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Comment by TheSpiceIsLife | Hacker News Reader

I don't really see how these "there's a word for that in German" are much, if any, of an improvement over their English equivalents.

   Verschlimmbesserung
   Improvementagrrivation

It's only three characters shorter, and English being a Germanic language, English is often referred to as simplified German, the languages maps pretty much one to one in the general case.

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compound_(linguistics)

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>I don't really see how these "there's a word for that in German" are much, if any, of an improvement over their English equivalents. Verschlimmbesserung Improvementagrrivation It's only three characters shorter

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.

This is a minor quibble as I largely agree, but

> 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!:)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_context_culture

It may be less-acceptable to combine words in English, but that doesn’t stop me from doing it when it feels right. I use hyphens, though, to help with clarity. If enough people use the same hyphenated word the hyphen might be dropped. From what little I know of German (Pimsleur CDs, then about three months around the country), it does seem to accommodate these combinations better than English does. Is it okay that languages change over time? If so, how do they change?

Look at English. US vs UK vs Australia vs South Africa. These were all once the same language. Cypriot Greek is another good example with some millennia of divergence.

It amuses me when we brits complain about US spelling when in some cases it’s we that changed and not North America.

English has compound nouns: strings of compounds that form a noun phrase. The main word, the head of the noun phrase, is rightmost. I think that is called head-final.

For instance "law school entrance exam administration".

This noun compounding process is extremely free and productive in English.

I wouldn’t necessarily say English does it slowly. New words can become viral/accepted if they fit a concept particularly well.

As an example, deepfake was noted to be first coined circa 2017.

Neologisms are adopted just as quick in German. The difference really lies in the inherent ability by the language to convey meaning almost no matter how crazy the word is.

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).

Eight letters and a few spaces is no big deal.

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.

I only dropped the space so as to not count it.

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.

It doesn’t transliterate to the same. That would have been “verschlimmerungverbesserung”

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”

>It's effectively the same as saying "improvement aggregation"

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.

I still disagree.

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.

>The German term is just the two words smooshed together.

Well, it's not. The devil is in the details, which includes the use of the language, not just how it appears to us.

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