The power of agglutinative languages. Here is an apparently valid German word that takes one minute to say: https://youtu.be/Brt6F4cGFCY
1. How long have you been waiting to use that in a sentence?
2. German has a word for everything. "My car misfires when I am in second gear and accelerating in a corner that is greater than 45° and on an incline." There is a German word for exactly that.
Anyhow, we really could use more words for snow. I've seen stuff falling from the sky that there are no words for. Some of it doesn't defies even simple phrases.
As I've said before, I love snow. I do live here for a reason.
There are no words for this slush-like substance that falls from the sky, sometimes as small clumps but other times in clumps large enough that you can hear them hit the ground. This happens usually when the air temp is just a bit above freezing, it is warmer down in the valley than it is here, and the higher air remains pretty warm until there is a cut-off a few thousand feet above you and the air gets much colder. Also, it tends to be high ambient moisture content to the point where you have a moderately dense fog.
There's probably a German word for that, but there's none in English and I doubt the Inuit people have one either.
Seriously, there is a lot of different types of snow. I didn't realize there were this many until I retired and moved here. Now I know...
By the way, the locals would call that 'the start of a good old fashioned New England shit-storm.' It often ends with frozen rain or sleet. I could go on for hours about the different types of snow. 100 words wouldn't even begin to cut it.
Joining or concatenating two nouns or a noun and an adjective form “a new word”, but the meaning is of course based upon the two other words.
So if I were to construct a word about the car, I could go like: anden-gears-sving-fejltænding. (Literally, second gear turn misfire). Typically hyphens are omitted, but they are optional.
Is that a new word? Not in Danish, it is just four other written with no spaces in between. Written together they describe a specific situation/concept. But there is no new word.
For example, "football stadium" is written in two words in English. In German it _must_ be written as "Fußballstadien" -- making it look like German has a lot of "special" "words". They are just concatenations to form nouns.
That sounds like what we call "räntä" in Finland, which, according to Wikipedia, is called "sleet" in Commonwealth countries.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rain_and_snow_mixed#Terminolog...
Picture nearly melted snowflakes, on the verge of melting - so that they are almost translucent. Now, clump them together, somewhere in the atmosphere. Sometimes, the clumps will have a diameter of as many as six centimeters, but that's pretty rare. Usually, they are only two to four centimeters.
Those fall out of the sky. Usually, I will see that just a couple of times per season. Some years, I don't see it at all. It really depends and it only happens when the conditions are just right.
My elevation is about 925 meters. I'm a bit above the 45°, the meridian. I usually get about 3.75 meters of snow, per season,
(I converted it to metric for you.)
I've never seen snow quite like it elsewhere. I'm sure it exists elsewhere, but I've never seen it.
> other times in clumps large enough that you can hear them hit the ground.
... Just for (very) wet snow.
I'm not really sure what to call it?
I don't think there is a German word for that? What is that word?
This is the first search result for one search:
http://www.fluentu.com/blog/german/weird-german-words-vocabu...
As a boring compound there is Schneeregen (snow-rain), but there is the shortened "Schnegen". Although the latter isn't used as a noun often, more commonly as a verb ("es schnegnet")
One of my best mates is a speech pathologist with a love of language. She throws out that word with a casual flair... :)
It reminds me, at times, of my university days. That may not seem like a compliment, but it is absolutely meant to be. See, I have a Ph.D., in Applied Mathemstics - from MIT.
HN sometimes reminds me of those university experiences. I find it comforting to not be the smartest person in the room. It makes me feel honored to be here.
Thank you for sharing your knowledge.
Or as my math professor friend likes to say, “German is closed under concatenation” (and “Latin under permutation”)