sitzpinkler! I had no idea this was actually a word.
15 years ago, when I was a young man in my early 20s, I lived in the top floor of a house, sharing that floor (and that floor's bathroom) with two other people: a German chap, and an English girl. Fast forward about six months and somehow one day a conversation took whatever turn would be required for it to be appropriate for me to say: "Well, I almost always leave the seat down, because I almost always sit down to take a piss." Cue a sudden burst of laughter from the German - who says they don't have a sense of humour? - because it turned out he did exactly the same thing. Good to know it wasn't just me at least, I suppose.
"Well" said our floormate. "I always wondered how such a pair of inconsiderately dirty bastards were still so consistently good at politely leaving the seat down."
There were 3 men in the house, and the 3rd man would occasionally use "our" bathroom. So the very next day the German guy put a sign up on the door in order to keep him out. SIT PISSERS ONLY.
There's also "Heimscheißer" -- someone who strongly prefers taking a dump in the comfort of his own home, and may even be incapable of doing so elsewhere, except for emergency situations.
TLDR: English and German both have compounds, but German additionally has simple rules to form and decline nouns from participles.
E.g.:
werdend = becoming
Werdender = someone (male), who is becoming
Fun fact: These participles always have a neutral plural, so they are gender neutral and are thus abused all over the place. In official documents the German language is losing all of its proper nouns, until everything is built out of participles.
Another fun fact: for political correctness, an artificial gender-neutral way of referring to both male and female students has long been the "internal capital I" [1]:
Recently though, the Green Party has gone a step further in Germany, and now uses in all of their documents the so-called "gender-star" [2]:
Student*innen
This is because it was felt that the version with capital-I only focused on males and females, but still excluded trans-sexual, trans-gender, and inter-sexual people.
This practice has even led to a new verb in German: "to gender", i.e., to use politically correct gender-neutral language.
Spanish countries do it for years with "@" or "x" like "estimad@s" for "estimados" and "estimadas" at once. And Latin America is not very politically correct, it's just respectful for all genders.
In writing only, and very obnoxious as well for a culture that fights for their grave accents and correct language way more than their English counterpart.
Italian is similarly gendered (and actually lacks a neuter): consider the translation of “all”: “tutti” (male) and “tutte”, a particularly ironic case that amuses me as an attempt to be all-inclusive can inadvertently become exclusive when applied to groups of people.
The standard politically correct solution is to use both “tutti e tutte”, but of late a trend is to use the asterisk next to remedy this (“tutt*”), which irks my regex-informed sensibilities no end because it might also match “tutto” (“everything”), though in context is fairly clear.
To get a bit more into detail on this issue: In German, nouns referring to occupations generally are all gendered, where the base word is male, and the suffix "in" changes that to female. In cases of mixed groups, or where the gender doesn't matter, the suffix is not used:
Singular:
Studentin = student (female)
Student = student (male, or unspecified)
Plural:
Studentinnen = students (all female*)
Studenten = students (at least one male, or unspecified)
Feminists (correctly) identified this imbalance as an issue of sexist language. The problem is, there isn't an easy fix. The common solutions nowadays are to use phrases like "Studenten and Studentinnen" (creating the new issue of which gender to name first) or in written form "StudentInnen". That's kind of clunky, creating a desire to use ungendered words where possible. So then people come up with constructs like this because they happen to be ungendered (but horrible in other ways).
I think in Austria, using the female form even for mixed/unknown groups is relatively common nowadays. But I'm just a very occasional visitor there and I'm not certain about the details. (Do they throw dice to determine which to use? Or did they just switch to the female, which then could be interpreted to be sexist against men.)
"Studierende" is actually a counterexample, because it means "people who are studying right now". So if you hear of "Studierendenproteste" rather than "Studentenproteste" (student protests), you can picture them reading books during their protest. :)
“Student” comes from Latin “studens”, which grammatically is exactly the same as “studierend” (Partizip I in German / Present Active Participle in Latin). The difference in meaning is random.
Heh, but German is not Latin, and so 'student' in German, as often happens with borrowed words, has acquired a different meaning, viz. that of a noun in this case.
Sorry, in Latin every adjective can also be used as a noun. So “studens” (“studierend”) can also mean “Studierende(r)”.
Edit: The point is, Latin “studens” also has the concurrency aspect to it, just as German “Studierender”. If you say “studens ambulat”, it means “He/she is taking a walk, while studying.”
German, having maintained more of its agglutinate "Germanic" roots than English over the centuries, has a fantastic morphological system for new word formation. For this reason, I've often thought it would be great if more new terminology were to originate from German.
Here are just a few of my favorite compounds you will likely struggle to form in less compound languages.
