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Comment by mr_mitm | Hacker News Reader

Can you give an example of a thought that cannot be expressed in English? That sounds like quite the claim without anything backing it up. I speak fluent German for what it's worth.

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the only i can think of is sentence with comatas. In german you can have as many „hauptsätze“ in one sentence as long they are separated by a comma. for example what thomas berndhard does is crazy. its one sentence per page. i think in german you can be more precise in one sentence. but that will be a hell of a sentence.

Can't you just use a semicolon to do the same in English? And even if not, just because an idea is split over several sentences doesn't mean you can't communicate it. That's what paragraphs are for.

You can, and probably should. Texts like Kant are borderline incomprehensible even to native Germans and seem to only serve the author's need for displaying their intelligence. The ideas they are conveying are not that complex. Relativistic quantum theory or string theory can be expressed in English (plus math, while it's not like math wouldn't be needed in German) just fine, so I really don't understand where these supposed limitations of English are.

yeah i am with you. Sometimes they overdoe it for no reason. I also prefer english to learn sth. Only because it is more straightforward and simpler to communicate. I love it

It's not that English can't express some things at all, but that there are words in German that aren't neatly translated to a English word. Schadenfreude is one German word that's been brought over by a certain writer. It's the joy of seeing someone else's misfortune. That's six-words to express what German can do in one, and for a poet or a wordsmith, that just won't do. If you're dubbing a German TV show, how're you going to fit those six words when the a character yells that one word. Smush it in and hope for the best? So it's still translatable into English, it's just clumsy. As are all translations, really. So German isn't special in that regard, plenty of languages share that quality. And no, the Inuit don not have 37 words for snow.

Torschlusspanik is the fear that time is running out for eg a career change. Weltschmerz is a deep melancholic sadness about the state of the world or life. Hopefully someone who actually speaks German can give greater nuance to those definitions and maybe some other examples.

That's not the argument that was made in the original post that I replied to. You explained those words in english just fine.

I think english has the blueprint to do the same. Worldpain damagejoyness careerangst etc

In german there are those wordwords but those are mostly already there and germans are not using this feature regularly to make up new words to describe things. But yes can be fun if one is doing it. The Fun of doing it ->i have fundoing

as someone pointed out, there are words that describe certain things way better in english then in german. anxiety and hypocrite is one of those that pop in my mind. There are translation for those but they arent used in the german day to day vocabulary

Actually, Schadenfreude can be neatly translated into a single English word: schadenfreude. English just adopts words that it lacks and (from a German perspective) it's not really special in that regard: We, too, have adopted words, like photography (spelled Fotographie in German) or folklore (original spelling retained) from English.

For what it's worth, I only have an example for the other way around: Accuracy vs precision. It's "Genauigkeit". But there is a subtle difference in meaning in English that is lost in German without additional explanation.

you can translate many english „complicated“ words one to one in german because german has a anglo saxon in it. for example accuracy is akkurat precission is prezision hypocrite is hypokrit etc

german has a crazy big vocabulary but most words arent used and in generell the language is simplified in everyday use. for example everyone has angst but noone has bange anymore. btw good word for anxious in german.

i once also had the impression that many nuances are lost in translation but then i had to realize germans are not using all the words of the vocabulary.

We have akkurat, which is only an adjective, there is not really a Noun version. But in any case, we would not give it the same meaning shift as you have in English, at least how it's used in physics.

Learning German is hard in the beginning, because of the more challenging grammar and "Donaudampfschifffahrtskapitaensmuetzenfabrikantengattin" but then becomes easier, as there a lot less word plays and figures of speech. It's quite regular. English is easy to get into, but to master it, you have to know them all. And the random pronunciation, of course.

Ja, Bange is uncommon. Really only used in "Da wird mir Angst und Bange!". and "Bange machen". It is still amazing to me that "Giving up the ghost" is a figure of speech in both English and German.

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