7 ms·

I think the issue of German compound nouns is seriously overegged. In almost all cases, it’s essentially the same as English, except with some spaces. It’s not

I think the issue of German compound nouns is seriously overegged. In almost all cases, it’s essentially the same as English, except with some spaces. It’s not like suddenly a short compound word expresses something that couldn’t be in English.

InsideOutSanta 1y ago
This is true, but some German compound words acquire a meaning that doesn't simply derive from their component words. Well-known ones include Kindergarten and Weltschmerz. This is often the case for domain-specific terms (Gestaltpsychologie, Bildungsroman).
- Tainnor 1y ago
  Weltschmerz and Bildungsroman relate very closely to their compositional meaning. Sure, they have become slightly more specialised (a novel about a teacher wouldn't be a "Bildungsroman", I guess), but it's not like you can't make an educated guess. Also, the fact that collocations can acquire more specialised meanings than just the sum of their parts is hardly unique to German (in English, the "theory of relativity" means something very specific and isn't used, e.g., for moral or epistemic relativism).
  - elygre 1y ago
    You find the same in any language. A «coming of age» story is not about birthdays.
    - KPGv2 1y ago
      And in any case, "this concept is untranslatable" is nonsense, usually born out of xenophobia or jingoism. "MY language is more expressive than those OTHERS." Every language has technical words that "cannot be translated." But when we say "cannot be translated," what we mean is "it is unsafe to expect a foreign reader to know what the term means without explanation." It's not that it can't be translated; it's that there isn't necessarily a single-word equivalent. I agree with the original suggestion that these can be a challenge to translate elegantly. But, speaking as a lawyer by training, the solution is obvious: you begin your technical document by describing novel technical terms. Then you use them in your document without explanation. Consider "sushi": how do you translate that? Nowadays, we don't. But before it was widely known, you could've just said "a sour rice dish" and be done with it. (For those of you thinking "no wait, sushi is raw fish," no. That's sashimi. Sushi is vinegared rice mixed with other stuff, often. (Sushi can be with egg, pickled plum, crab, beef, etc. none of which are fish.) Makizushi = rolled sour rice Nigirizushi = sour rice to be gripped Chirashizushi = sour rice with stuff scattered in it
      - dmd 1y ago
        > Chirashizushi = sour rice with stuff scattered in it And it annoys me to no end how many restaurants serve "chirashi" with completely plain, non-vinegared, non-seasoned-in-any-way rice. Just "throw some sashimi on some white rice".
- raffael_de 1y ago
  The whole is more than the sum of its parts; it's the product.
- cameronh90 1y ago
  Sure, but again those concepts typically will still have an equivalent way to express them in English. For example, Kindergarten is nursery in en-GB. I'm not entirely sure what the others actually mean, but Bildungsroman is probably "coming-of-age novel" which is a common literary genre. The biggest challenge I've had when writing multilingual user interfaces aren't lacking a way to translate, but just practical issues like dynamic string construction or where the structure of the UI somehow doesn't work in another language, or when a given string is used in multiple parts of the app in the English version, but the non-English versions need different strings in different places[0], or just where an English single word translates into a whole sentence (or vice versa). [0] For example some languages don't have a commonly used word that means "limb" - i.e. arm _or_ leg. A bit niche, but if you're doing something medical-related it can cause issues.
  - paganel 1y ago
    > coming-of-age novel" Technically it is correct, but in doing that you lose the essence of the word “roman” and of the whole influence French culture had over the whole of Europe until not that long ago, including in Germany. It is in these cases where it is quite obvious that Britain was an island at the edge of Europe, culturally and not only.
    - sealeck 1y ago
      Your objection to translating "Roman" as "novel" seems to be that Roman is closer to the French word for novel than "novel" in English is? But this seems to be more an objection to English using the word "novel" instead of something closer to the modern French term, and not actually an objection related to the translation. This seems like a slightly strange objection to me; I would have thought the actual semantic problem lies with "Bildung", in that a Bildungsroman generally involves some kind of learning/development/improvement, whereas a coming-of-age novel does not necessarily involve this. > It is in these cases where it is quite obvious that Britain was an island at the edge of Europe, culturally and not only. I mean this is a very weird claim, which assumes that Europe is culturally homogenous (e.g. I think you will find that Britain and France are culturally closer than France and Slovenia).
- amiga386 1y ago
  You do have to draw a distinction between compounding, where joined words gain their own meaning (some English examples: breakfast, football, highlight), and agglutination, which is the habit of the language to join words together, not necessarily creating a novel word that has its own meaning and dictionary entry, which is what Mr Twain is grumbling about in the article.
- Xmd5a 1y ago
  >Jardin d'enfant. All languages have noun-phrases. In this case, they are transparent.
- eukgoekoko 1y ago
  +1 Baumwolle is my fav.
