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Comment by zwieback | Hacker News Reader

I heard the same anecdote about the upper classes adopting French after 1066 but the farmers still calling the thing by its animal name. Trust the Germans to just continue smashing nouns together, Schweinefleisch, Rindfleisch and my American wife's favorite: "Hackfleisch" (hacked flesh). Too bad Germany didn't get invaded by the French until Napoleon.

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English "smashes words together" too - English is full of compounds (e.g. shopkeeper), it's just a much slower process, often goes via a long intermediate period of hyphenation, and the implied difference in meaning is a bit smaller.

The "smashing" together of words is much less interesting to most of us who use languages that does so than it seems to be to others - it does little more than placing the words adjacent to each other does in English, with the exception that it disambiguated.

E.g. "hakke" on it's own is the verb to hack in Norwegian, but as part of a compound it will mean something that has been hacked, or is hacking (e.g. hakkespett = woodpecker - and there's another English compound)

Funnily, Norwegian (and Danish) has imported the French boef - Norwegian as "biff" - while we still use the Germanic ku for cow - but we also "smash" words together, so hakkebiff = hakkebøf (Danish) = boef haché.

But "hakke biff" would imply the act of chopping it. And so we compound to remove the ambiguity.

We also have flesk, from the same origin as fleisch and flesh, but in Norwegian it specifically means pork flesh, so hakkeflesk, while it's not a term I can remember having heard, would be understandable but refer to pork because the meaning of combining the words is fairly generic.

The main difference is really that English writes compounds with a space in between whereas German doesn't. There's no way to express compounds like "pedestrian crossing" or "windshield wiper" with a space in German. When a compound gets frequent enough in English people will stop writing the space (like "windshield") whereas in German the space was never there to begin with.

English also constructs compound words out of Greek or Latin roots. For example “television” is a technology for seeing things that are happening far away (i.e. in a broadcasting studio); the German word is “Fernsehen”, which would be cognate to “Far-sight”, which is what “television” means. And sometimes we even have an Anglo-Saxon compound word alongside an etymologically equivalent compound word with classical roots, such as “manslaughter” and “homicide”.

Also Greek and Latin roots like monstrosities like your example “tele” (Greek) + “vision” (Latin).

The one that grates on me most is “monolingual” (unilingual/multilingual or monoglottal/polyglottal)

Live free! Embrace heteroradicalism!

> manslaughter

I never understood what they thought was so funny.

The joke is that they don’t decline “man” properly (“mans” rather than “men”).

Today we’d write it menslol.

We don’t do that with all compounds though. It’s really more a cultural thing. At a certain point a pair becomes so common place that it becomes one word. Beehive, for example, isn’t semantically different from bee hive but the pairing was common enough the space got dropped.

I would typically use “crosswalk” in preference to “pedestrian crossing”. The two terms are slightly different, but functionally equivalent. Is there something similar in German?

Crosswalk is American English. In the UK they are always pedestrian crossings.

But you don’t see things like “Straßenbahnhaltestelle” in English where you have four words mashed together. I’d translate that something like “streetcar stop,” but literally it’s “street car stopping place.” Streetcarstop while reasonable would not be accepted English by native speakers. Tramstop on the other hand is (at least places where people say tram). So while we mash it’s noticeably more limited.

But what’s the difference grammatically if there’s a space or not? Let’s take “streetcar stop”, although there is a space there, what function is “streetcar” performing other than being a noun? It’s not an adjective, you can’t say “that stop is streetcar”, that doesn’t sound right, you’d have to say “that stop is /for/ streetcars”.

So I would argue that “streetcar stop” still parses as a complete compound noun grammatically. This is just a matter of orthography in my opinion. German may more readily “freeze” compound nouns and put them into writing as a single unit, but both English and German are full of long ad hoc compound nouns.

The difference is for the German compound word you only have to remember the endings for the last part. You don’t need to worry about adjective declension. So yes it’s a real grammatical difference and not just whitespace differences.

I think the difference is that in English you can create new nouns by simply lining up existing nouns (with spaces in between). Over time these words may or may not grow together.

In German, you would have to create a single word from the start (possibly using a hyphen for disambiguation) and in some cases pluralise individual words so they can be joined together.

But you are right that in both cases the result is just a single noun, which contrasts with agglutinative languages such as Turkish where the entire grammar of a sentence can sometimes be packed into a single, potentially very long, word.

We (my first language is Norwegian, German is my 3rd, so I'm speaking mostly from my experience with Norwegian) tend to see it as far less of an act of "creating a word" than English-speakers tend to when confronted with our languages, though.

English speakers are often amazed at how we "have words for everything", which makes it seem like it's been some conscious act of establishing a new world on purpose. Of course sometimes that is the case, but that process happens in English too.

But exactly because of what you say, directing that amazement at us just combining words is pretty much the same as if we expressed amazement at how English has sequences of words for everything.

It just looks different to English-speakers for whom the merging of multiple words into a combination they've not seen before is not a frequent occurrence.

A lot of this is historical accidents of when shorter alternatives for different parts have or have not been imported, though, and whether there's a culture for going "enough" and shortening things or importing terms. Germans seem to be far more tolerant of holding on to long compounds than most.

Norwegian has "trikk" for tram/streetcar and "stopp" for "stop", and so we have "trikkestopp" for tram stop (but see below). Trikk was a case of "sporvogn" - "track wagon" - being too long.

Meanwhile, while "streetcarstop" is not in use in English "streetcar stop" is some places. E.g.[1].

