Hacker News Reader

Comment by knwang | Hacker News Reader

Brought up in China and having been in the US for the last 11 years, I find it very true how languages shape thoughts and behaviors. When I speak English a different set of thoughts would come to me than when I speak Chinese. In fact even when I think in different languages I tend to see things in different ways.

View on HN

I find exactly the same when I switch from German to English. I find that German is so extremely structured that it really forces you to think about what you're going to say. One thing I love about German too is the fact that complicated words are really just simple words stuck together. This reveals some amazing extra meanings sometimes. A great example of this is the word for "vocabulary", "Wortschatz", which is made up of Wort = word, Schatz = treasure. A treasure trove of words indeed!

Yes, the ability to form new words like that is very powerful. In the beginning the concatenated words tend to stay close to the original separate meanings of the word, but sometimes they start to stray.

(and for the record, the swedish variant of vocabulary is 'ordförråd', which literally mean a store of words)

The old word in english for vocabulary/glossary was 'wordhoard'. The influence of Latin displaced its usage though.

Another linguistic curiosity in English, is that, for some people, when there are two English words with equivalent meaning and one is originally English and the other originally Latin, some people will feel the Latin-derived word more weighty or of higher status than the English word.

For example: It's eminently clear she does not desire it. vs. It's utterly clear she does not want it. Or expression: Pardon me? vs. What?

It's enlightening to notice, though I'm not sure it's much of a curiosity - IIRC the Latin comes from Norman French, and they ruled English speakers for a while, so everything Frenchy was marked as more refined.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com