  - bmicraft 1y ago
    It's a good one ("tree wool"), but Buschwolle/Strauchwolle (bush/shrub wool) would probably be closer to accurate. In case any anyone's still wondering: the word is cotton
- KPGv2 1y ago
  It's worth noting this is normal in language. Consider the highly non-technical English "lighthouse," which has acquired a far more specific meaning than "a house made of light" or "a house that produces light" or "a house that weighs very little." I'm not familiar with "blackboard" being a valid term for any board that is black, but specifically one used in pairing with chalk to be written on. etc.
- yubblegum 1y ago
  > Kindergarten Don't know about that. Garten, garden, a nurturing environment for raising delicate flowers. Children's Garden. Kindergarten.
  - burning_hamster 1y ago
    Garten / garden derive from garte / yard, which just meant an enclosed outdoor space.
  - MobiusHorizons 1y ago
    I find it really interesting that in Russian they clearly took the same concept but just made it out of Russian words instead. Kindergarten in russion is детский (children's) сад (garden). There are other words that are straight from German, for instance бутерброд (sandwitch).
    - yubblegum 1y ago
      iirc at least 3 Russian empresses (and also Russian duchesses) started out as German princesses. The court spoke French. And Russia looked to the West as a role model and source of expertise for modernization and development. It could have been one or the other but France post revolution didn't have princesses to spare, so there is also the political aspect in terms of an absolute monarchy. Would be interesting to know when these words entered Russian vocabulary: before or after Napoleon. "From its inception, Russia has desperately needed foreign professionals—to teach Russians about governance, manufacturing, military, mining, and other trades. The Dutch, Swedes, Brits, and French were among the foreigners who came to Russia. But Germans certainly dominated, becoming a privileged nationality in Russia. "The ruling Romanov dynasty, which shared a lot of the German bloodline, became a branch of the Oldenburg dynasty under the name of Holstein-Gottorp-Romanov. Many of its members were born in Germany and spoke Russian with an accent. Germans, especially the Baltic ones, rapidly advanced through the ranks of the Russian society thanks to their talents, persistence, discipline, and loyalty to the throne (as of 1913, approximately 2,400,000 Germans lived in Russia)." https://www.the-american-interest.com/2015/08/27/russias-love-affair-with-germany/ https://www.the-american-interest.com/2015/08/27/russias-lov...
- WalterBright 1y ago
  Don't forget: gefingerpoken mittengraben springewerk blowenfusen poppencorcken spitzensparken
  - VonGallifrey 1y ago
    None of those are actual German words. For some of them, I found references that these words could potentially be used in Pennsylvania, but most of these words are not even German, even when you split them into their components.
    - FiatLuxDave 1y ago
      The reference you were looking for is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blinkenlights https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blinkenlights
      - VonGallifrey 1y ago
        From your link there: > written in a mangled form of German. If you show this to anyone who knows German, they will recognize that this was written by someone who doesn't.
        marcusb 1y ago
        I believe the comment you replied to is what is known as a "joke".
        VonGallifrey 1y ago
        Given that the commenter left another comment about having been misinformed, I don't think it was a Joke. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44008622 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44008622
        marcusb 1y ago
        yeah, it was a joke and what you just linked to was sarcasm and/or mockery.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
patrickk 1y ago
x100 this. You can sort of derive the meaning of a complex word if you grasp one or two parts of it and offer a hacked together English translation, even if it doesn’t map directly. I find that people online who haven’t actually studied German like to meme this often. The Latin-derived cases from the article, on the other hand, are the truly maddening, and makes you appreciate the simplicity of English grammar by comparison.
- Tainnor 1y ago
  > The Latin-derived cases They're not Latin-derived, they come originally from Proto-Indo-European (which had even more cases). Many other Indo-European languages retain cases (Slavic languages, Greek, etc.), but were lost in English and the Romance languages. What does come from Latin is the way we name and analyse these cases traditionally.
  - alpinisme 1y ago
    And personal pronouns preserve cases even in English (He/him/his).
  - Sesse__ 1y ago
    Interestingly, several different ways of analysis are in use. I first learned German as a third language and then moved to a German-speaking country, and realized that the way German-speaking people think about their grammar is often different from how foreigners think about the German grammar. The rules end up with the same result, but the angle can often be different. For instance, we first learned what a direct object was (something which is done with/to, e.g. in “I ate the ice cream”, “the ice cream” would be direct object). Then we learned that in German, the direct object is declined in accusative (which primarily affects the article, and adjective declination). This was consistent across multiple classes and teachers and books and schools. But my German German teachers had never heard of the concept “direct object”; for them, only the “accusative object” existed. Of course, the accusative object would be in accusative, but also, its presence would signal e.g. whether to use “haben” or “ist” for “is” in certain situations (for which I learned an entirely different set of rules that they had never heard of). You would think that this is because my native language (Norwegian) has different concepts, but our entire way of teaching Norwegian grammar was uprooted at some point pre-WW2 _precisely to map well to German_, to prepare students for German classes when that was a more common second language than English was. (There were tons of things I never understood why were important until I got to apply them to German later.) So you'd think they'd match better.
