
Why the German language has so many great words - tintinnabula
https://theconversation.com/why-the-german-language-has-so-many-great-words-55554
======
to3m
_sitzpinkler_! I had no idea this was actually a word.

15 years ago, when I was a young man in my early 20s, I lived in the top floor
of a house, sharing that floor (and that floor's bathroom) with two other
people: a German chap, and an English girl. Fast forward about six months and
somehow one day a conversation took whatever turn would be required for it to
be appropriate for me to say: "Well, I almost always leave the seat down,
because I almost always sit down to take a piss." Cue a sudden burst of
laughter from the German - who says they don't have a sense of humour? -
because it turned out he did exactly the same thing. Good to know it wasn't
just me at least, I suppose.

"Well" said our floormate. "I always wondered how such a pair of
inconsiderately dirty bastards were still so consistently good at politely
leaving the seat down."

There were 3 men in the house, and the 3rd man would occasionally use "our"
bathroom. So the very next day the German guy put a sign up on the door in
order to keep him out. SIT PISSERS ONLY.

~~~
hussong
There's also "Heimscheißer" \-- someone who strongly prefers taking a dump in
the comfort of his own home, and may even be incapable of doing so elsewhere,
except for emergency situations.

~~~
1wd
Since that word is somewhat noted for its use in the German dubbed movie
American Pie, I just wondered what the original uses instead. Apparently:
[http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=shitbreak](http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=shitbreak)

------
allendoerfer
TLDR: English and German both have compounds, but German additionally has
simple rules to form and decline nouns from participles.

E.g.:

werdend = becoming

Werdender = someone (male), who is becoming

Fun fact: These participles always have a neutral plural, so they are gender
neutral and are thus abused all over the place. In official documents the
German language is losing all of its proper nouns, until everything is built
out of participles.

E.g.:

Studenten = students (male)

Studentinnen = students (female)

Studierende = people, who study

~~~
kleiba
Another fun fact: for political correctness, an artificial gender-neutral way
of referring to both male and female students has long been the "internal
capital I" [1]:

    
    
        Studenten (male) + Studentinnen (female) = StudentInnen
    

Recently though, the Green Party has gone a step further in Germany, and now
uses in all of their documents the so-called "gender-star" [2]:

    
    
        Student*innen
    

This is because it was felt that the version with capital-I only focused on
males and females, but still excluded trans-sexual, trans-gender, and inter-
sexual people.

This practice has even led to a new verb in German: "to gender", i.e., to use
politically correct gender-neutral language.

[1]
[https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binnen-I](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binnen-I)

[2] [http://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/die-gruenen-
machen...](http://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/die-gruenen-machen-
geschlechtsneutrale-sprache-zur-pflicht-a-1063228.html)

~~~
wordbank
Spanish countries do it for years with "@" or "x" like "estimad@s" for
"estimados" and "estimadas" at once. And Latin America is not very politically
correct, it's just respectful for all genders.

~~~
Shorel
In writing only, and very obnoxious as well for a culture that fights for
their grave accents and correct language way more than their English
counterpart.

Otherwise tell me how do you say niñ@s out loud.

~~~
evincarofautumn
Hah, I just tried to pronounce it with coarticulation of [a] and [o], and it
came out as [ɞ] [1]. /niɲɞs/ sounds totally alien.

In reality, probably “niños y niñas”.

[1]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-
mid_central_rounded_vowel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-
mid_central_rounded_vowel)

------
jkire
Fundamentally, English is a flexible enough language that if any of these
concepts became common enough they would become ordinary words (probably
lifted directly from German).

This has actually happened, for example _Blitzkrieg_ (commonly the "blitz");
now this does _not_ simply mean "lightning war", it very much references a
particular part of a particular war. Also, _Zeitgeist_ is used in English, but
doesn't simply translate to "spirit of the time".

