[mkotowski]

Opinion of a Polish guy: In my eyes, English is pretty bloated, when seemingly almost every concept can have three or more alternative words, each from a different source. It is all matter of perspective, I suppose. :)

I think such feeling can be caused by languages that rely strongly on creating compound words rather than borrowing a new ones (example from the site: Dictionary > Wordbook).

[wolfram74]

The counterargument is that lots of words allow for precise concision. wordbook can be ambiguous, as almost all books are filled with words. Is wordbook specifying that this book is a word book as opposed to a picture book? wordkenbook might be less ambiguous, but maybe this referring to all nonfiction books using words?

all that being said, I think uncleftish[0] beholding is an amazing piece of text and a good exercise for young physicists

[0]https://groups.google.com/g/alt.language.artificial/c/ZL4e3f...

[wirrbel]

na, you are missing the point here, in German "Wörterbuch" (literally wordsbook) is the standard term for a dictionary. No ambiguity because by default a book is with words and then all composita describe some kind of deviation (Bilderbuch= picture book, Handbuch = handbook -> manual, Fahrtenbuch = drive book -> driver's log).

English just draws vocabulary from many roots and attaches connotations to them which have to be made a bit more explicit in englisch. So english for example has from the Germanic root "hunger", and from the french root (compare french "faim" hungry -> french "famine") "famine". Now in German, famine is "Hungersnot" (hunger crisis) and "hunger" is "Hunger".

Both languages are precise, yet I would say as a German native speaker, that French is more precise than English (also German is more precise but in this argument I am not impartial).

Just to be clear I am no opponent of loan words, and overall I believe modern-day languages that have a written culture probably converge towards an optimal information transmission rate, which is why english will gain and lose words, so will French and German.

[MrJohz]

You're cherry picking examples here though. How do you explain the "-zeug" words? If you think of "Zeug" more as tool then some of them kind of make more sense ("Feuerzeug", "Werkzeug", at a pinch "Spielzeug") but are you really thinking of a plane as a flying tool? And there are also cases where English has opted for a compound word and German has just invented its own: Ampel vs traffic light, for example.

Personally, I feel like I can be much more precise in English than I can in German (although that's probably mostly impartiality again!) Yes there are lots of words that are ostensibly just synonyms of each other, but they're mostly not true synonyms, because they have different connotations and can be used in different ways. I miss that wealth of vocabulary in German, where it often feels like I say more to get across the exact idea that I want to.

That said, a lot of that is probably familiarity and bias. I grew up in English, and learned German later in life, and I suspect you did the opposite, so obviously we're going have more intuition for our native languages.

[Someone]

> and German has just invented its own: Ampel vs traffic light, for example

That’s not an invention, but a loan word from Latin ampulla (small oil bottle), which got a meaning “hanging lamp” (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Ampel)

[biztos]

I disagree about the Zeug, I think it’s great to have the flexibility — “Zeug” is also just “thing” sometimes — but I find Fahrzeug and Flugzeug just as intuitive as Werkzeug and Feuerzeug. Now relating them to the various meanings of “zeugen” might be tricky but I think I get that too.

In many languages the airplane is a “flying machine” and that makes way more sense than “flat thing in the air” if you think about it.

As a foreigner trying to learn the language (not in DE anymore) I have to remind myself just how weird English is, and not to place unreasonable expectations on people doing the reverse of my journey. Having had to have, so to speak.

[rnosov]

Airplane makes some sense too as according to Wikipedia:

"Aéroplane" originally referred just to the wing, as it is a plane moving through the air. In an example of synecdoche, the word for the wing came to refer to the entire aircraft.

[MrJohz]

But the key point here is that "fire stuff" is still a pretty ambiguous term. Sure, it does describe a lighter, but it also describes lots of other things pretty well. The compound parts give some clues as to the nature of the object in question (a Feuerzeug does have something to do with fire), but fundamentally you still need to know what the word means.

So I don't think compound words magically remove ambiguity, at least not in the general case. Any given compound word could have multiple different meanings, and any given meaning can be described by several compound words.

[MrsPeaches]

As far as I understand it, Zeug means thing in this context.

Stuff is “Stoff” as in Brennstoff.