ughitsaaron 1y ago
I really agree. I think this is particularly peculiar to English speakers because the mix of origin in our vocabulary is such a grab bag.
Tainnor 1y ago
It's true that English uses basically the same method to create compound nouns, but quantitatively it's a difference. Long compounds consisting of 3, 4 or more parts are completely common in German and cause usually no trouble in understanding, whereas English is far more likely to split them up by the introduction of words such as "of", "for", etc.
top_sigrid 1y ago
This is so true. My favourite example is when Top Gear made fun of the German word "Doppelkupplungsgetriebe" by spelling it, when it is quite literally the translation to "dual-clutch transmission". It stil is hilariously funny, but you cannot conclude that German is weird with these words.
- hengheng 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - milesrout 1y ago
    [dead]
  - amiga386 1y ago
    Use of Latin has nothing to do with Americans or whiteness. It's a holdover from the legal and medical professions, and you'll find bird-spotters and gardeners doing it too thanks to Carl Linné's / Carolus Linnæus's love of Latin. See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_French https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_French - "attorney", "culprit", "grand jury", "tort", "voir dire" and so on I think what you're trying to say is that people who are pretentious and middle-class (who in your experience are affluent white Americans) like to reach for Latin words because they sound grander. Orwell had a lot to say on that in Politics and the English Language: https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/politics-and-the-english-language/ https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel... > Pretentious diction [is] used to dress up simple statements and give an air of scientific impartiality to biassed judgements. [...] Bad writers, and especially scientific, political and sociological writers, are nearly always haunted by the notion that Latin or Greek words are grander than Saxon ones
    - davedx 1y ago
      Also accounting! In English: "assets and liabilities" (Old French derived). In continental languages: "actives and passives" (medieval Latin accounting vocabulary).
sharpshadow 1y ago
Windschatten is an exception.
- Bost 1y ago
  Yes, "windshadow" one is more descriptive than "slipstream". (At least for me.)
  - lisper 1y ago
    "Rain shadow" is a common idiom in English. "Wind shadow" is not because English has multiple dedicated words for this concept, including "lee" [2] as well as slipstream. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rain_shadow https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rain_shadow [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windward_and_leeward https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windward_and_leeward
yubblegum 1y ago
I wonder 'where' these compound words end up in an n-dim embedding space (relative to their German and say English 'parts'). In fact this brings up the interesting question of tokenization of the long German compound words, and how all this plays out in German to English (and reverse) LLM translation and text generation.
nosioptar 1y ago
My favorite example is "kartoffellerntepause", it's the German word for the school break in southern Idaho for potato harvest.
rags2riches 1y ago
Sure, you can say three nouns in a row in English. But can you then make them into a verb? Or and adjective? What happens when some of the three words in English already are in a form that also parses as a verb or an adjective? English is a bastard language and it shows in its grammar.
- stronglikedan 1y ago
  Buffalo buffalo buffalo.
- nazgul17 1y ago
  I have verbified nouns on several occasions. My colleague this week took this a step further with this sentence: "We can model the data in [such and such way]. But then the user can PEBCAK their way into [impossible situation]." So close to poetry.
  - rags2riches 1y ago
    I was asking you to string three nouns together and verbify the resulting noun, like you effortlessly do in a language like German. Also, note how your verbified noun is identical to the original noun. That's the lacking grammar of the bastardised English language showing.
    - int_19h 1y ago
      The grammar isn't lacking, it's just that word function is determined by its position in the sentence and/or prepositions, rather than word mutation. With respect to composite-noun-verbifying, it works so long as you use hyphens to make clear it's a single unit.
carstenhag 1y ago
In some way yes, but not really. Had a colleague working on a project for Deutsche Bahn (state owned train operator), he was developing an app and the domain knowledge was full of long German words, no one outside this bubble ever uses: Bremshundertstel, Bremszettel, Mindestbremshundertstel, Notbremsüberbrückung... In a way it's better to have a super long name for this, so there are no 2-3 ways to describe the same thing.

