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Comment by cfallin | Hacker News Reader

Some of the compound words are really quite funny, too... two of my favorites, randomly encountered recently: gloves/mittens are "Handschuhe" (hand shoes), and a porcupine is "Stachelschwein" (spike/quill pig).

Very intuitive actually!

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Porcupine is the same thing, just using latinate roots rather than native English/Germanic ones.

Ah, yes, that makes perfect sense! So many word roots hiding in plain sight...

Ditto for Hippopotamus (Greek base for River Horse) and the German Nilpferd - Nile Horse.

A lot of stuff is like this. If you replace Geology with Rocklore then it sounds kind of weird but it's basically what it was in Greek.

See also: this old essay about "Uncleftish Beholding" (Atomic Theory) - English without the non-Germanic words.

https://groups.google.com/forum/message/raw?msg=alt.language...

Rocklore would be lithology or petrology.

Geology is the study of the earth.

English does this a lot with borrowed words too, like orangutan coming from Malay orang (man) hutan (forest), so man of the forest.

That’s a nice example where English fully compounds the word while German and Dutch, languages where compounding is more usual, use a hyphen (“Orang-oetan”, respectively “Orang-Utan”).

Looking at the various translations on Wikipedia (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orang-Utans#/languages), that could be because they took the word from different languages. For example, Bahasa Indonesia has “Orang Utan”, Bahasa Banjar “Uranghutan”

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