Often such compound words mean more than the sum of their parts (as I guess
the OP kind of meant), which is what makes them interesting to other
languages. OTOH, it seems pretty rare these constructs actually describe
something that English doesn't have a word/phrase for already. In fact, I
would say that its not so much that German has such constructs in their
language that makes them interesting, and more that as a different culture
they have different words to describe different concepts.

Edit: I should probably point out that I am a native English speaker that can
speak fluently Norwegian. "Ohrwurm" and "Wunderkind" are such nonsense
examples in this case; they are literal translations (just without the space,
and are understandable from any Scandinavian language), and they are pretty
much anti examples. Using foreign words that mean _exactly the same_ as the
English equivalents is nothing but pretentious, and doesn't support his
central argument at all.

~~~
dublinben
>Also, Zeitgeist is used in English, but doesn't simply translate to "spirit
of the time".

Except is generally does. That is still the primary definition in any common
dictionary, and the understood meaning of this word.

~~~
jkire
Really? To me that sort of is the closest translation, but it doesn't really
hit the nail on the head. But maybe that's just my weird linguistic
background.

~~~
PeCaN
Maybe it's a regional thing? My understanding of how people use it is still
‘spirit of the time’.

------
sn41
Sanskrit is similar. There are elaborate rules for combining, called "Sandhi"
[1] [2] which shows how nearby vowels or vowels near consonants change to form
a combined sound "aa+e = aie" etc. This allows the formation of fairly long
words, for example - "kimkarthavyathaavimoodatha", "not knowing what to do
next".

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandhi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandhi)

[2]
[https://ubcsanskrit.ca/lesson3/sandhirules.html](https://ubcsanskrit.ca/lesson3/sandhirules.html)

~~~
danans
Sanskrit has analogous structures, but they are not called Sandhi. Sandhi
refers specifically to phonetic combinations of adjacent sounds in subsequent
words, not a semantic or morphological combination. These phonetic processes
are almost completely independent of semantics.

The analogous structures in Sanskrit to the articles German examples are
various types of compounds, like tatpurusha, dvandva, etc.

------
pjungwir
I only have a little German, but I was so glad to read an article that
mirrored my feelings learning the language, which no one around seemed to
share. Not just that they smash words together, but that they do it with such
humor and whimsy. The author gave far more interesting examples, but some of
my favorites were Fledermaus (bat: a flying mouse) and Hackfleisch (ground
beef).

~~~
joezydeco
You might enjoy this chart:

[https://www.babbel.com/en/magazine/funny-animal-names-in-
ger...](https://www.babbel.com/en/magazine/funny-animal-names-in-german)

~~~
krylon
Thank you, that gave me quite a chuckle! =)

------
Matt3o12_
These contractions seem to add a lot of ambiguity though. Since
"Backpfeifengesicht" is not commonly used, I thought it described a person who
has been getting a lot of slaps across the neck so that his face took that
form. Without context, these words are sometimes hard to understand unless
they're commonly used.

Another example is Sitzpinkler. While this word is not ambiguous, it still
sounds funny. I'd never use that and probably say "a person who pees while
sitting". It might be used on some sign, although it makes the place where
such a sign is found sound cheap because that word is really colloquial.

Nevertheless, it does create some great words such Schadenfreude, and
Werdende. While i would never use Werdende, i believe it is used a lot in
lyric (poems and that stuff). Schadensfreude is a really nice word through.

Disclaimer: my native language is German.

~~~
etqwzutewzu
in French there is an expression for backpfeifengesicht, "tête à claques"
(i.e., the kind of face that deserves to be slapped) that is commonly used

~~~
usrusr
Expressions like that can sometimes be traced to a single literary source.
They also spread through translated versions. In that case, even a "naturally
occurring" expression in one language could spawn an expression coined by
literature in another. Without further data, it might be entirely possible
that Backpfeifengesicht was composed by a single translator trying to transfer
the well-known-expression nature of "tête à claques" into german.

------
neugier
I made an account just to tell you the most wonderful word creation of all:
"Neugier", the german for "curiosity, is made out of the words for "new" and
"greed", you could translate it as "greed for new things".