1. Spannungsbogen <=> the series of events which create suspense
2. Fernweh <=> the desire to go to other countries / leave your homeland
3. Torschlusspanik <=> being worried at the last minute
4. Leitmotiv <=> theme
And the list just keeps going. Because of the compound nature of German if you know the constituent parts of a word you will almost always have a pretty good idea about its meaning. Good examples of this from the IT world are : hochfahren vs. "boot", Zeichenkette vs "string", weiterleiten vs "forward", einhängen vs. "mount", etc.
Studierende is kind of problematic. While Studenten or Studentinnen describes groups of people who study in a university. It's a status. You are matriculated in an university. Therefore you are a Student. Studierende describes people who study. Whatever, wherever. Like study right now. This leads to weird problems.
If you now say that there is a group of students sitting in the bar drinking. It becomes a group of people who sit in a bar to drink and study.
Fundamentally, English is a flexible enough language that if any of these concepts became common enough they would become ordinary words (probably lifted directly from German).
This has actually happened, for example Blitzkrieg (commonly the "blitz"); now this does not simply mean "lightning war", it very much references a particular part of a particular war. Also, Zeitgeist is used in English, but doesn't simply translate to "spirit of the time".
Often such compound words mean more than the sum of their parts (as I guess the OP kind of meant), which is what makes them interesting to other languages. OTOH, it seems pretty rare these constructs actually describe something that English doesn't have a word/phrase for already. In fact, I would say that its not so much that German has such constructs in their language that makes them interesting, and more that as a different culture they have different words to describe different concepts.
Edit: I should probably point out that I am a native English speaker that can speak fluently Norwegian. "Ohrwurm" and "Wunderkind" are such nonsense examples in this case; they are literal translations (just without the space, and are understandable from any Scandinavian language), and they are pretty much anti examples. Using foreign words that mean exactly the same as the English equivalents is nothing but pretentious, and doesn't support his central argument at all.
> English is a flexible enough language that if any of these concepts became common enough they would become ordinary words
That reminded me of this great quote: "The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary." -- James Nicoll
Native German speaker here and I find the way Zeitgeist is used in English strange sometimes. I feel the word is often used synonymous to fashion or for "things currently popular" in English. A good example is Google's Zeitgeist which gives the popular searches for just one year. This is not something we would call Zeitgeist in German, I think.
In German we would say "Goethe captured the Zeitgeist of his epoch", on the other hand saying "Dark rimmed glass are in the Zeitgeist" would be strange.
To me, zeitgeist (in English) is closer to 'fashionable fad' than 'spirit of the time'. Zeitgeist for me fits "People are using object/service X" better than "migrant crisis in europe is swinging politics to the right". I see zeitgeist used around fads a lot more than I see it around socio-political movements.
Really? To me that sort of is the closest translation, but it doesn't really hit the nail on the head. But maybe that's just my weird linguistic background.
Blitzkrieg is like "a war being done quick" or "a war which wont last long and to be ended quick".
I think the key is the understanding of "Blitz", which is associated with things like "fast" "hitting hard" "dangerous" "powerfull" "in a short amount of time" "to release a high amount of energy in a short amount of time" (and so on).
All of these words, formed like a tag cloud, are meshed into the the idea "Blitz" added to the german word for war ("Krieg").
If i think about the german language, its all about abstraction (and precision).
> for example Blitzkrieg (commonly the "blitz"); now this does not simply mean "lightning war", it very much references a particular part of a particular war.
It's not just commonly "The Blitz", that's the only term used to describe that specific period of bombing.
If people use the word "Blitzkreig" in English, they're talking about the military strategy (usually only used in the context of WW2, but still).
In fact, The Blitz isn't really even an example of what would be referred to as Blitzkreig.
Sanskrit is similar. There are elaborate rules for combining, called "Sandhi" [1] [2] which shows how nearby vowels or vowels near consonants change to form a combined sound "aa+e = aie" etc. This allows the formation of fairly long words, for example - "kimkarthavyathaavimoodatha", "not knowing what to do next".
Sanskrit has analogous structures, but they are not called Sandhi. Sandhi refers specifically to phonetic combinations of adjacent sounds in subsequent words, not a semantic or morphological combination. These phonetic processes are almost completely independent of semantics.
The analogous structures in Sanskrit to the articles German examples are various types of compounds, like tatpurusha, dvandva, etc.
I only have a little German, but I was so glad to read an article that mirrored my feelings learning the language, which no one around seemed to share. Not just that they smash words together, but that they do it with such humor and whimsy. The author gave far more interesting examples, but some of my favorites were Fledermaus (bat: a flying mouse) and Hackfleisch (ground beef).
