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I heard the same anecdote about the upper classes adopting French after 1066 but the farmers still calling the thing by its animal name. Trust the Germans to ju
by zwieback 3y ago
I heard the same anecdote about the upper classes adopting French after 1066 but the farmers still calling the thing by its animal name. Trust the Germans to just continue smashing nouns together, Schweinefleisch, Rindfleisch and my American wife's favorite: "Hackfleisch" (hacked flesh). Too bad Germany didn't get invaded by the French until Napoleon.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- vidarh 3y agoEnglish "smashes words together" too - English is full of compounds (e.g. shopkeeper), it's just a much slower process, often goes via a long intermediate period of hyphenation, and the implied difference in meaning is a bit smaller. The "smashing" together of words is much less interesting to most of us who use languages that does so than it seems to be to others - it does little more than placing the words adjacent to each other does in English, with the exception that it disambiguated. E.g. "hakke" on it's own is the verb to hack in Norwegian, but as part of a compound it will mean something that has been hacked, or is hacking (e.g. hakkespett = woodpecker - and there's another English compound) Funnily, Norwegian (and Danish) has imported the French boef - Norwegian as "biff" - while we still use the Germanic ku for cow - but we also "smash" words together, so hakkebiff = hakkebøf (Danish) = boef haché. But "hakke biff" would imply the act of chopping it. And so we compound to remove the ambiguity. We also have flesk, from the same origin as fleisch and flesh, but in Norwegian it specifically means pork flesh, so hakkeflesk, while it's not a term I can remember having heard, would be understandable but refer to pork because the meaning of combining the words is fairly generic.
- User23 3y agoBut you don’t see things like “Straßenbahnhaltestelle” in English where you have four words mashed together. I’d translate that something like “streetcar stop,” but literally it’s “street car stopping place.” Streetcarstop while reasonable would not be accepted English by native speakers. Tramstop on the other hand is (at least places where people say tram). So while we mash it’s noticeably more limited.
- lmm 3y agoAs a native English speaker, even "tramstop" or "busstop" sounds wrong to me.
- vidarh 3y agoAs a native Norwegian speaker, I had to look it up to see whether a space was expected or not, as it seems entirely illogical for me to have a space there as they're so closely connected. The distinction between "fully merged" compounds, hyphenated ones, and ones with spaces is yet another one of those endlessly annoying quirks of English.
- User23 3y ago> The distinction between "fully merged" compounds, hyphenated ones, and ones with spaces is yet another one of those endlessly annoying quirks of English Being cognizant of these really helps develop empathy with ESL learners.
- mathieuh 3y agoBut what’s the difference grammatically if there’s a space or not? Let’s take “streetcar stop”, although there is a space there, what function is “streetcar” performing other than being a noun? It’s not an adjective, you can’t say “that stop is streetcar”, that doesn’t sound right, you’d have to say “that stop is /for/ streetcars”. So I would argue that “streetcar stop” still parses as a complete compound noun grammatically. This is just a matter of orthography in my opinion. German may more readily “freeze” compound nouns and put them into writing as a single unit, but both English and German are full of long ad hoc compound nouns.
- User23 3y agoThe difference is for the German compound word you only have to remember the endings for the last part. You don’t need to worry about adjective declension. So yes it’s a real grammatical difference and not just whitespace differences.
- 3y ago
- canjobear 3y agoThe main difference is really that English writes compounds with a space in between whereas German doesn't. There's no way to express compounds like "pedestrian crossing" or "windshield wiper" with a space in German. When a compound gets frequent enough in English people will stop writing the space (like "windshield") whereas in German the space was never there to begin with.
- tnecniv 3y agoWe don’t do that with all compounds though. It’s really more a cultural thing. At a certain point a pair becomes so common place that it becomes one word. Beehive, for example, isn’t semantically different from bee hive but the pairing was common enough the space got dropped.
- philwelch 3y agoEnglish also constructs compound words out of Greek or Latin roots. For example “television” is a technology for seeing things that are happening far away (i.e. in a broadcasting studio); the German word is “Fernsehen”, which would be cognate to “Far-sight”, which is what “television” means. And sometimes we even have an Anglo-Saxon compound word alongside an etymologically equivalent compound word with classical roots, such as “manslaughter” and “homicide”.
- naravara 3y ago> manslaughter I never understood what they thought was so funny.
- gumby 3y agoThe joke is that they don’t decline “man” properly (“mans” rather than “men”). Today we’d write it menslol.
- gumby 3y agoAlso Greek and Latin roots like monstrosities like your example “tele” (Greek) + “vision” (Latin). The one that grates on me most is “monolingual” (unilingual/multilingual or monoglottal/polyglottal)
- gumby 3y agoFrench does that too so I think an invasion would not have helped.
- graywh 3y agoin English, we refer to smashed-together word(s) as "portmanteau", a French word that is a portmanteau itself
- NoZebra120vClip 3y agoThe sort of compound words which we're discussing appear by a process of synthesis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_language See also: agglutination https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agglutination https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agglutination A portmanteau is different, where parts of several words are blended, rather than retaining the substance of each word in a compound. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blend_word https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blend_word And let's not forget xkcd's coinage of the malamanteau: https://xkcd.com/739/ https://xkcd.com/739/
- gerdesj 3y ago"Too bad Germany didn't get invaded by the French until Napoleon." Read up on the Holy Roman Empire. Germany, France etc are quite complicated concepts.
- primitivesuave 3y agoTo add some context here - the concept of a unified "Germany" has only existed four times in history. First under Charlemagne in the 800s, then under Otto von Bismarck in 1871, then under Adolf Hitler until the fall of the Third Reich in 1945 (assuming one considers annexation of the Sudetenland and the Anschluss to fully encompass Germanic people), and finally the modern state of Germany since 1990.
- usrusr 3y agoSeems arbitrary. Why Bismarck's Kaiser but none of those between Charlemagne and Napoleon? How German was the realm of Charlemagne when it reached further across the Pyrenees than it reached across the Elbe?
- kergonath 3y agoCharlemagne, of course, being king of the Franks and emperor of the Romans. Things back then do not match neatly to modern concepts such as a French or a German nation-state.
- rahen 3y agoWeren't France and Germany essentially the same country during Charlemagne?
- kergonath 3y agoYes, they were. Actually the core of both countries was one and the Franks did not care much about our modern borders. Western Francia became eventually France, while Eastern Francia became Franconia (roughly, the borders were always blurry and shifted a lot over time). Of course, the Franks came from further East and never replaced the populations they invaded, so even there and then both cultures and peoples were always mixed.
- pyuser583 3y agoOne of the best Christopher Hitchend quotes is about English/German compatibility: > Der Brand (The Fire), by the historian Jörg Friedrich, accuses Winston Churchill of a conscious policy of airborne terrorism against civilians … The word “brand” in English, of course, carries a distinctly different vernacular meaning.
- hackernewds 3y agoHitchens*
- gumby 3y ago> upper classes adopting French after 1066 The upper classes were French after 1066 (Harold had definitively repelled the Danes for the last time just three weeks before Hastings).
- Lio 3y agoIt's not so much that the upper classes adopted French after 1066, it's that the upper class was replaced by people that spoke Norman French. If you examine the richest landed gentry in England today a very sizeable number still bare the family names of those that fought for William at the Battle of Hastings.