I love the expressiveness of German.
This seems less like an improvement gone awry though, and more like a classic case of what in English we'd call "bait and switch."
This seems less like an improvement gone awry though, and more like a classic case of what in English we'd call "bait and switch."
Verschlimmbesserung
Improvementagrrivation
English does the same sort of thing were you'll see something like use case become use-case and then usecase.
This is called portmanteau in English, and here's the Wikipedia article, with some common examples.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portmanteau
Edit to add: also compound words
The different is that the former is a legit syntax/form of a composite word in German (where you can combine words more freely), whereas Improvementagrrivation is not. Also the former conveys a meaning, whereas the latter would have people scratching their heads.
The limitation with port-manteu and/or compound words in English is that you don't just create them and that's it: they also need to be adopted in order to be part of the language, accepted as words and understood as terms and intention (and not just an error of forgeting to add a space between two words), etc.
In programming terms, one might say that German has first-class support for compound words, whereas with English you need to wait for each new word to slowly be added to the vocabulary.
> In German you can combine more freely, and people will more ofen than not, get it immediately too.
It could be true but I'm sceptical, I reckon tht in most languages you can change things on the fly and people will get it. For example, the next comment down from yours has this:
> I suppose in English it's an updowngrade?
All you'd need is the context and pretty much everyone would get it. You may say that context is the difference but doesn't everything in English need a bit of context?[1] (I'm also a bit sceptical of the context thing too though!:)
It amuses me when we brits complain about US spelling when in some cases it’s we that changed and not North America.
For instance "law school entrance exam administration".
This noun compounding process is extremely free and productive in English.
As an example, deepfake was noted to be first coined circa 2017.
I am willing to bet that every German will likely understand Morgenkaffeesehnsucht, the desire for coffee in the morning (which I just made up on the fly).
There are certainly English phrases shorter than their German counterparts. "Car insurance" vs "Autoversicherung", for example. It's just that beyond a select few exceptions certain types of things are not a convention in Standard English, like nouns for very specific feelings.
It's effectively the same as saying "improvement aggravation".
Communication can be defined as information that makes a difference, and the German verschlimmbesserung adds nothing.
It literally transliterates to the exact same thing in English.
I don't really agree much with your last point. Someome still has to come up with the word in German, and others have to use it.
Edit: fixed a tapographical error <- see, it works in English too, as my sibling comment pointed out with updowngrade.
Instead, the “ver-“ prefix and the “-ung” suffix are factored out and basically, a new verb is invented and immediately can be understood by German speakers: “verschlimmbessern”
No, it's not (I also assume you meant "improvement aggravation").
First, pragmatically, as it is at the monent:
(1) "verschlimmbesserung" IS a word in German, and is in use, people understand it, use it to express their update pain, etc. "improvement aggravation" on the other hand, is not a thing. It's just two words next to each other. People will scratch their heads as to what you mean, and you'll need to explain it with further terms in a circumlocutory way.
And that's not by accident, it's because (2):
(2) The second issue is that in german adding two words together (or more) "parses" in the language, and creates a valid new term (with either an obvious or a culturally transmitted meaning).
In English that's not the case. You can't just say "This is an improvement aggravation" (I mean, it's a free country, so you can, but people would just think you've made a syntactic mistake).
>I don't really agree much with your last point. Someome still has to come up with the word in German, and others have to use it.
Yes, but like in Lisp with macros, in German the speaker (programmer) is allowed to come up with such words.
It's not really a new word, nothing new has been added.
If we take the context away from the German as used here in this case, then it's just as meaningless as the English context-free utterance.
The German term is just the two words smooshed together.
Have you ever watched Lucy The Daughter Of The Devil?
There's an episode where Jesus and Satan are doing smooshes.
People think these German words and cool because they're novel and foreign, but English has plenty of very similar sorts of constructs, weirdness, and coolness too. Dang nab it!
I'd argue English is just as expressive.
Well, it's not. The devil is in the details, which includes the use of the language, not just how it appears to us.