These contractions seem to add a lot of ambiguity though. Since "Backpfeifengesicht" is not commonly used, I thought it described a person who has been getting a lot of slaps across the neck so that his face took that form. Without context, these words are sometimes hard to understand unless they're commonly used.
Another example is Sitzpinkler. While this word is not ambiguous, it still sounds funny. I'd never use that and probably say "a person who pees while sitting". It might be used on some sign, although it makes the place where such a sign is found sound cheap because that word is really colloquial.
Nevertheless, it does create some great words such Schadenfreude, and Werdende. While i would never use Werdende, i believe it is used a lot in lyric (poems and that stuff). Schadensfreude is a really nice word through.
Expressions like that can sometimes be traced to a single literary source. They also spread through translated versions. In that case, even a "naturally occurring" expression in one language could spawn an expression coined by literature in another. Without further data, it might be entirely possible that Backpfeifengesicht was composed by a single translator trying to transfer the well-known-expression nature of "tête à claques" into german.
I made an account just to tell you the most wonderful word creation of all: "Neugier", the german for "curiosity, is made out of the words for "new" and "greed", you could translate it as "greed for new things".
English has plenty of these kinds of compound words: "shoebox", "lapdog", "underworld", "housewife", "footstool", "raincoat", etc. Other compounds like "thoughtexperiment", "cocktaildress" or "middleschool" are written with spaces, simply by convention. We could write them without spaces if we wanted to.
The author even says as much: "Both German and English can create compound words out of most parts of speech, not just nouns, and English sometimes hyphenates them or even writes them as one word".
So it seems like the answer to the initial question ("So what is it about the German language that allows for such constructions?") is "arbitrary spelling rules".
I think here's where you're missing the point: The article describes how authors like to, and are able to, coin new compound words in German and readers can understand them without the need for explanation. IMO this is something that's harder to do in English. The main reason for that is not that compound nouns exist, but the ability to turn everything into a noun and then combine it with others.
Example:
green - grün - Begrünung ("planting with trees and grass") - Strassenbegrünung ("planting trees and grass along the street").
You may be able to use "greening" here, but at least AFAIK it is not common in English since it seems a bit strange to turn adjectives into nouns like that. In German I don't even think that anyone needed to explain that word - you immediately think of the older word "Bepflanzung" (planting) and notice that it's probably meant in this context. It's all about reusing known pre- and suffixes.
> The article describes how authors like to, and are able to, coin new compound words in German and readers can understand them without the need for explanation
I guess to some extent the comparison is going to be subjective (and my German is so bad I can't really do so with confidence), but I think a big component in the discussion has to do with dialects. Were someone to say "street-greenin'" in my hometown, the phrase would be understood right away, and is entire grammatical in many American english dialect, but no in the standard dialect. Now if you walk on to a university campus and say that you are interested in neotransphilic interpersonalization most people will have little trouble getting at what you mean (though they might agree as to the specific meaning, and role there eyes at you if they study English). This is rather high brow, but these kind of fun and games with prefixes, suffixes, and a regimen of contractions are also common in 1337 and other dialects. But again, they are not part of the standard dialect.
I would be curious to see a comparison of difference in compound words across different German dialects.
I think there's a difference in what is perceived as 'standard' between the two languages. English basically gives you a very rich vocabulary that has pretty much preset terms - common, legal, official and academic - for all concepts. German basically gives you a set of rules, a set of word stems and the rest is "Usus", i.e. the way it is commonly used, which is weaker than being part of an official standard. So different regions may have different official terms for the same thing because there is no standard to tell them otherwise - consensus is only reached through interaction. I think that's similar to how it works with English in the UK though.
Now, when it comes to the initial rules, they are common to all dialects, albeit with some variations (vowel / consonant shift etc.). So the "Be" in Begrünung would be universally understood as indicating a human activity in this context, rather than a passive process.
>You may be able to use "greening" here, but at least AFAIK it is not common in English since it seems a bit strange to turn adjectives into nouns like that.
I think the equivalent in English would be "begreening." It looks weird written out, but I think your meaning would be clear if you said something like, "The city's begreening project will cost an estimated 1.5 million dollars."
In fact, you are able to use "greening" here. A google search for "greening" returns a great number of websites and articles about "greening" in exactly the sense you describe. There is nothing strange about it.
This google search also led me to another wonderful English compound word: "greenwashing" [0]. Undoubtedly, if this were instead a German compound ("Grünwaschen" oder so), we would fawn over the inventiveness of German and lament the inability of English to produce such compounds.
There are plenty of English compounds that don't fit that description: forthright, downright, forthcoming; wisecrack (but "wise woman"); blackboard, greenback, greengrocer, yellowbelly; drive-by, drive-in; tapout, all out, balls-out, blackout, checkout. A couple common vulgarities do exactly what Sitzpinkler and Sockenfalter do, though admittedly the English -er is no longer "male-specific." (It once was.)
