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Comment by lhorie | Hacker News Reader

I don't know about other languages, but when a friend asked me this question for portuguese a long time ago, I came up with "pet, "firetruck" and "sitcom" as examples. The first two translate to a noun plus an adjective ("animal de estimação" and "caminhão de bombeiro", respectively) and are not that interesting, but the last one has no translation whatsoever as far as I know, primarily because the very existence of sitcoms is sort of predicated on high variety of TV channels, whereas in smaller countries, there usually is only one or two very dominant ones.

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The UK has had sitcoms on the radio since the 50s and TV since the 60s, when there weren't many channels. I think it's more down to what the controllers of the channels want to put on it. Sitcoms can be extremely popular - Only Fools and Horses was watched by around 40% of the UK population at its peak.

Oh, that's a great point, I hadn't thought of that

Sitcom is a conjoining of two word: situational comedy. I wonder if that makes it a great example or a poor one. Now I’m curious of other conjoined words...

Edit: doh. I forgot there is a word for that: portmanteau.

Yeah I was also a bit torn because of that.

FWIW, "situational comedy" is not something that a english speaking person would normally say (or even necessarily understand without context), and likewise the literal Portuguese translation ("comédia situacional") is extremely unlikely to evoke a mental image of "Friends" the way that "sitcom" does in English. If I had to attempt to explain what "sitcom" means to a brazilian person, I might instead say something like "série de comédia americana", which translates literally to "american comedy series".

In Japanese, there's the word "pasocon" (portmanteau of personal computer). Obviously here in the west, nobody would use that combination of words that way.

So I think which portmanteaus exist in a language is a function of the originating culture, which is an interesting phenomenon on its own.

Pasokon has been reborrowed by anime fans to refer to person-shaped personal computers, such as the androids seen in Chobits. Not a huge semantic drift, really.

The more interesting part of Japanese portmanteaus is the use of the first two mora from each word, where English speakers would try to fit head to tail, like “persoputer” or something. But I guess in an agglutinative language, the end of a word is a much fuzzier concept.

> persoputer

Hmm, I think abbreviations are more common. Case in point, personal computer is usually abbreviated to PC.

But PC nowadays has a connotation of a non-Apple computer. Just goes to show how much nuance culture bring into the picture!

The last one comes from "Situation Comedy"[0], in Portuguese it translates to "Comédia de Situação". Sitcom is just an abreviation.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sitcom

Telenovela, or just novela works.

AFAIK, novelas are called soap operas in english.

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