------
antman
Lets not forget the funny Mark Twain essay “The awful German language”. For
those that haven't read it:
[https://www.cs.utah.edu/~gback/awfgrmlg.html](https://www.cs.utah.edu/~gback/awfgrmlg.html)

------
CurtMonash
My father, who was German, used to claim that almost any hyphenated phrase was
actually a single word.

Most especially, he used to claim this when we played Scrabble.

~~~
kuschku
That’s why for German scrabble there are quite different rules.

Because, if you want, you can turn anything into a word.

Someone who turns anything into a word:

female: Allesinworteverwandelnde, male: Allesinworteverwandelnder, etc.

You can just string things together. It’s exactly like you name things in
Java. Bus. BusStop. BusStopPosition. BusBusStopInteraction.

------
gaur
English has plenty of these kinds of compound words: "shoebox", "lapdog",
"underworld", "housewife", "footstool", "raincoat", etc. Other compounds like
"thoughtexperiment", "cocktaildress" or "middleschool" are written with
spaces, simply by convention. We could write them without spaces if we wanted
to.

The author even says as much: "Both German and English can create compound
words out of most parts of speech, not just nouns, and English sometimes
hyphenates them or even writes them as one word".

So it seems like the answer to the initial question ("So what is it about the
German language that allows for such constructions?") is "arbitrary spelling
rules".

~~~
m_mueller
I think here's where you're missing the point: The article describes how
authors like to, and are able to, coin new compound words in German and
readers can understand them without the need for explanation. IMO this is
something that's harder to do in English. The main reason for that is not that
compound nouns exist, but the ability to turn everything into a noun and
_then_ combine it with others.

Example:

green - grün - Begrünung ("planting with trees and grass") - Strassenbegrünung
("planting trees and grass along the street").

You may be able to use "greening" here, but at least AFAIK it is not common in
English since it seems a bit strange to turn adjectives into nouns like that.
In German I don't even think that anyone needed to explain that word - you
immediately think of the older word "Bepflanzung" (planting) and notice that
it's probably meant in this context. It's all about reusing known pre- and
suffixes.

~~~
gajomi
> The article describes how authors like to, and are able to, coin new
> compound words in German and readers can understand them without the need
> for explanation

I guess to some extent the comparison is going to be subjective (and my German
is so bad I can't really do so with confidence), but I think a big component
in the discussion has to do with dialects. Were someone to say "street-
greenin'" in my hometown, the phrase would be understood right away, and is
entire grammatical in many American english dialect, but no in the standard
dialect. Now if you walk on to a university campus and say that you are
interested in neotransphilic interpersonalization most people will have little
trouble getting at what you mean (though they might agree as to the _specific_
meaning, and role there eyes at you if they study English). This is rather
high brow, but these kind of fun and games with prefixes, suffixes, and a
regimen of contractions are also common in 1337 and other dialects. But again,
they are not part of the standard dialect.

I would be curious to see a comparison of difference in compound words across
different German dialects.

~~~
m_mueller
I think there's a difference in what is perceived as 'standard' between the
two languages. English basically gives you a very rich vocabulary that has
pretty much preset terms - common, legal, official and academic - for all
concepts. German basically gives you a set of rules, a set of word stems and
the rest is "Usus", i.e. the way it is commonly used, which is weaker than
being part of an official standard. So different regions may have different
official terms for the same thing because there is no standard to tell them
otherwise - consensus is only reached through interaction. I think that's
similar to how it works with English in the UK though.

Now, when it comes to the initial rules, they are common to all dialects,
albeit with some variations (vowel / consonant shift etc.). So the "Be" in
Begrünung would be universally understood as indicating a human activity in
this context, rather than a passive process.

------
draw_down
Colloquial English, at least in America, has the idea of a "punchable face."
Perhaps not as catchy as the German word (which is just a couple words jammed
together anyway), but they're similar.

I really hate this phrase. I just generally find it repulsive, but also 99% of
the people who say it would never hit anyone.