InsideOutSanta 1y ago

This is true, but some German compound words acquire a meaning that doesn't simply derive from their component words. Well-known ones include Kindergarten and Weltschmerz. This is often the case for domain-specific terms (Gestaltpsychologie, Bildungsroman).

Tainnor 1y ago
Weltschmerz and Bildungsroman relate very closely to their compositional meaning. Sure, they have become slightly more specialised (a novel about a teacher wouldn't be a "Bildungsroman", I guess), but it's not like you can't make an educated guess. Also, the fact that collocations can acquire more specialised meanings than just the sum of their parts is hardly unique to German (in English, the "theory of relativity" means something very specific and isn't used, e.g., for moral or epistemic relativism).
- elygre 1y ago
  You find the same in any language. A «coming of age» story is not about birthdays.
  - KPGv2 1y ago
    And in any case, "this concept is untranslatable" is nonsense, usually born out of xenophobia or jingoism. "MY language is more expressive than those OTHERS." Every language has technical words that "cannot be translated." But when we say "cannot be translated," what we mean is "it is unsafe to expect a foreign reader to know what the term means without explanation." It's not that it can't be translated; it's that there isn't necessarily a single-word equivalent. I agree with the original suggestion that these can be a challenge to translate elegantly. But, speaking as a lawyer by training, the solution is obvious: you begin your technical document by describing novel technical terms. Then you use them in your document without explanation. Consider "sushi": how do you translate that? Nowadays, we don't. But before it was widely known, you could've just said "a sour rice dish" and be done with it. (For those of you thinking "no wait, sushi is raw fish," no. That's sashimi. Sushi is vinegared rice mixed with other stuff, often. (Sushi can be with egg, pickled plum, crab, beef, etc. none of which are fish.) Makizushi = rolled sour rice Nigirizushi = sour rice to be gripped Chirashizushi = sour rice with stuff scattered in it
    - dmd 1y ago
      > Chirashizushi = sour rice with stuff scattered in it And it annoys me to no end how many restaurants serve "chirashi" with completely plain, non-vinegared, non-seasoned-in-any-way rice. Just "throw some sashimi on some white rice".
raffael_de 1y ago
The whole is more than the sum of its parts; it's the product.
cameronh90 1y ago
Sure, but again those concepts typically will still have an equivalent way to express them in English. For example, Kindergarten is nursery in en-GB. I'm not entirely sure what the others actually mean, but Bildungsroman is probably "coming-of-age novel" which is a common literary genre. The biggest challenge I've had when writing multilingual user interfaces aren't lacking a way to translate, but just practical issues like dynamic string construction or where the structure of the UI somehow doesn't work in another language, or when a given string is used in multiple parts of the app in the English version, but the non-English versions need different strings in different places[0], or just where an English single word translates into a whole sentence (or vice versa). [0] For example some languages don't have a commonly used word that means "limb" - i.e. arm _or_ leg. A bit niche, but if you're doing something medical-related it can cause issues.
- paganel 1y ago
  > coming-of-age novel" Technically it is correct, but in doing that you lose the essence of the word “roman” and of the whole influence French culture had over the whole of Europe until not that long ago, including in Germany. It is in these cases where it is quite obvious that Britain was an island at the edge of Europe, culturally and not only.
  - sealeck 1y ago
    Your objection to translating "Roman" as "novel" seems to be that Roman is closer to the French word for novel than "novel" in English is? But this seems to be more an objection to English using the word "novel" instead of something closer to the modern French term, and not actually an objection related to the translation. This seems like a slightly strange objection to me; I would have thought the actual semantic problem lies with "Bildung", in that a Bildungsroman generally involves some kind of learning/development/improvement, whereas a coming-of-age novel does not necessarily involve this. > It is in these cases where it is quite obvious that Britain was an island at the edge of Europe, culturally and not only. I mean this is a very weird claim, which assumes that Europe is culturally homogenous (e.g. I think you will find that Britain and France are culturally closer than France and Slovenia).
