4 ms·
Germans are cheating a bit, they just concatenate existing words and "hey, we have a word!"
by nuker 6y ago
Germans are cheating a bit, they just concatenate existing words and "hey, we have a word!"
- rowanG077 6y agoThat's not true. You can find "verschlimmbessern" in any dictionary [1][2]. [1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/verschlimmbessern https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/verschlimmbessern [2] https://www.duden.de/rechtschreibung/verschlimmbessern https://www.duden.de/rechtschreibung/verschlimmbessern
- nuker 6y agoBlend of verschlimmern (“to make worse”) + verbessern (“to improve”) From your link ...
- rowanG077 6y agoThe point is that's in a dictionary and thus is not a random combination of words.
- Aeolun 6y agoThese two things are not mutually exclusive. The usage of these specific two words is just widespread enough to be entered into the dictionary.
- rowanG077 6y agoThey are not mutually exclusieve. I also never claimed that they are mutually exclusieve. I simply said it's wrong that claiming germany is cheating in this case. Because the word is in the dictionary and thus not an ad hoc combination.
- pvorb 6y agoThat is really a bad example, but in general this is true for long German words. Often there's a similar combination of words in English, the only difference being that in German everything concatenates to one word and in English there are spaces between the words which describe the same concept.
- thaumasiotes 6y ago> the only difference being that in German everything concatenates to one word and in English there are spaces between the words which describe the same concept Sure, but that's a purely orthographical difference, not a difference in the grammar of the languages. It's like saying that German is fundamentally different from English because in German, all nouns are capitalized, whereas in English, some nouns aren't capitalized.
- pvorb 6y agoYes, I tried to say that the difference is really minor. There's a tendency to combine words out of existing fragments in German. Verschlimmbessern might be an example for this. In English I see this less often and there are many more words that come from Latin or Greek.
- Delk 6y agoFinnish also has lots of compound words. German might be different, but in Finnish words might sometimes have a slightly different meaning if the words are written separately (with a space) or as a compound. (Often that other meaning is rarely used, and there would almost never be any actual potential for confusion, but technically there may still be a difference.) Some of the compounds may be written as compounds because that's just how you're supposed to write them, but sometimes there might be some kind of actual semantics behind it. Could there be something similar going on in German, or is it really that German-speakers just concatenate things that English-speakers would write separately?
- pvorb 6y agoYes, this is also the case for German. If you use the individual components separately, that will often mean sometimes slightly differen, but most of the times using separate words won't make any sense at all.
- jodrellblank 6y agoIs that so different from "downsizing", "television", "textbook", "wallpaper", "motorbike", "grapefruit", "agoraphobia", "airport", "manslaughter", "candlestick", et al?
- thaumasiotes 6y agoThe noun formation that people purport to mock in German is the same that English uses, as in your examples of "textbook", "motorbike", "grapefruit", "airport", "manslaughter", and "candlestick". It's unsurprising that German and English grammar would be identical in this respect, since the languages are extremely closely related. It's a little more surprising that so many English speakers seem to think the German words are hilarious; I assume they think so only because they were told to and never bothered to think about it. "Television" and "agoraphobia" are different; "downsizing" is less clear than the other examples.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- nuker 6y agoYup, Lebensabschnittpartner looks quite different from wallpaper.