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Comment by darklajid | Hacker News Reader

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.

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Yeah, I read their explanation and don't really see it. Sure, if you're typing something out you don't need to hit the space key as much, but... meh.

I meant unwieldy in the sense that they have a lot of syllables. I assume Germans can pronounce these words without tripping over them.

Well of course we can! We can also buffer arbitrarily long sentences with only one verb at the very end without any signs of impatience ;-)

Are there any English words that capture an abstract concept with great precision, and do not exist in the German language?

Let's see, schadenfreude, oops. Try again: zeitgeist, drat. I'm coming up kaput. Mox nix anyway.

I wouldn't know any, at 1:30am in the morning.

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.

I wonder what the German equivalent of "boffin" is?

That's a good example.

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.

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