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The 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
by canjobear 3y ago
The 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)
- taejo 3y agoLive free! Embrace heteroradicalism!
- nickles 3y agoI would typically use “crosswalk” in preference to “pedestrian crossing”. The two terms are slightly different, but functionally equivalent. Is there something similar in German?
- mike_hearn 3y agoCrosswalk is American English. In the UK they are always pedestrian crossings.