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Comment by Kenji | Hacker News Reader

I am willing to give up my language in favour of a world language - in fact, I have already done that. I think in English. I write all my poetry, stories and dreams in English, I only communicate in that language unless it's with family or coworkers. I pretty much gave up on my native language. I feel like English is superior in many ways because it has words that my language does not, which forces me to describe awkwardly what I mean instead of using a single word. In German, happiness and luck are merged into one single word (da fuq?). German has no succinct word for contrarian (noun). Or another point for English:

Our language has wisely sensed the two sides of being alone. It has created the word loneliness to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word solitude to express the glory of being alone. - Paul Tillich

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English has these words that your language does not, because it borrowed heavily from several other languages in the past. Having only one language would kill off that source for diversity.

Dutch also has one word for happiness and luck ("geluk"), although in Flanders you can use "chance" to express "luck" specifically (borrowed from French).

In some ways, English allows for more specificity compared to German, but the reverse is also true.

I have to disagree here. Maybe 'Glück' has more than one meaning (happiness and luck) but you also have particular words for happiness like 'Fröhlichkeit'. Of course in a day to day context you would not use all those different words but still I think German can be used as a language to describe things very precise.

As a native speaker of German I feel often more comfortable to advertise products in English but that is probably because I'm so used to English advertisements and I'm not so exposed to that particular vocabulary in German (or maybe German is too precise to really shine in advertisements). I don't think I could translate an Apple keynote into German and still sounding so 'magical'.

Maybe there are some words you can't translate literally or they don't sound as nice (contrarian: Querdenker, Nonkonformist) still you would miss other awesome things like the German way to combine nouns to infinite length.

German, however, has schadenfreude, gestalt, eigenvalue, angst, weltschmerz and poltergeist ;)

The most important feature of German that I strongly miss in English (and probably other languages, too) is the easiness that one can make new words (in particular nouns) by juxtaposition (and indeed, importantly, you can often rely on the fact that more complicated words are constructed this way). I really wish a lot more English words were built by juxtaposition from more simple concepts instead of being own words that one has to learn without (easily) being able to understand the "atoms" that the word is built of.

Some of smsm42's example do have this property:

"Eigenwert" (eigenvalue): eigen (of (it)self), Wert (value)

"Weltschmerz": Welt (world), Schmerz (pain)

"Poltergeist": poltern (to rumble), Geist (ghost)

Mandarin Chinese does much the same as German.

English prefers to borrow words from other languages. Curiously, it has borrowed hardly any words from Mandarin Chinese.

> English prefers to borrow words from other languages. Curiously, it has borrowed hardly any words from Mandarin Chinese.

Besides that there had been much less contact between English speaking countries and China than to, say, German, French or Spanish speaking countries (at least until the Chinese economy began to boom) there is another reason that I can imagine. Since the Chinese dialects/languages are tonal languages their sound is much more foreign to the ear of people who didn't grew up with a tonal languages. Indeed people who learnt to speak one of the Chinese dialects told me one of the first exercises is learning to even consciously perceive the different tones.

Yes, probably down to historical lack of contact. I don't think that tones are part of the reason. There has been somewhat more borrowing from Cantonese into English, e.g. ketchup, dimsum, kumquat, and cheongsam, and substantial borrowing from Chinese into Japanese and Korean. The tones are simply dropped.

English had all of these, exactly.

Every child knows poltergeist, from Harry Potter. Every teenager knows angst.

The others are less universal, but I'd expect a university graduate to know them.

That's kind of the point - English imported them from German (or, rather, just uses German words). English does that all the time. Same with French - rendezvous, cachet (don't confuse with cache :), passé, etc. So French speakers shouldn't feel bad for taking words from English - that happens all the time, just this time English is more popular so other languages take from it. Before that it was German and French, and in 100 years maybe it will be Mandarin, who knows.

Where exactly do you think those words come from?

Having more specific or less specific words is not necessarily a weakness or strength of a language - sometimes being able to express both happiness and luck in a single word might be useful, and I imagine it is easy to specify either one or the other concept with a quick paraphrase if necessary.

Erm, Tillich could have chosen a better example: in French you also have isolement and solitude.

I think Tillich wanted to make a point about solitude and loneliness, not the superiority of English. I find his point interesting in both contexts.

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