I think an article on German compounds would have been worthwhile on its own. To develop interest in it, however, the author has found it necessary--as many others have--to write of one language's richness as a factor of another's lack. English is actually quite pithy on some of the concepts he claims "require a mouthful when translated" from the German: "that which is in the process of becoming" (das Werdende) is (with varying nuance) nascent, incipient, inchoate, germinal, budding, springing, arising, dawning, crepuscular, in embryo, in the bud, in the gristle, forming, fashioning, styling, or becoming. To give rise to a noun to describe that thing which is nascent, incipient, etc., does not require the ham-fisted (there's a good, playful compound!) stroke which Duncan has used: he's playing it up! If you want a single word for it, bud,germ, etc., have their figurative uses as well. And if he wanted a dictionary definition for das Werdende, he could have dropped the relative pronoun and two prepositions and written, "a nascent thing." (In actual writing, thing would usually be replaced by a more precise identifier, and the phrase would be the richer for it.) There are some rare words, like inchoant, which also do the trick, and whose inception (or kick-off, throw-off, lift-off) looks rather like that of das Werdende.
yes it's not so prevalent indeed. It's likely that the ancestor of modern english relied more on forging compounds before it started importing a vast part of it's vocabulary from latin through french. Worth noting that many of the words of latin or greek origin are in turn compounds in those languages. Just a few random examples:
- exit: out - go
- prospect: forward - look
- decide: down - cut
- alarm: to the weapons
Such etymologies might still be somewhat intuitive to native romance language speaker, although in most of the cases the brain just treats them as opaque units of meaning and sometimes even an obvious alarm (italian: allarme) -> all'arme (italian for "to the weapons") which shares the same pronunciation is not immediately obvious to a native speaker until you point it out; after that an a-ha moment follows.
Thus I'm curious to know how does it work in German where so many compound words are accessible without being hidden by arcane etymology and the general rule is still productive: does it require some effort to actually break a compound in smaller parts once it became so common to be de facto a new word of its own ?
Does it require some effort to actually break a compound in smaller parts once it became so common to be de facto a new word of its own?
No in general it's quite easy. You just have to pretend it's early latin before the innovation of spaces between words ;) And then there are semi-consistently applied rules about certain suffices (like -s, -er, -en + others) which somtimes go between the subwords to indicate that one of the in a declensional position. For example:
Volksempfänger = Empfänger (des) Volk(es) = "(radio) receiver of the people"
Forming compounds is a bit trickier; everyone "knows" the rules (for applying joining suffices) though they may not be able to articulate as to why -- the new compounds just pop out.
> does it require some effort to actually break a compound in smaller parts once it became so common to be de facto a new word of its own ?
Older, well established compounds often deviate a bit from their original meaning over time, those are as opaque as allarme. "Creative" insults (where English also demonstrates a rich pool of compounds) for example will quickly erode from their literal meaning to "generic insult", only the rough position in the universal coordinate system for expletives (general magnitude, position in the spectrum between evil and stupid) remains.
For unknown compounds, there are some that follow standard patterns of known compounds ("Studentenvereinigung" - student union) and new ones can be read as fluently as an expression with blanks ("Studierendenvereinigung" - also student union, but properly gender neutral or "gegendert", "Crowdfundinggründervereinigung" - union of founders who are using crowd funding, hypothetical but would be easy to parse for anyone who has ever heard of kickstarter)
Other compounds however can be rarely used, yet still very much unparsable for much of the population. Take for example the "Backpfeifengesicht" that is cited here a lot, the sub-compound "Backpfeife" (a slap in the face) is strictly regional dialect (or even just local slang, and to make it worse from a time long past) and has been shortened from "Backenpfeife" which would still only make sense if you know what it is. I suspect that it was originally coined as an insider slang term deliberately misleading to outsiders. For those cases, you learn to quickly give up on extracting meaning when it does not work and learn it like any other new word, a meaningless GUID that could be anything, slowly narrowed down any time you encounter it in context. Some parsing may still happen, in the case of the Backpfeifengesicht one might for example infer/suspect that it is not about the face but about a person/type of person, because ending with "-gesicht" is also used in other compounds. For example the "Freibiergesicht", someone who will only grace you with his company when there is free beer (regional, typically used as a very low magnitude friendly provocation)
I think what he's basically saying is that when English became a fusional language, forged by the collision of two alien languages -- one Germanic, one Latin; each with its own morphological building system -- everything just turned into a big jumble, and people forgot all these (once) nuanced rules for compounding / deriving words -- leaving us with the comparatively limited ruleset we have now.
At least that's my basic interpretation of the coldly functional, atonal clusterfuck that is modern English.
