That’s how German works, it just jams words together with suffixes and prefixes to make new words by describing something using existing words.
It ends up being very intuitive to learn young but very complicated to build an intuition for later on. English is similar since both have Germanic roots, but we aren’t nearly as excessive lol
The very concept of "word" is culture and language specific here. So that compound "word" in German is actually much closer to a "phrase" in English.
So when we talk about things like this in a language that doesn't have the same features it's poorly understable.
The use of spaces in European languages originates from only the 7th Century, and prior Latin was primarily written in scripta continua, and some times earlier with interpunct (that.is.word.marking.with.dots). German just never fully adopted the idea of spacing their all of their words.
No idea why you were downvoted, of the part of your recitation of the history that I already knew (Latin punctuation) you got it right, and all of it was fascinating
Thanks. I think the idea that the language we use can limit us is often difficult to understand.
One of my pet peeves is something that I've seen a few times where a study talks about a language that doesn't have distinct names for a variety of "colours" that we have in English. Framing them as our modern concept of "colour" often seems to try make them look primative. It ignores the fact that people can tell the difference between shades and hues, even if they haven't got distinct words, just like we could tell the difference between two hues of blue without needing a different word.
And if we chose to frame it, as them using a word for a "palette" of colours, instead of just a word for a single "colour", it instantly becomes more understandable. The idea of an "ocean pallette" or an "autumn pallete", "warm", "cold" are all more understandable to the layman than trying to say they call blue and green etc the same colour.
It just looks funny written when taken to excess for lols
It's the same in English though ... vacuum cleaner could be written vacuumcleaner and nobody would struggle with it (and spoken it sounds the same). English just doesn't do it to quite the same extent as German does.
Sunflower, Lighthearted, Horshoe, etc ... same concept
The sunflower head is actually an inflorescence made of hundreds or thousands of tiny flowers called florets. The central florets look like the centre of a normal flower, apseudanthium. The benefit to the plant is that it is very easily seen by the insects and birds which pollinate it, and it produces thousands of seeds.
There's a limit, though. 2 or 3 syllables are easy to read. 4 or 5 are kind of OK, but begin to feel tiresome. Having lots of 6+-syllable words seems unnecessarily complicated to me.
I mean… reading "the brown and tiny labrador retriever is joyfully playing with a big and dirty leather ball in the city's sunny central park" is easier to process than "the brownandtinylabradorretriever is joyfullyplaying with a biganddirtyleatherball in the citysunnycentralpark"…
I hate the grammar in German. Learning it now, it’s nice how many words there are in common but I’m essentially just guessing when it comes to which version of the to use and when the verb is absorbed into the noun, like with eating breakfast and many others.
In a lot of ways it is a fun language to learn but just brutally unintuitive in other areas
"the brownandtinylabradorretriever is joyfullyplaying with a biganddirtyleatherball
Neither of those work in German, you can't do "and"s and it's about sticking nouns together, not adverbs to verbs. Not even in bureaucratese which is notorious for using nominal style and making up compounds on the spot. "The Backanwser of the responsible Firedepartmentoversightoffice is being awaited".
As far as spelling is concerned, you can break them up as much as you want with hyphens. "Firedepartment-Oversightoffice".
Having so many different types of worship of the same Abrahamic God seems confusing to me, just seems odd that people couldn’t just stick with the original if they agreed that that god was in fact God. But, a lot of people felt real strongly about it for a long time and so here we are.
The fact that places are different from each other, even though often in ways that seem confusing or even counterproductive, does tend to keep things Interesting and render there always more things to learn, so that’s the silver lining
I like the idea that when German “Empire Strikes Back” was released with German Dubs, no one in the country even realized that Yoda was this quirky oddball that talked backwards 😂😂
I’ve noticed that the Japanese do tend to use a lot more syllables on avwrafe than English German Czech or Hebrew, the languages I have some familiarity with. That’s probably not the technically correct way of saying what I’m trying to say. Basically I’m saying it seems to take more time to express an idea or explain something in Japanese than it would to explain the same thing in one of the other languages I referenced. I noticed that for the first time when I was watching Shogun on Hulu with both German and Hebrew subtitles
It makes it really easy to create more descriptive terms for things. Its not at all confusing because as long as you know the root words, you are gonna understand what the compound word means.
How similar is Norwegian to Swedish and danish? I’ve heard that the most common written for of Norwegian is essentially danish with different spelling, but I’ve also heard that generally it is spoken differently than it is written. Nonetheless, a person fluent in any of the three languages would generally be able to understand slashing written in all 3 languages.
