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Comment by marmakoide | Hacker News Reader

In Mandarin and Vietnamese, you can build new words by concatenation of words with broad meanings. Say, a plane is "flying machine", a mobile phone is a "hand machine", and a fridge is a "cold closet". In practice, it's very effective and it allows you to either guess the commonly used concatenations, or make up your own and you might be understood. I assume you can do that in Toki Pona too ?

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Most languages are like this. That English words are so opaque is quite a historically contingent thing, not the baseline of how languages usually work. English retains a lot of Latin and Greek and French compounds, which are usually translated more literally in many other languages.

In German, plane is Flugzeug (flight tool), fridge is Kühlschrank (cooling closet). In Hungarian, they are repülőgép (flying machine) and hűtőszekrény (cooling closet) as well, calqued from German.

English speakers often perceive this as some kind of endearing primitive Tarzan-like communication without all those classy prestigious words, but English also has plenty examples. How about "washing machine" for example?

Calques are great, as are loanwords.

In English, "calque" is a loanword, but "loanword" is a calque.

That is simply fun.

Right? :-D

In English, we make words the same way - it's just that we construct them out of latin or greek roots.

"Television" is tele (Greek, 'far') + vision (Latin, 'seeing'). German for Television is "Fernsehen" - fern (German, 'far') + sehen (German, 'seeing').

seatbelt pineapple

Even English kind of does this, just playing parcour through multiple languages, and with time and use shortening the compound words to shorter alternatives. A plane is an aeroplane, or aeróplanos, an air wanderer. A mobile phone is a mobile telefone, a movable far-voice.

And of course in many languages more related to English as well, such as (a bit infamously) German. And obviously there are compound words in English as well, either concatenated ("snowman", "airport") or not ("cell phone", "compound word").

My favorite is "electric brain," for "computer."

Well, the kind of computer you have in mind used to be electronic computer to distinguish it from a computer or calculator which described a human being who computed. See, for instance, Nevil Shute's biography Slide Rule in which he describes being in charge of a department of calculators when working on the R100.

It's a fascinating read. You can get it from Anna's Archive.

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