In many cases, words that linguists call "non-compositional compounds" end up, in English, as a single word.
For instance a "blackboard" isn't a "black board": it is not simply any old board that is black. I.e. the semantics of the composition is not the composition of the semantics.
Some compound words in English have a history which starts as two separate words, then later joined with a hyphen, an finally conjoined without a hyphen. This roughly follows their evolution into a non-compositional noun.
"Newspaper" was once "news-paper" for instance.
Words like "high school" are the unfortunate exceptions; a high school isn't a school which is high, yet it's written as if it were two words. It's certainly not spoken that way; there is a difference between "high class", "high seas", "high concept" and "high school". The "school" is uttered without the slightest pause in front of it, and de-emphasized. Exactly like "board" in "blackboard", or "wife" in "housewife".
For what it's worth, at least English orthography doesn't string together long runs of words into an undelimited string.
I probably won't convince you, but let me try to convey one more time that it functions as one word, thusly:
"My son is in /'haisku:l/."
"3800 feet up in the mountains? That sure is a /'ha:i/ /'sku:l/!"
In some languages, the word for word translation for high school refers to something else. E.g. the Slovak phrase "vysoká škola" literally means "high school" if taken word for word, but actually it refers to some post secondary higher education. This corresponds corresponds to the German word Hoschschule which looks like a cognate for "high school", but meaning-wise isn't. High school is called "stredná škola" which literally means "middle school"! (And the university-prep variety of such a school is also called "gymnázium", the cognate of which denotes a sports or exercise hall in English.)
So the "high" in "high school" is simply not directly informative; you only know what kind of school that refers to from your cultural knowledge and context.
I find it strange that you listed high school as being distinct from high class, when both have the same non-literal meaning of "high".
Maybe it's a cultural thing, but I pronounce both high class and high school without a pause, and with emphasis on both the high and the class / school.
Because the word housewife is hundreds of years old, and middle school isn't. Over time, compound nouns drift closer. They start out as two words, are then joined by a hyphen, and then become a single concatenated word.
> Well, the important difference is that German has actually simple, clean rules for spelling in those cases.
In German, there are the “Fugenlaute”, sounds that are inserted between the words that a compound is made of. And it is not always clear, what these sounds should be.
Some examples:
* “Schaden(s)ersatz” (compensation for damages) – some put an “s” between “Schaden” (damage) and “ersatz” (substitute), some don’t.
* In the German constitution the word “verfassungsgebend” appears, but some would call it “verfassunggebend”.
There are even words that have a different meaning depending on the “Fugenlaute”:
* “Landsmann” / “Landmann” (Land = country / land; Mann = man): “Landsmann” is a man from the same country; a “Landmann” is a peasant or farmer.
In high school, I took French classes, but my friends’ introductory German textbook had such vocabulary words (yes, they needed to memorize the proper spelling and gender of these to prepare for vocabulary quizzes, and invent sentences where the words would be appropriate in context) as:
“Feeling that the end of the world is near”, “kite flying festival”, “commemorative coin with Maria Theresa’s face on it”, “ship from the Hanseatic League”, and “cemetary for homeless, nameless people”.
These are on a whole different scale from “shoebox” or “raincoat”.
(Personally I suspect that the textbook authors were just trolling everyone.)
It's still nothing but a combination of other words without space in between.
In Japanese (or Chinese), do you consider that mixing kanji together to form a more complicated word is something unusual ? It's very much the same concept as what Germans do.
Endzeitstimmung - Feeling that the end of the world is near.
What a great word. Endzeit being composed of the nouns Ende (end) and Zeit (time) which form the word Endzeit, wich is the time when the world ends. And then composed with Stimmung (feeling).
> Personally I suspect that the textbook authors were just trolling everyone.
While that happens very often, surprisingly all the words you said are actual German words, and Endzeitstimmung, Drachenflugfestival (oder Drachenfestival, if you want to make it shorter) and Hanseschiff are quite common German words anyone would understand.
Fun fact: In German, except for a grammatical weirdness, Dragon and Kite are the same word. The word is also the same as Deltoid.
I personally feel that German compound words often express much more abstract concepts than their English counterpart. To give a really infamous example: Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz
The first thing to note is that adding an "ung" to the stem of a verb usually means "the abstract process of doing what the verb describes". Even this simply property makes it quite easy to express rather abstract concepts that are quite clumsy in English.
Now we'll decode this word:
Rind: agricultural term for "cow" ("Kuh")
fleisch: meat
So Rindlfleisch = "meat of cows" (beef)
"Etikettierung": The German word "Etikette" means "label" (it also has other meanings, but they are not important here). Form this we can derive the word "etikettieren" (to put a label on something). From this verb, as I explained above, you can derive "Etikettierung" - the abstract process of labeling something. What is the something here? Of course the beef.