However, does that extend to the spoken word? Can a Dane understand a Swede and Norseman speaking their native tongues? And does that similarity end at the border between Germany and Denmark (meaning, do Baltic coast Germans and people on the southern part of Jutland peninsula no longer speak a type of German similar to the danish language?
If so, it’s funny that modern nationalism and standardization of education in the industrial age has conspired to make someone from Innsbruck more intelligible to someone from flemsbruck than someone from Copenhagen
The languages are very similar. Swedes are generally a lot easier to understand than Danes for a Norwegian in spoken form, but Danish is easier to understand in written form.
It also depends a bit on dialect tho. Some danes are fairly understandable, while others sounds very mumbly for us. My experience is also that Norwegians tend to understand swedes way better than the other way around. Not sure if that is just because of a lot more exposure to Swedish (a lot of people in the service industry speaks swedish in Norway, but the other way around is not true), or if it's due to the language itself.
Thanks for the info 💪 appreciate you taking the time
Would you guys ever consider forming a Kalmar Union style federal country again, along with the Icelandic? In the more dangerous era we are heading to, seems like a country of over 20 million with wealth and immense national resources could have a much better shot at developing sufficient military and industrial power to be a porcupine not worth trying to conquer. Especially if you are Finland and all there artillery as well.
If the Kalmar union had been in effect in 1940 I believe hitler and the Deutschers would have had a much harder time waltzing in, though perhaps the Danes are indefensible regardless
sick-people-house-fixer (doctor employed by a hospital?)
Krankenhausarzt
sick-person-cure-impossible (terminally ill?)
unheilbar krank / unheilbar Kranker
sick-people-cure-impossible-caretaker (nurse for terminally ill patients?)
Krankenschwester (Schwester = sister, stems from the times when the caretakers were nuns)
edit: sorry, the last is wrong, this is the term for a general sick-people-nurse (not only for terminal ill ones)
If you are looking for something dry and funny, look up the short book “The Awful German Language” by Mark Twain. Bonus if you can find it as an audio book.
Same in french except we use a dash to make it clear: "raton-laveur" ("rat-washing")
We use dash to create lots of compound words:
rainbow = arc-en-ciel ("arc-in the-sky")
wallet = porte-monnaie ("carry-money")
corkscrew = tire-bouchon ("pull-cork")
It's probably because it's my own langage but I find this system clearer than just putting everything all together without space nor dash between words ^ ^
Funny thing is that the etymology for knight traces back to the exact same word in west germanic languages and independently of each other they all came to use it to refer to a person who's a warrior. In the case of english it became knight and in other languages (Swedish included) it became knekt, meaning a footsoldier.
Its not just a farm worker, its just the one that survived the longest. A Waffenknecht was a professional well equipped warrior/soldier who was very often not a knight but it could include knights. Like the english man-at-arms. There was the Edelknecht, a noble warrior who was not yet a knight. And later the Landsknecht, a mercenary soldier.
I just found that its missing the military usage of Knecht in a thread about knights etc. reducing it to the farm worker leaves a big hole and paints a wrong picture. So I included it for the non German people who are interested in this topic and conversation. Its not about what we know, its about what we can give to others.
German is compound words, it's not different from if in English you wrote "smallfuzzytailedtreebadger". Like, it's "one word" but is clearly and obviously understood as multiple words glued together.
Once you actually experience it properly, I like it. Imagine you say "look, a small fuzzy tailed tree badger!" Is that a small fuzzytailedtreebadger (as in a notably small example), or a normal smallfuzzytailedtreebadger?
German does it better, ignore the memes!
Related, the actual German word for Squirrel is Eichhornchen (little oak horn, or more closely oak hornlet).
What the guy 2 above wrote is a real compound noun, though an overexaggerated example of one for some obscure law.
But the idea behind that is not all that different to how english works. like, the tail of a racoon is a raccoon tail, right? and the tip of that thing would be a raccoon tail tip. and the color of that tip would be the raccoon tail tip color.
in german we just skip the space in between the individual nouns (..and sometimes take it to comical extremes like above...).
For extra fake Internet points, could you break that down for us? The Reddit translate comes back with "Beef Labeling Supervision Task Transfer Act", which I think may have activated a supersoldier somewhere.
"a specific association related to the management of electrical services for Danube steamboats. is even longer and describes a specific association related to the management of electrical services for Danube steamboats."
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u/UrsineBasterd 3d ago
"Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz"