Has anyone else noticed that when conversations about “we need x word for y concept” arise, the German language nearly always seems to be the one that has something similar or already present?
It's because the German language is highly compound. Take any descriptive phrase, remove the spaces, and you have a new word.
In English, it'd be the equivalent of taking "make worse by improving" and turning it into "makeworsebyimproving".
When I was learning German, we were taught the language has far fewer core nouns than English (4000 vs 20,000 is stuck in my head, but this is going back years), but then they bash them together to get the rest of the concepts.
As a German I’ve always found “verschlimmbessern” very clunky and awkward, but it is pretty widespread, so you get used to it. That’s usually not the case in discussions like this, for example the famous “Wanderlust” isn’t really a thing in German, although it is a feasible, natural sounding compound.
An English neologism might be something like “imporse(n)” or maybe “imperiorate”. Personally that sounds more sophisticated to me. “Imporsement” or “imperioration” could be the nominalisations (what’s the noun for “worsen”?).
> It's because the German language is highly compound. Take any descriptive phrase, remove the spaces, and you have a new word.
Like Sanskrit.
Also, in Sanskrit, many words have multiple meanings, so when you string them together, there is often (somewhat of) a combinatorial explosion of overall meanings.
I read somewhere (on HN?) that Italians speak faster than Germans because their words contain less information, so in the end they still communicate the same amount of information per minute. Italians and Germans were used in the example because they were the two extremes.
I was reading a conversation trying to work out the most information that you could fit into a one word command (the limit of the Dungeons and Dragons Command spell.) Italian was floated as the language that could be stretched the furthest, due to being able to compound verbs.
So it really depends on exactly what kind of information you are trying to package and how. Different languages compress differently.
Angst and zeitgeist don't decimate the American tongue. If you want us to adopt verschlimmbessern, drop one of the Ms and one of the Ses and get Muppets to sing a song about it.
It has no 1:1 translation, but that's true the other way around too for a lot of nuanced words.
E.g.: silly, ridiculous, foolish
In Germany you have: albern, lächerlich, töricht
They are quite close to the English ones, but not exact the same. It's the other way around too: English doesn't have words that match the German ones 1:1
In English, it'd be the equivalent of taking "make worse by improving" and turning it into "makeworsebyimproving".
When I was learning German, we were taught the language has far fewer core nouns than English (4000 vs 20,000 is stuck in my head, but this is going back years), but then they bash them together to get the rest of the concepts.