is much more common than Fernsprecher in my non-native experience
- Tainnor 6y agoMost people would probably not even understand "Fernsprecher" at this point. It's really old-fashioned.