amiga386 1y ago
You do have to draw a distinction between compounding, where joined words gain their own meaning (some English examples: breakfast, football, highlight), and agglutination, which is the habit of the language to join words together, not necessarily creating a novel word that has its own meaning and dictionary entry, which is what Mr Twain is grumbling about in the article.
Xmd5a 1y ago
>Jardin d'enfant. All languages have noun-phrases. In this case, they are transparent.
eukgoekoko 1y ago
+1 Baumwolle is my fav.
- bmicraft 1y ago
  It's a good one ("tree wool"), but Buschwolle/Strauchwolle (bush/shrub wool) would probably be closer to accurate. In case any anyone's still wondering: the word is cotton
KPGv2 1y ago
It's worth noting this is normal in language. Consider the highly non-technical English "lighthouse," which has acquired a far more specific meaning than "a house made of light" or "a house that produces light" or "a house that weighs very little." I'm not familiar with "blackboard" being a valid term for any board that is black, but specifically one used in pairing with chalk to be written on. etc.
yubblegum 1y ago
> Kindergarten Don't know about that. Garten, garden, a nurturing environment for raising delicate flowers. Children's Garden. Kindergarten.
- burning_hamster 1y ago
  Garten / garden derive from garte / yard, which just meant an enclosed outdoor space.
- MobiusHorizons 1y ago
  I find it really interesting that in Russian they clearly took the same concept but just made it out of Russian words instead. Kindergarten in russion is детский (children's) сад (garden). There are other words that are straight from German, for instance бутерброд (sandwitch).
  - yubblegum 1y ago
    iirc at least 3 Russian empresses (and also Russian duchesses) started out as German princesses. The court spoke French. And Russia looked to the West as a role model and source of expertise for modernization and development. It could have been one or the other but France post revolution didn't have princesses to spare, so there is also the political aspect in terms of an absolute monarchy. Would be interesting to know when these words entered Russian vocabulary: before or after Napoleon. "From its inception, Russia has desperately needed foreign professionals—to teach Russians about governance, manufacturing, military, mining, and other trades. The Dutch, Swedes, Brits, and French were among the foreigners who came to Russia. But Germans certainly dominated, becoming a privileged nationality in Russia. "The ruling Romanov dynasty, which shared a lot of the German bloodline, became a branch of the Oldenburg dynasty under the name of Holstein-Gottorp-Romanov. Many of its members were born in Germany and spoke Russian with an accent. Germans, especially the Baltic ones, rapidly advanced through the ranks of the Russian society thanks to their talents, persistence, discipline, and loyalty to the throne (as of 1913, approximately 2,400,000 Germans lived in Russia)." https://www.the-american-interest.com/2015/08/27/russias-love-affair-with-germany/ https://www.the-american-interest.com/2015/08/27/russias-lov...
WalterBright 1y ago
Don't forget: gefingerpoken mittengraben springewerk blowenfusen poppencorcken spitzensparken
- VonGallifrey 1y ago
  None of those are actual German words. For some of them, I found references that these words could potentially be used in Pennsylvania, but most of these words are not even German, even when you split them into their components.
  - FiatLuxDave 1y ago
    The reference you were looking for is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blinkenlights https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blinkenlights
    - VonGallifrey 1y ago
      From your link there: > written in a mangled form of German. If you show this to anyone who knows German, they will recognize that this was written by someone who doesn't.
      - marcusb 1y ago
        I believe the comment you replied to is what is known as a "joke".
        VonGallifrey 1y ago
        Given that the commenter left another comment about having been misinformed, I don't think it was a Joke. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44008622 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44008622
        marcusb 1y ago
        yeah, it was a joke and what you just linked to was sarcasm and/or mockery.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

