Has anyone else noticed that when conversations about “we need x word for y concept” arise, the German language nearly always seems to be the one that has something similar or already present?
In English, it'd be the equivalent of taking "make worse by improving" and turning it into "makeworsebyimproving".
When I was learning German, we were taught the language has far fewer core nouns than English (4000 vs 20,000 is stuck in my head, but this is going back years), but then they bash them together to get the rest of the concepts.
descriptive-with-more-readability ... Common Lisp ... Lisp ... parentheses ... angled brackets ... Angles ... Anglophones.
An English neologism might be something like “imporse(n)” or maybe “imperiorate”. Personally that sounds more sophisticated to me. “Imporsement” or “imperioration” could be the nominalisations (what’s the noun for “worsen”?).
Like Sanskrit. Also, in Sanskrit, many words have multiple meanings, so when you string them together, there is often (somewhat of) a combinatorial explosion of overall meanings.
https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2019/09/28/why-are-...
So it really depends on exactly what kind of information you are trying to package and how. Different languages compress differently.
Englisch took Angst and Zeitgeist. Take that one too?
E.g.: silly, ridiculous, foolish In Germany you have: albern, lächerlich, töricht
They are quite close to the English ones, but not exact the same. It's the other way around too: English doesn't have words that match the German ones 1:1