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Comment by kazinator | Hacker News Reader

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.

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Juraschuleaufnahmeprüfungsvoraussetzungen btw. Although nobody would actually say that. More like "Aufnahmeprüfungskriterien für die juristische Fakultät".

My favorite is "memory management": Speicherverwaltung.

We can take the sentence:

"Achtung, Achtung, Luftlagemeldung!"

and substitute into it:

"Achtung, Achtung, Speicherverwaltung!"

Failing memory management can be like an air raid, sort of. The program "bombs" and all. Map a guard page on both sides and dive into shelter! :)

The CLISP source file name "spvw.d" is an acronym of this word.

Mostly true but not always.

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."

"Im Sitzen Pinkelnder" would definitely be less catchy.

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" .)

This is because German still retains some case, while English has almost completely abandoned it.

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 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".

"It doesn't works" has little to do with the glue-s, it just happens to be halfway between the even more wrong "It not works" and "It doesn't work".

Personally, I go for "It not worksy" (or shorter: "Not worksy!") when I want the language to be as broken as the thing it describes.

It's called a "Gleitlaut" and it's supposed to make it easier to pronounce the word, for instance "Nutzungsrecht" vs "Nutzungrecht".

Native german speaker here, thinking the other way around: if it is one thing, why would you want to use more than one word to name it?

Native MS-DOS user here: why would you need subdirectories in a filesystem that break up file names into multiple words?

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