"Streetcar stopping place" of course would definitely be a step too far in English, but so would it be in e.g. Norwegian that otherwise mostly shares the German approach to combining words (to the point where newspapers regularly have articles about how the language is going to hell because people fail to combine words when they should) but where we'd go "hang on" and omit parts or otherwise rephrase to find a short alternative.

However, we do have "stoppeplass" for "stopping place", though more often used for somewhere to stop a car for a longer period, and "holdeplass" for "holding place" which implies a more temporary stopp, and so we can and sometimes do also use trikkeholdeplass - "tram holding place" [2], but these longer forms tends to gradually be replaced by shorter ones over time, as Norwegian has a tradition for contractions (to the eternal frustration of foreigners learning Norwegian, because spoken Norwegian tends to drop syllables and whole words with wild abandon) and replacing long terms.

[1] https://www.buildkcstreetcar.com/project-news/stages-of-a-st...

[2] We can, and also sometimes do (but a quick search of the Norwegian national library shows it's quite rare, with peaks of tens of uses in print some decades), use "sporvognholdeplass". If you were to say that people would probably wonder what century you are visiting from (even though the full term was no more common before), but it'd be understandable.

> to the point where newspapers regularly have articles about how the language is going to hell because people fail to combine words when they should

In Sweden there was for a few years a webpage dedicated to the fight against incorrectly writing words apart, famously producing red stickers that were then used as hypens where appropriate: http://www.skrivihop.nu/exempel/bilder/fika_sugen.jpg

They got wildly popular but shut down after just three years because they felt they ended up attracting a lot of asshole followers that outright harassed people in their name.

It sounds the same when you speak it it’s just a cultural convention whether you use a space or hyphen or nothing at all.

As a native English speaker, even "tramstop" or "busstop" sounds wrong to me.

As a native Norwegian speaker, I had to look it up to see whether a space was expected or not, as it seems entirely illogical for me to have a space there as they're so closely connected.

The distinction between "fully merged" compounds, hyphenated ones, and ones with spaces is yet another one of those endlessly annoying quirks of English.

> The distinction between "fully merged" compounds, hyphenated ones, and ones with spaces is yet another one of those endlessly annoying quirks of English

Being cognizant of these really helps develop empathy with ESL learners.

"Too bad Germany didn't get invaded by the French until Napoleon."

Read up on the Holy Roman Empire. Germany, France etc are quite complicated concepts.

To add some context here - the concept of a unified "Germany" has only existed four times in history. First under Charlemagne in the 800s, then under Otto von Bismarck in 1871, then under Adolf Hitler until the fall of the Third Reich in 1945 (assuming one considers annexation of the Sudetenland and the Anschluss to fully encompass Germanic people), and finally the modern state of Germany since 1990.

The partial absence of Austria and the German-speaking cantons of Switzerland, Italy, Belgium and perhaps France in all possible variations of these “concepts” means that a United Germany has never been truly achieved I suppose. Probably a good thing for those folks own cultural and dialect identity…

Language is just one element of identity anyway. Also, the concept of "United Country X" is a XIX century invention, largely based on now-discredited racist ideologies. We should aim for something better.

I can think of at least one situation where this idea of a "united country" is still being forcefully pushed today...

Seems arbitrary. Why Bismarck's Kaiser but none of those between Charlemagne and Napoleon? How German was the realm of Charlemagne when it reached further across the Pyrenees than it reached across the Elbe?

Charlemagne, of course, being king of the Franks and emperor of the Romans. Things back then do not match neatly to modern concepts such as a French or a German nation-state.

Weren't France and Germany essentially the same country during Charlemagne?

Correct. The current regional concept of "Germany" proper probably started with the Treaty of Verdun, when the lands of Francia were divided amongst three of Charlemagne's grandsons. The inheritor of Francia Orientalis was in fact also known as "Louis the German".

Don't think anyone was considering themselves French or German yet. There were smaller subdivisions we forgot about (or I forgot about, I'm no historian). They just happened to be all under Charlemagne's rule.

Yes, they were. Actually the core of both countries was one and the Franks did not care much about our modern borders. Western Francia became eventually France, while Eastern Francia became Franconia (roughly, the borders were always blurry and shifted a lot over time).

Of course, the Franks came from further East and never replaced the populations they invaded, so even there and then both cultures and peoples were always mixed.

And not even all of those included all german speaking populations, i.e. a large part of Switzerland, Austria, Liechtenstein and all those regions/cities that were partly german, modern day Transylvania for example

It's not so much that the upper classes adopted French after 1066, it's that the upper class was replaced by people that spoke Norman French.

If you examine the richest landed gentry in England today a very sizeable number still bare the family names of those that fought for William at the Battle of Hastings.

One of the best Christopher Hitchend quotes is about English/German compatibility:

> Der Brand (The Fire), by the historian Jörg Friedrich, accuses Winston Churchill of a conscious policy of airborne terrorism against civilians … The word “brand” in English, of course, carries a distinctly different vernacular meaning.

Hitchens*

> upper classes adopting French after 1066

The upper classes were French after 1066 (Harold had definitively repelled the Danes for the last time just three weeks before Hastings).

French does that too so I think an invasion would not have helped.

in English, we refer to smashed-together word(s) as "portmanteau", a French word that is a portmanteau itself

The sort of compound words which we're discussing appear by a process of synthesis:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_language

See also: agglutination https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agglutination

A portmanteau is different, where parts of several words are blended, rather than retaining the substance of each word in a compound.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blend_word

And let's not forget xkcd's coinage of the malamanteau:

https://xkcd.com/739/

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