patrickk 1y ago

x100 this. You can sort of derive the meaning of a complex word if you grasp one or two parts of it and offer a hacked together English translation, even if it doesn’t map directly. I find that people online who haven’t actually studied German like to meme this often. The Latin-derived cases from the article, on the other hand, are the truly maddening, and makes you appreciate the simplicity of English grammar by comparison.

Tainnor 1y ago
> The Latin-derived cases They're not Latin-derived, they come originally from Proto-Indo-European (which had even more cases). Many other Indo-European languages retain cases (Slavic languages, Greek, etc.), but were lost in English and the Romance languages. What does come from Latin is the way we name and analyse these cases traditionally.
- alpinisme 1y ago
  And personal pronouns preserve cases even in English (He/him/his).
- Sesse__ 1y ago
  Interestingly, several different ways of analysis are in use. I first learned German as a third language and then moved to a German-speaking country, and realized that the way German-speaking people think about their grammar is often different from how foreigners think about the German grammar. The rules end up with the same result, but the angle can often be different. For instance, we first learned what a direct object was (something which is done with/to, e.g. in “I ate the ice cream”, “the ice cream” would be direct object). Then we learned that in German, the direct object is declined in accusative (which primarily affects the article, and adjective declination). This was consistent across multiple classes and teachers and books and schools. But my German German teachers had never heard of the concept “direct object”; for them, only the “accusative object” existed. Of course, the accusative object would be in accusative, but also, its presence would signal e.g. whether to use “haben” or “ist” for “is” in certain situations (for which I learned an entirely different set of rules that they had never heard of). You would think that this is because my native language (Norwegian) has different concepts, but our entire way of teaching Norwegian grammar was uprooted at some point pre-WW2 _precisely to map well to German_, to prepare students for German classes when that was a more common second language than English was. (There were tons of things I never understood why were important until I got to apply them to German later.) So you'd think they'd match better.

ughitsaaron 1y ago

I really agree. I think this is particularly peculiar to English speakers because the mix of origin in our vocabulary is such a grab bag.

