Comment by igravious | Hacker News Reader

Comment by igravious | Hacker News Reader

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This I noticed right away but I didn't know the linguistic terms for it. (Isn't agglutination something to do with this by the way?) For instance the very famous schadenfreude that everybody has come across at one point or another and arguably has been imported into English at this stage (and so _is_ an English word as such) has two distinct words - schade meaning pity (i think) and freude meaning joy (i think). This example is silly because it is allowable and possible to compose reallylongwords in german from shorter words but not in English. What would be neat is if there were a single undecomposable word in German that has no ready, handy English cognate.

I wonder how many "words" on this list or not morphologically discrete.

German here. "Schaden" in this case means harm or damage or misfortune (which causes someone else's joy). It can mean pity in other contexts, though, as in "that's a pity".

A nice example of an undecomposable word in German that has no ready, handy English cognate is Gemütlichkeit. From Wikipedia: "Its closest equivalent is the word "coziness"; however, [...] Gemütlichkeit connotes the notion of belonging, social acceptance, cheerfulness, the absence of anything hectic and the opportunity to spend quality time."

Thanks for that clarification. I was going by my rusty German and Google translate :)

Gemütlichkeit sounds like a great word. So German and grand. An interesting word on the list from the page of the article is Dépaysement ... meaning "The feeling that comes from not being in one’s home country" which if you squint closely is un-country-ness in English which indeed sounds odd. But we do we the word _discplacement_ which could be overloaded with this typically gallic connotation.

How do we distinguish Dépaysement from alienated?

Or how about the humble "Brot"? No German would recognize what you get sold as "bread" in Britain as proper "Brot".

Gemütlichkeit sounds a lot like fellowship to me.

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