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Comment by kurtosis | Hacker News Reader

It makes me happy and amused to hear langauge chauvanism from a non-european! Why am I not-surprised to learn that chinese sounds perfectly logical to a native speaker!

The examples he gives are quite bogus though - how would someone without the experience in chinese learn that a "bus" is a "public wagon" instead of a "fat car" or a "wheeled boat" or a "shared ride"? Is there some rule you can learn?

I've also been trying to learn the german language and there are many many examples of compounds like this - I have made up many that are completely logical to me, but get only confused looks from people. e.g. "einziehen" is to settle-in but "ausziehen" is to remove your clothes.

"chandelier" is actually quite logical if you follow the historical emergence of the word from the french word for "candlestick"

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Something like "Aus der Wohnung ausziehen.." is perfectly fine for "moving out".

http://dict.leo.org/ende?lp=ende&lang=de&searchLoc=0...

Both “off” and “out” are translated to „aus“ in German. „Ausziehen” could be translated as “to pull off” (for clothes) or ”to pull out” (for houses and apartments). Hence the two meanings.

When you put your clothes on or move in you don‘t have the same problem. “On” and “in” are translated to „an“ and „ein“, respectively. That’s why there is „anziehen“ (“to pull on”, for clothes) and „einziehen“ (“to pull in”, for houses and apartments).

(To the grandparent: You really should try you luck creating compound words in German even when you are not sure whether the word exists. That’s a very German thing to do :)

Even in the comment you use "langauge", so doubtful I checked if the world "langauge" existed haha.

When he says it's simple, he means to understand. But sometimes you can still guess words. Few examples that you could have find if you're familiar with chinese (because you're learning it for example) :

_出租车 (chuzuche) means taxi (rent - car)

_火车 (huoche) means train (fire - car)

_飞机 (feiji) means airplane (fly - machine)

I'll grant you fly machine. But if a taxi is a rent car, what do I call a rental car? And if a fire-car is a train, what do I say if my car catches fire?

A more interesting tidbit is:

"You must." is "Du musst.". "You may." is "Du darfst.".

But: "You must not." is "Du darfst nicht." and "You may not." is "Du musst nicht."

"Du musst nicht." is "You don't have to"

It is a difference in operator precedence. Pseudo-Prolog example following)

    not(obligation(you, action)) 
    vs.
    obligation(you, not(action))

Yes, "Have to" and "Muessen" makes the idiom of negation easier to translate. I also agree with your analysis.

Ausziehen is perfectly fine German for moving out of your house or your clothes. It just has (at least) two meanings.

Ah, this reminds me of DSL (Domain Specific Language)...

almost thought "Dutch as a Second Language"... then I had to read the parenthesis.

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