"Überwachung": The verb "überwachen" means "to supervise" or "to monitor". You know the rules to find out what "Überwachung" means (the abstract process ...). Just one remark for those who are interested: "überwachen" consists of the prefix "über" and the verb "wachen" (to wake, to keep watch).
"Aufgaben": Could be simply translated with "tasks", but this, in my opinion distorts the meaning a little bit. I'll rather divide it into "auf" + "Gabe". "Gabe" is a slightly old-fashinoned word meaning "Something that was given to you by someone else" (derived from the past "gab" of "geben" (to give)). So "Aufgabe" is more correctly translated with "something that was given to you by someone else to do". "Aufgaben" is simply the plural of "Aufgabe".
"Übertragung": The verb "transfer" expresses in my opinion quite the same meaning as "übertragen", since the Latin prexix "trans" corresponds quite well to the prefix "über" as it's used here and the Latin verb "ferre" from which the "fer" in "transfer" is derived means "to carry" (in German: "tragen"). So (you know the rules) "Übertragung" is the abstract process of transfering something. What do we transfer: The answer is clear: The "Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgaben".
Gesetz: We could simply use the English word "law", but "Gesetz" is derived from the verb "setzen" (to set). Thus "Gesetz" carries the slight connotation of "something that was set into force by some authority".
Exercise ;-) : How should "Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz" be translated into English?
The "Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz" is not a law about beef labelling procedures, but about whom the monitoring of the labeling of beef is assigned to. It's not that simple. :-)
Edit: Bonus exercise: What about "Grundstücksverkehrsgenehmigungszuständigkeitsübertragungsverordnung"? I'm ducking away ;-)
Colloquial English, at least in America, has the idea of a "punchable face." Perhaps not as catchy as the German word (which is just a couple words jammed together anyway), but they're similar.
I really hate this phrase. I just generally find it repulsive, but also 99% of the people who say it would never hit anyone.
One of my philosphy professors at university said Heidegger and most of German philosphy is only an expression of German language, like "Das Sein, Das Seiende, ..."
My personal favorite: "Hängematte" (hammock) – a hanging mat (something to be hanged + mat)
While actually borrowed from Haitian "hamáka" (it entered German first in the early 15 hundreds as "Hamaco" or "Hamach"), it was soon adopted in the form of a similar sounding native compound. (Also compare the Dutch "hangmat".) Just few native speakers realize, it's not what it reads.
What I wrote was actually somewhat speculative. More recent Dutch etymology research ( http://www.etymologiebank.nl/trefwoord/hangmat ) says that there is an early German find Hengmatten [1627; Pfeifer], more than 40 years before the first Dutch find (1669). Still, Philippa et al. claim, the German must be a loan translation from Dutch, both because it is a sailor's term in the Dutch Golden Age, and because a direct German derivation seems less plausible as it would have more sound changes.
As a native German speaker, I do appreciate the ability to join words like that.
English, on the other is awesome for forming phrases that are nearly impossible to translate. "To go to town on somebody" is one I really like, for example. Also, English is much better for cursing, for some reason. People cursing in German always sound really, really lame (except for Bavarians).
Funny that you mention English as better for cursing; as a French, I've always found the English catalogue of dirty words and insults quite limited. There doesn't even seem to have more than 2 or 3 common names for genitals of both sex, or even several dirty names for sodomy. Imaginative genitals naming coupled with religion, dirty things and weird sexual practices allow for some nice compositions :)
Well, I have to admit my knowledge of French is limited to a handful of words. The only languages I know well enough to make a comparison are German and English. :-/
On the other hand, from a non-german speaker perspective, German is, for lack of a better word, aggressive. Cursing in German sounds definitely more meaningful than cursing in, say, Italian.
A couple of months back, a bank failed in Italy. On a news piece, a lady was cursing (really cursing) at bank owners. It was one of the most aggressive speeches I've seen. Yet, if you listened to the "music" alone, it was an incredibly sweet speech.
> English, on the other is awesome for forming phrases that are nearly impossible to translate. "To go to town on somebody" is one I really like, for example.
I think all languages do this. Why would English be specifically better at it than german?
That example, specifically, all languages do. What I find unique in English is that it is very onomatopoeic. What is a "boom box"? It's a box that does the sound "boom". When you "crash" your car, that's the sound that occurs. A staple, when applied, sounds like "staple", as much as a zipper produces the "zip" sound when pulled. It is quite unique.
This would imply that lots of English text can only be written, but hardly understood by someone else. No, really: I think PHP is the better comparison.