------
BogusIKnow
One of my philosphy professors at university said Heidegger and most of German
philosphy is only an expression of German language, like "Das Sein, Das
Seiende, ..."

------
masswerk
My personal favorite: "Hängematte" (hammock) – a hanging mat (something to be
hanged + mat)

While actually borrowed from Haitian "hamáka" (it entered German first in the
early 15 hundreds as "Hamaco" or "Hamach"), it was soon adopted in the form of
a similar sounding native compound. (Also compare the Dutch "hangmat".) Just
few native speakers realize, it's not what it reads.

~~~
gpvos
This word actually was originally formed in Dutch (hangmat, also from hamaka)
and was borrowed by German slightly later.

~~~
masswerk
Yes, this also what I once learned at university, but newer accounts tend to
skip this step of transition.

~~~
gpvos
What I wrote was actually somewhat speculative. More recent Dutch etymology
research (
[http://www.etymologiebank.nl/trefwoord/hangmat](http://www.etymologiebank.nl/trefwoord/hangmat)
) says that there is an early German find Hengmatten [1627; Pfeifer], more
than 40 years before the first Dutch find (1669). Still, Philippa et al.
claim, the German must be a loan translation from Dutch, both because it is a
sailor's term in the Dutch Golden Age, and because a direct German derivation
seems less plausible as it would have more sound changes.

------
timlod
Lots of the words mentioned in the article are not of common use in German.
They are great words, though! For the attentive reader:
[https://www.google.de/maps/@53.5660642,9.9655336,3a,15y,64.5...](https://www.google.de/maps/@53.5660642,9.9655336,3a,15y,64.52h,87.29t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1se6uYPPS5hUxnuu2LG88hsw!2e0!7i13312!8i6656!6m1!1e1)

------
krylon
As a native German speaker, I do appreciate the ability to join words like
that.

English, on the other is awesome for forming phrases that are nearly
impossible to translate. "To go to town on somebody" is one I really like, for
example. Also, English is much better for cursing, for some reason. People
cursing in German always sound really, really lame (except for Bavarians).

~~~
wazoox
Funny that you mention English as better for cursing; as a French, I've always
found the English catalogue of dirty words and insults quite limited. There
doesn't even seem to have more than 2 or 3 common names for genitals of both
sex, or even several dirty names for sodomy. Imaginative genitals naming
coupled with religion, dirty things and weird sexual practices allow for some
nice compositions :)

~~~
krylon
Well, I have to admit my knowledge of French is limited to a handful of words.
The only languages I know well enough to make a comparison are German and
English. :-/

------
dunkelheit
German is the Java of human languages.

~~~
kuschku
Which is an awesome concept, if the alternatives are PHP (english).

~~~
krylon
English would be Perl, obviously. ;-)

~~~
wolfgke
This would imply that lots of English text can only be written, but hardly
understood by someone else. No, really: I think PHP is the better comparison.

~~~
krylon
Well, but English is a very pragmatic language, "importing" ideas (vocabulary,
mainly) freely from other languages, with a rather loose (dare I say "messy"?
Compared to Latin, at least...) syntax that offers a lot of flexibility,
making, as they say, easy things easy and hard things possible, choosing
expressiveness over conceptual clarity/elegance. Sounds a little like Perl to
me. ;-)

OTOH, PHP has taken inspiration from Perl, so I do not disagree very strongly.

------
phabian
Reading Kafka in german is so much more modern and musical than in english or
any other language. Kafka in english sounds almost sentimental, less modern.
At least thats my feeling. In english translators often break his long
paragraphs and sentences. Samuel Beckett said that he used to read most of
Kafka in german, especially the Castle - Das Schloß.

~~~
krylon
I once had the unusual task of helping to translate a lengthy set of
requirement specification documents for a migration between to ERP systems
from German to English.

My overall impression is that German lends itself far easier to lengthy,
nested, convoluted sentences. You can build long sentences in English, too,
but their structure tends to be ... flatter?

