Learned something cool today

[Szdfan]

I like the ability in German to build words out of its parts. The nuance of some of these words is beautiful and interesting.

[Bootstrap]

I like the ability in German to build words out of its parts. The nuance of some of these words is beautiful and interesting.

I agree. English actually does the same thing, but we generally use spaces and hyphens where German smushes it all together. This is something most Germanic languages do.

For example, in English we might say:

Federal Constitutional Court decision procedure amendment proposal

In German, the same idea could be written as one word:

Bundesverfassungsgerichtsentscheidungsverfahrensänderungsvorschlag

Both mean the same thing, and both are built by stacking smaller words together. Both languages are “indefinitely extensible,” you could keep adding parts forever. Both languages make full use of this word-building power.

[JohnL]

I like the ability in German to build words out of its parts. The nuance of some of these words is beautiful and interesting.

I think so too. We’ve had German speaking families in the area a few generations back. Every now and then they’d let slip one of their German words. They seemed to enjoy our area and never complained.

[Robert]

I like the ability in German to build words out of its parts. The nuance of some of these words is beautiful and interesting.

I agree. English actually does the same thing, but we generally use spaces and hyphens where German smushes it all together. This is something most Germanic languages do.

For example, in English we might say:

Federal Constitutional Court decision procedure amendment proposal

In German, the same idea could be written as one word:

Bundesverfassungsgerichtsentscheidungsverfahrensänderungsvorschlag

Both mean the same thing, and both are built by stacking smaller words together. Both languages are “indefinitely extensible,” you could keep adding parts forever. Both languages make full use of this word-building power.

Thanks for this explanation. English is rooted in German, so now it makes much more sense to me how this works. I do like the way Spanish and other Latin based languages put the noun first then add the adjectives afterwards. That makes more sense, but English, and I suspect German does it adjective then noun. I like having the main idea, then shaping it with adjectives. Harder for me to hold onto the adjectives then hear the noun and have to figure out how to shape the concept of the noun.