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Comment by canjobear | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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”.

> 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.

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!

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.

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