Well, but English is a very pragmatic language, "importing" ideas (vocabulary, mainly) freely from other languages, with a rather loose (dare I say "messy"? Compared to Latin, at least...) syntax that offers a lot of flexibility, making, as they say, easy things easy and hard things possible, choosing expressiveness over conceptual clarity/elegance. Sounds a little like Perl to me. ;-)
OTOH, PHP has taken inspiration from Perl, so I do not disagree very strongly.
Reading Kafka in german is so much more modern and musical than in english or any other language. Kafka in english sounds almost sentimental, less modern. At least thats my feeling. In english translators often break his long paragraphs and sentences. Samuel Beckett said that he used to read most of Kafka in german, especially the Castle - Das Schloß.
I once had the unusual task of helping to translate a lengthy set of requirement specification documents for a migration between to ERP systems from German to English.
My overall impression is that German lends itself far easier to lengthy, nested, convoluted sentences. You can build long sentences in English, too, but their structure tends to be ... flatter?
So in translating, I would often break up monstrous monolithic sentences ("Bandwurmsatz", as we say in German) into several shorter ones.
It is different, I guess, when translating literature, but translating literature is probably really, really hard anyway. So try to have pity on those poor people who had to translate Kafka.
I generally prefer to read literature in its original language, but English is the only foreign language I know well enough to do that... :(
I think the greatest thing about the German language is its practicality. "Ausgang" or "exit", literally from the words 'go out' or 'gone out' but that describes the action and noun. It is the description of the word that becomes the word. "Escalator" is "Fahrtreppe" or "Rolltreppe", literally moving/going stairs or roll stairs.
And has arguably a better ring to it, since "Turnbeutel" is more readily associated with children than "Sporttasche", making the term slightly more ridiculing.
Finnish is nice for this as well. The grammar is mostly about inflected forms so you can keep things together in a single word, you can most often find a way to write words together, and even creating completely new yet understandable words by joining existing words together or applying onomatopoetics is doable.
OpenOffice was great in having strange combinations in its dictionaries, and no sense for if they might fit or not. I remember it once being insistent on correcting something over a large edit distance to Steinzeitauto ("stone age car"), which is a correctly formed word, but really only useful if referring to the "The Flintstones".
Not necessarily more "abstract", but for various reasons here are more words imbued with double- or multiple meanings.
That and there's intrinsically more positional freedom for certain categories of words; e.g. Werdende in the above article is essentially the same word as the verb participle werdend, but placed in a position (that of a nounified adjective) which basically doesn't work in English.
The analogous construction in English would be "the becoming" or "the expecting", implicitly referring to a thing or person. Other than lyrical cases ("The Shining"), you pretty much wouldn't use that formulation in English.
The german language has long words simply because its written form (orthography) doesn't require spaces between the elements of a noun phrase.
So whereas in English we write "law school entrance examination test requirements", the German written transliteration of that will string the words together without spaces.
Calling that a "word" makes a strawman out of the concept of a word.
Juraschuleaufnahmeprüfungsvoraussetzungen btw. Although nobody would actually say that. More like "Aufnahmeprüfungskriterien für die juristische Fakultät".
While generally neutral, a spaceless join does convey a sense of "hardness", or a deepening of the association between the joined parts in some contexts. It also can give a concept greater currency simply because it can be expressed more efficiently: compare Sitzpinkler with "[A male person / group of people] who pee while sitting."
The german frequently employs the letter 's' to glue the words together, for instance: Nutzungsgebühr, which is made up of words Nutzung (usage) and Gebühr (fee). Or as in BedienungSanleitung. Actually, they are so much accustomed to the use of 's' if you speak them in English, when they make a mistake, they tend to mistake on the 's', for instance I did hear a German say "it doesn't workS" .)
The mistake "it doesn't works" could be hypothesized as not of phonetic/morphological origin but as a case of redundant person/number. The speaker hasn't internalized the rule when you negate "works" to "doesn't work", the auxiliary "do" verb carries the negative/number/person/tense, and the main verb simply appears in the dictionary infinitive form. That is to say, the speaker put the tense and number on both "work" as well as on "do".
The native "Es funktioniert nicht" negation doesn't use an auxiliary form; there is no parallel structure there on which to build an intuition, even though English has Germanic roots. It's more of a cognate to "It functions not".
I've helped some 4th grader learn English and they always explained to me that they used "it doesn't works" because of the rule that after using he, she and it, there needs to be an S (there is even a German saying for English learners: "he, she, it und das als muss mit" – in English, "he she it and the S must come along"). Since they have heard that saying so much, they often miss that they already used the S in "doesn't" and use it again. A lot of practice often helps though.