Fire-thing and burning-stuff.

Lighter is “Zünder“ in German.

Feuerzeug vs Zünder

To close to call regarding which is clearer.

[logifail]

> find Fahrzeug and Flugzeug just as intuitive

There is a certain logic to German. How about:

Wheel -> das Rad

Wheels -> die Räder

Bicycle -> das Fahrrad

Bicycles -> die Fahrräder

Cyclist -> der Radfahrer / die Radfahrerin

Cyclists -> die Radfahrer / die Radfahrerinnen

[hgomersall]

Except for the genders, which are completely arbitrary and very annoying to a learner.

[wirrbel]

> Personally, I feel like I can be much more precise in English than I can in German (although that's probably mostly impartiality again!) Yes there are lots of words that are ostensibly just synonyms of each other, but they're mostly not true synonyms, because they have different connotations and can be used in different ways. I miss that wealth of vocabulary in German, where it often feels like I say more to get across the exact idea that I want to.

Don't know if you are still reading this but nevertheless I wanted to give a reply to this paragraph. Overall I think I really understand your point here, but these various connotations are to me not precision, but a symptom of a high-risk of imprecision if that makes sense. In German (there I am partial), or in french (there I would be impartial) I think that language is more precise because if in doubt, you just add a relative clause or another sentence.

You know, learning English and French in Germany, after 4 years of french classes (like 4h per week) my 4th year of french classes was with the same teacher who also taught English. She made a comparison, when learning english you basically are able to speak fairly easily already in your first or second year on a basic level. To become proficient it takes however a decade of learning and mastery. With french, most students are struggling for 4 years until the grammar is learned, but then they actually have all tools under their belt to speak and write proper french. the rest is filling a few wholes in your vocabulary-knowledge here and there and memorizing a few more irregular verb forms.

[nine_k]

I'd translate "Zeug" as "device": a tool or other contraption made to facilitate some activity. Flugzeug definitely helps flying, like Werkzeug helps working.

[wirrbel]

Sportzeug, Nähzeug, Strickzeug, &c.

[wirrbel]

> And there are also cases where English has opted for a compound word and German has just invented its own: Ampel vs traffic light, for example.

Ampel is a loanword from latin, "ampulla", it was used for oil lamps hanging from churches and thus kind of made its way into the "Ampel".

The legal texts use "Lichtzeichen" instead of Ampel IIRC.

[wolverine876]

> optimal information transmission rate

Written like a programmer. Information transmission is only one narrow purpose of language. We are not computers; language isn't a data structure. It's an Orwellian concept.

> No ambiguity

> Both languages are precise, yet I would say as a German native speaker, that French is more precise than English (also German is more precise but in this argument I am not impartial).

Measuring precision of a word requires a defined, precise or accurate (complete, correct, consistent) concept. I.e., to say Wörterbuch is precise, you need to have a precise concept of what it describes. But reality isn't precise; you never have complete, correct, or consistent knowledge of it. There is always another variation, invention, exception, etc.

The only exception is circular definition - if you define the object according to the bounds of the word. 'This object is a Wörterbuch, and an object that doesn't meet the definition is not one.'

[lifthrasiir]

> wordbook can be ambiguous, as almost all books are filled with words. Is wordbook specifying that this book is a word book as opposed to a picture book? wordkenbook might be less ambiguous, but maybe this referring to all nonfiction books using words?

Your description only applies to a word phrase "word book". The lexicalized word "wordbook" would have its own meaning (presumably one of your suggestions), just like "dictionary" does, but without requiring additional foreign morphemes.

[atchoo]

I was curious about "thesaurus" given that is not a dictionary but still a "word book".

According to Google Translate, apparently Wörterbuch also means thesaurus so OP is correct, it is more ambiguous than dictionary.

The first suggested translation for thesaurus is... thesaurus... so much for compound words eh?

[lifthrasiir]

I specifically said "lexicalized" because the word "wordbook" would be somehow related to "word" and "book" but can mean something else so these words can't no longer stand as a standalone word. Whether the word "thesaurus" can be said to be a "word book" or not is pretty much irrelevant here. If a "wordbook" meant a thesaurus then a plain dictionary would naturally use a different word (or phrase) to avoid confusion. Or more likely, "thesaurus" may not exist as a single word but would be just called a synonym dictionary.

