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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

#141

Post by bryanrasmussen »

School-Cotton wrote: post #137
bryanrasmussen wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

yes (although I can't remember any of it now whenever I am there for about a week I start being able to communicate when shopping I suppose if I spent a month I might be doing better but I'm never there for more than a week at a time), but anyway I'm talking about the popular conception of German from the American/English perception and the self-perception of the English language from the perception of English speakers. Which I thought was obvious?

Re: German expressions that don’t exist in English

#142

Post by mumblemumble »

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.

I don't know about "correctly", but it can definitely be difficult to translate a really good phrase from one language to another in a way that retains both the power and the meaning.

For example, Shakespeare is somewhat famously difficult to translate into French. Much of what's great about his writing is in the level of density he was able to achieve by playing with certain parts of English grammar's plasticity, and the strong rhythm he gets by playing with sounds. In French, it's easy enough to translate the meaning, but stricter rules about the use of articles and some characteristics of the language's word morphology make it really hard to achieve the same density, and differences in the phonology make it harder to achieve the same drumming rhythm.

Double meanings are also tricky. Different languages offer different opportunities for play with ambiguity, because they generally don't have the same patterns of polysemy.

Re: German expressions that don’t exist in English

#143

Post by School-Cotton »

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #141
School-Cotton wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

yes (although I can't remember any of it now whenever I am there for about a week I start being able to communicate when shopping I suppose if I spent a month I might be doing better but I'm never there for more than a week at a time), but anyway I'm talking about the popular conception of German from the American/English perception and the self-perception of the English language from the perception of English speake…

Sorry, you are right. I misinterpreted your comment.

Re: German expressions that don’t exist in English

#145

Post by tom_mellior »

habet wrote: post #65

"Entschuldigen" is a pretty fascinating verb, but not for the author's reasons. It literally means to remove guilt from someone (not specifically from oneself as the author states) and is kind of equivalent to "forgive". Commonly it is misused in German: people say "ich entschuldige mich", literally meaning they're removing their own guilt from theirselves and thus forgiving theirselves, which is kind of impossible a…

> The right phrase would be

The right phrase, depending on your religion, is what people use in practice (descriptivism), or what's listed in dictionary (prescriptivism). In this case, the two happen to agree: https://www.duden.de/rechtschreibung/entschuldigen "jemanden wegen eines falschen Verhaltens o. Ä. um Verständnis, Nachsicht, Verzeihung bitten", example: "sich förmlich, in aller Form entschuldigen"

I understand where you're coming from, but the ship has sailed. The word means what it means now, even if a literal historical reading indicates that it might have meant something else at some point.

Re: German expressions that don’t exist in English

#146

Post by atregir »

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.…

Oh my, Sonnenschuld!!!! I feel you, I have felt this so often and talked about it too, but me and my colleagues didn't come up with this neologism :D Can we use it, can we, can we, bitte?!

Re: German expressions that don’t exist in English

#147

Post by jgwil2 »

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…

This is an entirely subjective judgment on your part that you are advancing as though it were a matter of fact. Have you considered the possibility that you know English least well of your three languages, and that you are therefore better able to express yourself in the other two? Also, please provide a source for your "fact" that some languages are inherently more "expressive" than others (whatever that means).

Re: German expressions that don’t exist in English

#148

Post by pseudalopex »

chmod775 wrote: post #132
sagichmal wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The article suggests it isn't much older in German.

Re: German expressions that don’t exist in English

#149

Post by jgwil2 »

memling wrote: post #117
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…

> As a German, the word I'm really missing when speaking English is the simple word "doch", which more or less means "No, but yeah". As a college student I lived with a few German speakers. I felt like I had "arrived" with the language during an exchange in which I said, "Ich kann nicht Deutsch" and the native speaker said, "Doch." Of course the nuances are a bit more complex than that, and English (it feels to me) u…

Agree about the intonation vs particles. Sometimes a word like wohl would be most naturally translated into English by italics.

Re: German expressions that don’t exist in English

#150

Post by smitty1e »

watt wrote: post #125
smitty1e wrote: post #25

Here's a massively useful term, particularly in the case of watching the news: Fremdschämen See: https://www.leo.org for good discussion.

I think basically it means "cringe".

Oh no no no.

It's more the embarrassment one feels on behalf of some shameless piece of work who really ought to silence themselves, yet somehow natters on.

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