6 ms·

I love the expressiveness of German. This seems less like an improvement gone awry though, and more like a classic case of what in English we'd call "bait and

I love the expressiveness of German. This seems less like an improvement gone awry though, and more like a classic case of what in English we'd call "bait and switch."

TheSpiceIsLife 5y ago
I don't really see how these "there's a word for that in German" are much, if any, of an improvement over their English equivalents. Verschlimmbesserung Improvementagrrivation It's only three characters shorter, and English being a Germanic language, English is often referred to as simplified German, the languages maps pretty much one to one in the general case. English does the same sort of thing were you'll see something like use case become use-case and then usecase. This is called portmanteau in English, and here's the Wikipedia article, with some common examples. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portmanteau https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portmanteau Edit to add: also compound words https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compound_(linguistics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compound_(linguistics)
- coldtea 5y ago
  >I don't really see how these "there's a word for that in German" are much, if any, of an improvement over their English equivalents. Verschlimmbesserung Improvementagrrivation It's only three characters shorter The different is that the former is a legit syntax/form of a composite word in German (where you can combine words more freely), whereas Improvementagrrivation is not. Also the former conveys a meaning, whereas the latter would have people scratching their heads. The limitation with port-manteu and/or compound words in English is that you don't just create them and that's it: they also need to be adopted in order to be part of the language, accepted as words and understood as terms and intention (and not just an error of forgeting to add a space between two words), etc. In programming terms, one might say that German has first-class support for compound words, whereas with English you need to wait for each new word to slowly be added to the vocabulary.
  - TheSpiceIsLife 5y ago
    I only dropped the space so as to not count it. It's effectively the same as saying "improvement aggravation". Communication can be defined as information that makes a difference, and the German verschlimmbesserung adds nothing. It literally transliterates to the exact same thing in English. I don't really agree much with your last point. Someome still has to come up with the word in German, and others have to use it. Edit: fixed a tapographical error <- see, it works in English too, as my sibling comment pointed out with updowngrade.
    - coldtea 5y ago
      >It's effectively the same as saying "improvement aggregation" No, it's not (I also assume you meant "improvement aggravation"). First, pragmatically, as it is at the monent: (1) "verschlimmbesserung" IS a word in German, and is in use, people understand it, use it to express their update pain, etc. "improvement aggravation" on the other hand, is not a thing. It's just two words next to each other. People will scratch their heads as to what you mean, and you'll need to explain it with further terms in a circumlocutory way. And that's not by accident, it's because (2): (2) The second issue is that in german adding two words together (or more) "parses" in the language, and creates a valid new term (with either an obvious or a culturally transmitted meaning). In English that's not the case. You can't just say "This is an improvement aggravation" (I mean, it's a free country, so you can, but people would just think you've made a syntactic mistake). >I don't really agree much with your last point. Someome still has to come up with the word in German, and others have to use it. Yes, but like in Lisp with macros, in German the speaker (programmer) is allowed to come up with such words.
      - TheSpiceIsLife 5y ago
        I still disagree. It's not really a new word, nothing new has been added. If we take the context away from the German as used here in this case, then it's just as meaningless as the English context-free utterance. The German term is just the two words smooshed together. Have you ever watched Lucy The Daughter Of The Devil? There's an episode where Jesus and Satan are doing smooshes. People think these German words and cool because they're novel and foreign, but English has plenty of very similar sorts of constructs, weirdness, and coolness too. Dang nab it! I'd argue English is just as expressive.
- jhatemyjob 5y ago
  Do you have autism?
  - dang 5y ago
    Personal attacks will get you banned here. Please don't. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Edit: you've unfortunately been posting a lot of unsubstantive comments. Could you please not do that? If you read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html you'll see that we're trying for something a bit different from internet default here. There's also https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html.

I love the expressiveness of German. This seems less like an improvement gone awry though, and more like a classic case of what in English we'd call "bait and switch."

TheSpiceIsLife 5y ago

I don't really see how these "there's a word for that in German" are much, if any, of an improvement over their English equivalents. Verschlimmbesserung Improvementagrrivation It's only three characters shorter, and English being a Germanic language, English is often referred to as simplified German, the languages maps pretty much one to one in the general case. English does the same sort of thing were you'll see something like use case become use-case and then usecase. This is called portmanteau in English, and here's the Wikipedia article, with some common examples. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portmanteau https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portmanteau Edit to add: also compound words https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compound_(linguistics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compound_(linguistics)

coldtea 5y ago
>I don't really see how these "there's a word for that in German" are much, if any, of an improvement over their English equivalents. Verschlimmbesserung Improvementagrrivation It's only three characters shorter The different is that the former is a legit syntax/form of a composite word in German (where you can combine words more freely), whereas Improvementagrrivation is not. Also the former conveys a meaning, whereas the latter would have people scratching their heads. The limitation with port-manteu and/or compound words in English is that you don't just create them and that's it: they also need to be adopted in order to be part of the language, accepted as words and understood as terms and intention (and not just an error of forgeting to add a space between two words), etc. In programming terms, one might say that German has first-class support for compound words, whereas with English you need to wait for each new word to slowly be added to the vocabulary.
- TheSpiceIsLife 5y ago
  I only dropped the space so as to not count it. It's effectively the same as saying "improvement aggravation". Communication can be defined as information that makes a difference, and the German verschlimmbesserung adds nothing. It literally transliterates to the exact same thing in English. I don't really agree much with your last point. Someome still has to come up with the word in German, and others have to use it. Edit: fixed a tapographical error <- see, it works in English too, as my sibling comment pointed out with updowngrade.
  - coldtea 5y ago
    >It's effectively the same as saying "improvement aggregation" No, it's not (I also assume you meant "improvement aggravation"). First, pragmatically, as it is at the monent: (1) "verschlimmbesserung" IS a word in German, and is in use, people understand it, use it to express their update pain, etc. "improvement aggravation" on the other hand, is not a thing. It's just two words next to each other. People will scratch their heads as to what you mean, and you'll need to explain it with further terms in a circumlocutory way. And that's not by accident, it's because (2): (2) The second issue is that in german adding two words together (or more) "parses" in the language, and creates a valid new term (with either an obvious or a culturally transmitted meaning). In English that's not the case. You can't just say "This is an improvement aggravation" (I mean, it's a free country, so you can, but people would just think you've made a syntactic mistake). >I don't really agree much with your last point. Someome still has to come up with the word in German, and others have to use it. Yes, but like in Lisp with macros, in German the speaker (programmer) is allowed to come up with such words.
    - TheSpiceIsLife 5y ago
      I still disagree. It's not really a new word, nothing new has been added. If we take the context away from the German as used here in this case, then it's just as meaningless as the English context-free utterance. The German term is just the two words smooshed together. Have you ever watched Lucy The Daughter Of The Devil? There's an episode where Jesus and Satan are doing smooshes. People think these German words and cool because they're novel and foreign, but English has plenty of very similar sorts of constructs, weirdness, and coolness too. Dang nab it! I'd argue English is just as expressive.
jhatemyjob 5y ago
Do you have autism?
- dang 5y ago
  Personal attacks will get you banned here. Please don't. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Edit: you've unfortunately been posting a lot of unsubstantive comments. Could you please not do that? If you read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html you'll see that we're trying for something a bit different from internet default here. There's also https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html.