[mgaunard]

A thesaurus is a type of dictionary.

[oefnak]

Synoniemenbüch, probably?

[biztos]

Synonymwörterbuch, apparently:

https://shop.duden.de/collections/worterbucher-und-sprache/p...

[hoseja]

Synonym, of course, being latin.

[oblio]

Lazy just like us. Thesaurus in Romanian is "dicționar de sinonime". I won't bother translating it back to English, you can figure it out :-D

[NoGravitas]

Likewordbook, surely.

[jhbadger]

Yes, Compound words in any language are ambiguous based on their components and need to be learned as concepts into themselves. In English we have "houseboat", which means a boat that has living quarters in it that someone uses as a home. But based on the words, it could mean a boat that you keep in your house instead.

[jojobas]

Almost all books have text in them, yet nobody suffers from the ambiguity of what a textbook is.

[culebron21]

In Slavic languages it's even simpler, it's "slovár" or "slóvnik", meaning something like "worder".

[guidoism]

I feel this way when I speak Spanish. I'm constantly looking for the right word and it always seems that there is only one word in Spanish that fits multiple words in English. I've had the opposite happen where there are more precise words in Spanish, but not as often as the reverse.

[Dalewyn]

>The counterargument is that lots of words allow for precise concision.

In fact, the hallmark of writing/speaking good English is conveying yourself using the least words required with the utmost precision.

Don't believe it? Watch a British politician roast someone in Parliament. That is bloody masterful English literature right there.

[mogrim]

That's just modern fashion - in other eras "flowery" language would be considered superior.

[taylorius]

As a native English speaker, I think the multiple choices of word are a strength. They usually have subtle differences of style (if not meaning), which can affect the tone of the sentence. In my opinion, this is where English achieves its precision - at the phrase or sentence level, rather than the level of individual words.

[culebron21]

Depends on what part of vocabulary you look at. Some words, on the contrary, have many names: "nut", "beam", "housing", "tell", "well", etc. I used to think it's the contrary to Slavic languages, where borrowed words in professions get exact meaning (marine industry, or IT).

[memsom]

Having a Polish wife an knowing something about Polish through a few failed attempts to learn some, Polish is a lot more "bloated" to an English eye. The moods and aspects make learning Polish super hard. If you learn the morphology of the individual elements I guess you can guess what a verb means, but it all seems a bit alien. An needing to know if a verb is in one aspect or another, and that sometimes the aspect is "past" and sometimes "future" in tense... it is hard unless you are a native speaker or really dedicated.

As for English and bloated - I'm probably a high A2/low B1 Swedish speaker. I can read a lot better than I speak. I also dabbled in Norwegian out of fascination of how absolutely similar and yet different the two languages are. (It's like Czech and Polish.) So much looks the same, just spelt differently, but you also have a large corpus of vocabulary that is on the surface different - but in reality a native speaker would know there is a word that is equivilent (maybe just not used as much or archaic.) The one I found today, which blew my mind was "trenge". This means "need" in Norwegian. It is one of those odd "Norwegian seems to prefer another word". Swedish seems to mostly use "behöva" and Norwegian does also have "behøve", but I see trenge way more. Today I saw some Swedish song lyrics with "tränga" (which is basically a Swedish equivalent of the Norwegian spelling.) Synonyms happen in all languages. Even if languages that are purely Germanic with minimal Latin influence. Caveat: this is obviously my own observations. Not claiming any thing other than casual knowledge and no actual expertise.

More examples, from a Swedish speaking point of view, are jente/jänta (latter is archaic, flicka is more contemporary), snakke/snacka (the latter is normally tala or prata), bruke/bruka (bruka in Swedish is seeminly used to mean "usually" rather than "use", and änvenda is used for "use")... the list goes on. I find this really interesting. I think the Hanseatic league and Low German it brought explains an least some of these synonyms.

[nine_k]

> three or more alternative words

Wait until you start studying Sanskrit ;)

[ithkuil]

Being bloated is a boon to the poet and a curse to student

[LeonB]

C# is headed in that direction too.