They need the general rule that English verbs can be verb phrases, which have an auxiliary or modal like "have" or "do". And that such verb phrases inflect the auxiliary verb, while the main verb stays in the infinitive form (or in the participle form, as the case may be). The auxiliary carries the tense, negation, person and number.
Also it helps to imagine that there is always an auxiliary. If you don't see it, it is invisible, but still there. When the auxiliary is invisible, it cannot take the tense, number and so on; these markers go to the main verb.
Now when you make a question, the auxiliary and sentence subject exchange places (subject-aux inversion). This still happens when the aux: is invisible.
Visible aux (will):
Statement: You will have the soup.
Question: Will you have the soup?
Invisible aux:
Statement: You [invisible] have the time.
Question: [invisible] you have the time?
But now, this invisible aux is dangling up in front of the clause and that is forbidden. In this situation, the invisible aux is instantiated in a visible form, and it appears as the verb "do":
Question: Do you have the time?
And, as usual, this invisible-come-visible aux now takes the tense, number, person, "not" negation away from the main verb. With that we can more or less semi-accurately understand how "do" works in forming questions.
Remember that the mistake I mention above is often made by beginners. While it is true what you said, it is easier to just tell them: always use two verbs in a question or negative sentence. If you don't have two, just borrow "do" and apply the appropriate time/person to that verb and use the infinitive form of the second verb.
When learning a language it is important to have easy-to-understand and simple rules. When you try to write or speak in a foreign language, there are a lot of things to consider and you are going to forget a few. The best thing you can do is practice a lot until it starts to sound natural. If you always try to apply all rules you've learned, you are going to miss some, no matter how smart you are. It's also important to have someone who can correct you and tell you the appropriate rules.
>The only important structural difference between the German and the English in these compounds is whether there is a written space between the two nouns...
I still don't understand how creating these huge, unwieldy words is an advantage. If a useful word contains more than about four syllables people tend to shorten it, just like they would an English phrase.
The article explicitly tries to explain its idea of an "advantage", stuffing more information into less characters ('English needs a whole sentence to explain the concept of a single albeit long word in German').
Disclaimer: I'm German. I like my native language. But I don't think that it is more concise than English in any use case I can think of and while I feel that the article is interesting and amusing, it's not comparing the real world German to English. The examples are valid, the article didn't seem wrong, but .. I doubt that this has any significance.
Unwieldy is a crappy attribute of course. They aren't unwieldy. Foreign, strange to you? Sure, can't argue with that. Unwieldy though? Don't judge what you don't know.
I do know that lots of things become a mess if you try to translate them to German (with my background, on this board: You certainly don't want to learn about German words for mother/main board, stack or similar things. Or - let's do one: "Stack" was taught as "Kellerspeicher" for a while, which is the combination of "Keller"/basement and "Speicher"/memory).
Back to the original question: Aren't the general concepts the same, can't you capture the same stuff in exactly the same precision in English? Are we just talking about the way ~some~ concepts can be compressed into a single noun quite well vs. a succinct sentence?
Oh, yeah, German CS books can be annoying, especially older ones where every author had their own way of translating things.
stack = "Kellerspeicher" = "Keller" = "Stapel" (literal translation of "stack") = "Stapelspeicher".
That said, PC components mostly are very direct translations that IMHO work well. main board = "Hauptplatine", hard disk = "Festplatte" (which apparently in the beginning led to confusion to why the IT departments are ordering such expensive catering, but nowadays is established), ... are all easy to map.
The closest I can think of is "Tüftler", but that really doesn't capture the science-y aspect and is more hands-on. More the guy building a fusion reactor in his garage, less the group designing a radar device in some government lab.
As a native speaker, I definitely prefer "Parkraumbewirtschaftungszone" over "Zone bewirtschafteten Parkraumes", "Zone, in welcher Raum zum Parken bewirtschaftet wird".
The example may show that once you start chopping up a long word, you tend to end up with a pile of messy inflections and possessive pronouns.
In English, you might say something like "paid parking area", but I'd argue that would carry less meaning.
15 years ago, when I was a young man in my early 20s, I lived in the top floor of a house, sharing that floor (and that floor's bathroom) with two other people: a German chap, and an English girl. Fast forward about six months and somehow one day a conversation took whatever turn would be required for it to be appropriate for me to say: "Well, I almost always leave the seat down, because I almost always sit down to take a piss." Cue a sudden burst of laughter from the German - who says they don't have a sense of humour? - because it turned out he did exactly the same thing. Good to know it wasn't just me at least, I suppose.
"Well" said our floormate. "I always wondered how such a pair of inconsiderately dirty bastards were still so consistently good at politely leaving the seat down."
There were 3 men in the house, and the 3rd man would occasionally use "our" bathroom. So the very next day the German guy put a sign up on the door in order to keep him out. SIT PISSERS ONLY.