So in translating, I would often break up monstrous monolithic sentences
("Bandwurmsatz", as we say in German) into several shorter ones.

It is different, I guess, when translating literature, but translating
literature is probably really, _really_ hard anyway. So try to have pity on
those poor people who had to translate Kafka.

I generally prefer to read literature in its original language, but English is
the only foreign language I know well enough to do that... :(

------
jusuchin
I think the greatest thing about the German language is its practicality.
"Ausgang" or "exit", literally from the words 'go out' or 'gone out' but that
describes the action and noun. It is the description of the word that becomes
the word. "Escalator" is "Fahrtreppe" or "Rolltreppe", literally moving/going
stairs or roll stairs.

~~~
ithkuil
w.r.t exit, that's just because english borrowed the word from another
language:

From exeō ‎(“exit, go out”), from ē ‎(“out”) + eō ‎(“go”).

------
dash2
My favourite versions of Sitzpinkler, the many ways to describe a "big girl's
blouse" in German:

Sporttaschenvergesser - Sportbagforgetter. A guy who always "forgets" his
sports bag at PE class.

Vorwärtseinparker - Forwardparker. A guy who parallel parks forward, rather
than by reversing in.

Warmduscher - Warmshowerer. Rather than manly cold ones.

~~~
asdfyolo
the second one is also called "Turnbeutelvergesser" (has the same meaning) but
used more often/commonly. ...as far as i notice.

~~~
kleiba
And has arguably a better ring to it, since "Turnbeutel" is more readily
associated with children than "Sporttasche", making the term slightly more
ridiculing.

------
yason
Finnish is nice for this as well. The grammar is mostly about inflected forms
so you can keep things together in a single word, you can most often find a
way to write words together, and even creating completely new yet
understandable words by joining existing words together or applying
onomatopoetics is doable.

------
junto
One of my favourites is "Reißverschlussverfahren", which describes the way in
which two lanes of traffic should merge like a zip closing.

[https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reißverschlussverfahren](https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reißverschlussverfahren)

~~~
taejo
English has the exact same term with the same meaning: "zipper method"

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipper_method](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipper_method)

------
amelius
Incidentally, it is probably also the best language to swear in :)

~~~
gumby
Cantonese is the best language to swear in!

~~~
junto
Is there any language that can compare to the amazing variety of
expressiveness offered by the word "fuck" though?

[http://www.angelfire.com/or/mckennap/fuck.html](http://www.angelfire.com/or/mckennap/fuck.html)

P.s. Angelfire... Now that brings back memories.

------
tiatia
One disadvantage of this is that it actually makes a decent spelling
correction (e.g. MS Word) more difficult.

~~~
detaro
OpenOffice was great in having strange combinations in its dictionaries, and
no sense for if they might fit or not. I remember it once being insistent on
correcting something over a large edit distance to Steinzeitauto ("stone age
car"), which is a correctly formed word, but really only useful if referring
to the "The Flintstones".

------
etqwzutewzu
my favorite one: rosinenpicker, a person who eats the raisins in the cake

~~~
eginhard
Related: Korinthenkacker (raisin crapper), a nitpicker

------
wjj
I heard German has more abstract words , is that true?

~~~
kafkaesq
Not necessarily more "abstract", but for various reasons here are more words
imbued with double- or multiple meanings.

That and there's intrinsically more positional freedom for certain categories
of words; e.g. _Werdende_ in the above article is essentially the same word as
the verb participle _werdend_ , but placed in a position (that of a nounified
adjective) which basically doesn't work in English.

The analogous construction in English would be "the becoming" or "the
expecting", implicitly referring to a thing or person. Other than lyrical
cases ("The Shining"), you pretty much wouldn't use that formulation in
English.

------
dschiptsov
Really, more than Sanskrit?)

------
kazinator
The german language has long words simply because its written form
(orthography) doesn't require spaces between the elements of a noun phrase.

So whereas in English we write "law school entrance examination test
requirements", the German written transliteration of that will string the
words together without spaces.

Calling that a "word" makes a strawman out of the concept of a word.