Tainnor 1y ago

It's true that English uses basically the same method to create compound nouns, but quantitatively it's a difference. Long compounds consisting of 3, 4 or more parts are completely common in German and cause usually no trouble in understanding, whereas English is far more likely to split them up by the introduction of words such as "of", "for", etc.

top_sigrid 1y ago

This is so true. My favourite example is when Top Gear made fun of the German word "Doppelkupplungsgetriebe" by spelling it, when it is quite literally the translation to "dual-clutch transmission". It stil is hilariously funny, but you cannot conclude that German is weird with these words.

hengheng 1y ago
[flagged]
- milesrout 1y ago
  [dead]
- amiga386 1y ago
  Use of Latin has nothing to do with Americans or whiteness. It's a holdover from the legal and medical professions, and you'll find bird-spotters and gardeners doing it too thanks to Carl Linné's / Carolus Linnæus's love of Latin. See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_French https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_French - "attorney", "culprit", "grand jury", "tort", "voir dire" and so on I think what you're trying to say is that people who are pretentious and middle-class (who in your experience are affluent white Americans) like to reach for Latin words because they sound grander. Orwell had a lot to say on that in Politics and the English Language: https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/politics-and-the-english-language/ https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel... > Pretentious diction [is] used to dress up simple statements and give an air of scientific impartiality to biassed judgements. [...] Bad writers, and especially scientific, political and sociological writers, are nearly always haunted by the notion that Latin or Greek words are grander than Saxon ones
  - davedx 1y ago
    Also accounting! In English: "assets and liabilities" (Old French derived). In continental languages: "actives and passives" (medieval Latin accounting vocabulary).

sharpshadow 1y ago

Windschatten is an exception.

Bost 1y ago
Yes, "windshadow" one is more descriptive than "slipstream". (At least for me.)
- lisper 1y ago
  "Rain shadow" is a common idiom in English. "Wind shadow" is not because English has multiple dedicated words for this concept, including "lee" [2] as well as slipstream. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rain_shadow https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rain_shadow [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windward_and_leeward https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windward_and_leeward

yubblegum 1y ago

I wonder 'where' these compound words end up in an n-dim embedding space (relative to their German and say English 'parts'). In fact this brings up the interesting question of tokenization of the long German compound words, and how all this plays out in German to English (and reverse) LLM translation and text generation.

nosioptar 1y ago

My favorite example is "kartoffellerntepause", it's the German word for the school break in southern Idaho for potato harvest.

rags2riches 1y ago

Sure, you can say three nouns in a row in English. But can you then make them into a verb? Or and adjective? What happens when some of the three words in English already are in a form that also parses as a verb or an adjective? English is a bastard language and it shows in its grammar.

stronglikedan 1y ago
Buffalo buffalo buffalo.
nazgul17 1y ago
I have verbified nouns on several occasions. My colleague this week took this a step further with this sentence: "We can model the data in [such and such way]. But then the user can PEBCAK their way into [impossible situation]." So close to poetry.
- rags2riches 1y ago
  I was asking you to string three nouns together and verbify the resulting noun, like you effortlessly do in a language like German. Also, note how your verbified noun is identical to the original noun. That's the lacking grammar of the bastardised English language showing.
  - int_19h 1y ago
    The grammar isn't lacking, it's just that word function is determined by its position in the sentence and/or prepositions, rather than word mutation. With respect to composite-noun-verbifying, it works so long as you use hyphens to make clear it's a single unit.

carstenhag 1y ago

In some way yes, but not really. Had a colleague working on a project for Deutsche Bahn (state owned train operator), he was developing an app and the domain knowledge was full of long German words, no one outside this bubble ever uses: Bremshundertstel, Bremszettel, Mindestbremshundertstel, Notbremsüberbrückung... In a way it's better to have a super long name for this, so there are no 2-3 ways to describe the same thing.