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German expressions that don’t exist in English

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Re: German expressions that don’t exist in English

#131

Post by goto11 »

missosoup wrote: post #128
goto11 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Some languages are inherently less expressive than others. English is not very expressive... I call bullshit. Do you have any justification for this claim?

Yeah I speak 3 languages and all 3 have mutually exclusive constructs that can't be translated while carrying over the 'true meaning'. English is by far the least expressive of the 3. A common example is slavic мат. A repertoire of profanities that simply have no English translation, no equivalent, not even a meaningful loose translation/explanation. The best you can do is find the nearest approximate meaningful Engl…

I'm calling bullshit on the claim that languages can be placed on a scale of expressiveness. You will first have to define expressiveness and then how to measure it.

Re: German expressions that don’t exist in English

#132

Post by chmod775 »

sagichmal wrote: post #127
donjoe wrote: post #123

My favourite German expression which doesn't exist in English is still "Ohrwurm". It refers to a catchy song/tune stuck in someone's mind [1]. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earworm

You linked to the literal English translation of it, which definitely exists?

The article also mentions it's a calque which emerged only recently.

So... 'yeah' to both of you.

Re: German expressions that don’t exist in English

#133

Post by hapless »

Most of these have close English equivalents, but as a second language learner, the author does not have a large enough vocabulary to summon them easily.

Learning a second language is not the same experience as being a native speaker.

Having grown up without German in my life, I will never have the eloquence or depth of vocabulary in German that I do in English. That's OK. It is the nature of the human animal.

Knowing my limitations, I would be reluctant to write an article about "English expressions that do not exist in German"

Re: German expressions that don’t exist in English

#134

Post by danans »

deng wrote: post #62

These are good examples of what linguists call a "Volksetymologie", meaning a usually wrong derivation of words which are no longer correctly understood or have changed meaning. A popular example is when a German newspaper did one of those stupid surveys for the "most beautiful German word", and the winner was "Habseligkeiten". The cited reason was because it combines "Haben" (to have) with "Selig" ("blessed"), the p…

> Of course German is not unique in having "doch", most other roman languages ...

Slightly off topic but from a historical linguistics perspective, German is not a Romance language.

Re: German expressions that don’t exist in English

#135

Post by diffeomorphism »

georgeplusplus wrote: post #80
Hermel wrote: post #31

No, these expressions exist in English, they just have a slightly different meaning. And in the case of “Entwicklung”, the English pendant “Development” even has the exact same origin: to unwrap or unfold (the opposite of envelope). There certainly are German expressions that do not exist in English, but this list does not do a good job at collecting them. My personal impression is that German makes it easier to expr…

I dislike when people say “this cannot be translated correctly into your language” as it logically doesn’t make sense. perhaps they mean word for word? I’m sure any language can conjure up a similar feeling and combination of words. Maybe not a literal translation, but by virtue of being a human construct, any language can be crafted and molded into anything.

You can write an essay to describe the concept but that is quite different from translating.

What your are arguing is like jumping from "assembly is Turing complete, of course you can implement tail recursion" to "assembly is basically lisp" and that claiming otherwise "logically doesn't make sense". Sure, with lots of effort you can express anything in any language, but there are concepts which are much more easily and naturally expressed in any given language than another.

Re: German expressions that don’t exist in English

#136

Post by School-Cotton »

ulfw wrote: post #122
goto11 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Some languages are inherently less expressive than others. English is not very expressive... I call bullshit. Do you have any justification for this claim?

Do you have any justification for calling bullshit on him?

I’m not the OP, but the fact that out of the thousands of professional academic linguists, none has ever seriously proposed and defined an “expressiveness scale” suggests that we would need extraordinary evidence to accept an HN comment claiming to have done so.

Re: German expressions that don’t exist in English

#137

Post by School-Cotton »

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #52
jasonjei wrote: post #46

Doesn’t every language have such a thing? What makes German more exceptional than English? Or Chinese more exceptional than English? I’m certain there are expressions that don’t exist in every language, and even if you translated them, they might not translate well due to cultural or linguistic issues (try translating Monty Python to Chinese while keeping British wit and hoping your average Chinese viewer understands…

I guess what makes German more exceptional than English is the common wisdom about the languages (common wisdom used here as something not necessarily wise or even insightful but just a commonly understood thing that is maybe not even enunciated very often). The common wisdom has that English is a language that imports new concepts from other languages as needed (which implies that these concepts somehow are not Engl…

Have you ever studied German? It has an absolutely dizzying number of French and/or Latin loanwords.

Re: German expressions that don’t exist in English

#138

Post by goto11 »

ulfw wrote: post #122
goto11 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Some languages are inherently less expressive than others. English is not very expressive... I call bullshit. Do you have any justification for this claim?

Do you have any justification for calling bullshit on him?

I have never heard of any objective measure of "expressiveness" of human languages.

Re: German expressions that don’t exist in English

#140

Post by drpgq »

distances wrote: post #64
camillomiller wrote: post #34

As an Italian living in Germany, and as a lover of the German language, I think this is not a good list. It reads like it was put together to fit the author's approach to coaching. Entwicklung, indeed, is the best example of this. It is exactly the same in English. What's really fun about German: as a non native you can get to a point where you create involuntary neologisms by putting together words you already know.…

Interesting that you find beautiful days to be a rare occurrence in Berlin. Perhaps because you're coming from Italy? I have the opposite attitude -- summer days are easier to spend inside in Berlin, as the weather is generally very good and there's always another beautiful day coming!

The winter months in Berlin can be a bit grim.
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