~~~
aurora72
The german frequently employs the letter 's' to glue the words together, for
instance: Nutzungsgebühr, which is made up of words Nutzung (usage) and Gebühr
(fee). Or as in BedienungSanleitung. Actually, they are so much accustomed to
the use of 's' if you speak them in English, when they make a mistake, they
tend to mistake on the 's', for instance I did hear a German say "it doesn't
workS" .)

~~~
Matt3o12_
I've helped some 4th grader learn English and they always explained to me that
they used "it doesn't works" because of the rule that after using he, she and
it, there needs to be an S (there is even a German saying for English
learners: "he, she, it und das als muss mit" – in English, "he she it and the
S must come along"). Since they have heard that saying so much, they often
miss that they already used the S in "doesn't" and use it again. A lot of
practice often helps though.

~~~
kazinator
They need the general rule that English verbs can be verb phrases, which have
an auxiliary or modal like "have" or "do". And that such verb phrases inflect
the auxiliary verb, while the main verb stays in the infinitive form (or in
the participle form, as the case may be). The auxiliary carries the tense,
negation, person and number.

Also it helps to imagine that there is always an auxiliary. If you don't see
it, it is invisible, but still there. When the auxiliary is invisible, it
cannot take the tense, number and so on; these markers go to the main verb.

Now when you make a question, the auxiliary and sentence subject exchange
places (subject-aux inversion). This still happens when the aux: is invisible.

Visible aux (will):

Statement: You will have the soup.

Question: Will you have the soup?

Invisible aux:

Statement: You [invisible] have the time.

Question: [invisible] you have the time?

But now, this invisible aux is dangling up in front of the clause and that is
forbidden. In this situation, the invisible aux is instantiated in a visible
form, and it appears as the verb "do":

Question: Do you have the time?

And, as usual, this invisible-come-visible aux now takes the tense, number,
person, "not" negation away from the main verb. With that we can more or less
semi-accurately understand how "do" works in forming questions.

~~~
Matt3o12_
Remember that the mistake I mention above is often made by beginners. While it
is true what you said, it is easier to just tell them: always use two verbs in
a question or negative sentence. If you don't have two, just borrow "do" and
apply the appropriate time/person to that verb and use the infinitive form of
the second verb. When learning a language it is important to have easy-to-
understand and simple rules. When you try to write or speak in a foreign
language, there are a lot of things to consider and you are going to forget a
few. The best thing you can do is practice a lot until it starts to sound
natural. If you always try to apply all rules you've learned, you are going to
miss some, no matter how smart you are. It's also important to have someone
who can correct you and tell you the appropriate rules.

------
gozur88
>The only important structural difference between the German and the English
in these compounds is whether there is a written space between the two
nouns...

I still don't understand how creating these huge, unwieldy words is an
advantage. If a useful word contains more than about four syllables people
tend to shorten it, just like they would an English phrase.

~~~
darklajid
The article explicitly tries to explain its idea of an "advantage", stuffing
more information into less characters ('English needs a whole sentence to
explain the concept of a single albeit long word in German').

Disclaimer: I'm German. I like my native language. But I don't think that it
is more concise than English in any use case I can think of and while I feel
that the article is interesting and amusing, it's not comparing the real world
German to English. The examples are valid, the article didn't seem wrong, but
.. I doubt that this has any significance.

Unwieldy is a crappy attribute of course. They aren't unwieldy. Foreign,
strange to you? Sure, can't argue with that. Unwieldy though? Don't judge what
you don't know.

~~~
ra1n85
Are there any English words that capture an abstract concept with great
precision, and do not exist in the German language?

~~~
vacri
I wonder what the German equivalent of "boffin" is?

~~~
detaro
That's a good example.

The closest I can think of is "Tüftler", but that really doesn't capture the
science-y aspect and is more hands-on. More the guy building a fusion reactor
in his garage, less the group designing a radar device in some government lab.

