[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.

[wirrbel]

Feuerzeug is a lighter, its a fixed term, nothing "wobbly" that relates to fire-stuff.

Zünder is an igniter/detonator, Zündung is the ignition.

Zeug can be used as "thing", but it is frequently used when refearing to gear. So "Feuerzeug" is like "Firegear", "Werkzeug" is the "gear for working" (tools).

[biztos]

There is Zündholz for “match” but lo[0], apparently there is/was Zündzeug:

https://www.dwds.de/wb/dwb/zündzeug

[0]: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/lo

[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.

[nine_k]

This is because English has lost most of its Indo-European heritage (except lexical), and looks much more similar to Chinese that to an IE language like German, Spanish, Russian, Greek, Hindi / Urdu, or even Farsi (though Farsi has also lost grammatical gender).

* English has no inflections; nouns and adjectives stay the same no matter what role in a sentence do they have.

* English has no noun-adjective agreement, and a very rudimentary verb-noun agreement (only third person singular).

* English words have unpredictable pronunciation: like in Chinese, there are some hints and rules, but they are full of exceptions. Try to find a pattern: "busy" / "Suzy" / "circusy", "corps" / "thorps", etc. No way to predict the sound without knowing both the etymology and tradition.

* English has no grammatical gender.

* Though unlike Chinese, English has a sharp distinction between singular and plural.

No wonder even German looks somehow distant from English :)

[hgomersall]

Oh those things are certainly true, but the genders are not consistent across Indo-European languages. In learning a language they act as a thing to get stuck on. It's an unpleasant feeling to know you are constantly getting genders wrong, even if you are understood (though seemingly in France, getting genders wrong is sufficient to be not understood).

[jagaerglad]

Although vaguely off topic, one thing that grinds my gears is calling Persian "Farsi". Nobody goes around saying "hello I speak Español" but for some reason, rather recently, it has become popular to use the endonym for Persian in place of the already well established "Persian". I've more than once met people not knowing they are the same thing which is sad because using the new word loses well-rooted associations like with famous authors and other cultural elements etc

[wirrbel]

There are several persian languages, so referring to the one you mean as "Farsi" makes it more clear (as opposed to "Tajiki" or "Dari" for example).

[WorldMaker]

English has had a lot of good or at least interesting evolutionary reasons to drop most grammatical cases and grammatical genders. English decided to make some interesting trade-offs in expected word order to lower redundancy in inter-word agreement morphology.

Also, while Proto-Indo-European had plenty of grammatical cases, the current theories are that it had fewer grammatical genders than modern languages. The PIE grammatical genders are generally attributed as "animate" and "neuter" and there's a lot of interesting debate on exactly where and when (and why) what today are called "masculine" and "feminine" split from animate (and how much they were "masculine" and "feminine" to PIE is also an interesting debate). That split might have been very late indeed, which seems reflected in the evidence of how few Indo-European languages agree on grammatical genders beyond people and a very small list of animals. (Also, late enough that for instance Farsi might not have "lost" much at all, simply missed out on some of the late splits and evolved around them.) Grammatical gender especially has stopped being seen as a key common trait in IE languages given what linguists have seemed to reconstruct of PIE.

> No wonder even German looks somehow distant from English

A lot of that is inter-tribal politics more than just the syntactic shifts English experienced versus "trunk Indo-European". Modern German sometimes referred to as "High German" intentionally dominated in such a way as to push out all of its "Low German" rivals from the core of Germany which included the Anglo-Saxon tribes. At a raw level English is closer on the family tree to other "Low German" languages such as modern-day Dutch, but modern-day Dutch has its own cultural supremacy battles in its territories and mostly driven its rivals to extinction, several of which themselves were closer to English on the family tree. The closest living relatives of Anglo-Saxon German are the Frisian languages [1] most of which have been classified as endangered or nearly extinct due to cultural domination fights with Dutch (including events relatively similar to the Norman conquest in terms of massive linguistic after-shocks, just between Dutch and Frisian tribes). Modern English is like four tree-branches away from Modern German, even before taking into account the Norman invasion influenced language changes and slowly differently evolved syntax. So it shouldn't be a surprise English looks distant to German because it was always distant to German.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frisian_languages

[nine_k]

Thanks for the detailed comment!

Certainly there are languages more closely related to English, like Dutch or Swedish / Norwegian, that stand sort of midway between English and (High) German. But if we take older languages, like classic Latin, or those with many archaic features, like Lithuanian, the distance from English syntax and grammar becomes pretty large.

I suspect that languages tend to simplify in grammar in areas where several different languages have to coexist: say, England had Germanic, Celtic, and French languages interacting for quite some time, with some Latin thrown in by the church.

I suspect that Mandarin Chinese also resulted from many languages on a pretty large territory interacting a lot, shaving grammatical complexity bit by bit.

[ta1243]

Indeed, for a native English person who doesn't have genders for inanimate objects (I'm sure someone will come up with an exception) they don't seem to add any benefit. La chaise vs Le chaise. It's a chair, you sit on it. Someone articistic might decide that a chair has a masculine form, but another chair could be feminine, but that doesn't change the "le" vs "la" part.

Do non-european languages have genders?

[wirrbel]

yes, and/or word classes that may involve Gender, animate/inanmate categories, etc.

[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.