321–330 of 363 posts
> Anglish is a kind of English which prefers native words over those borrowed from foreign languages. does not make sense - english is a language sythesised from huge borrowings from other languages, over time. what is the "native" language supposed to be?
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But the key point here is that "fire stuff" is still a pretty ambiguous term. Sure, it does describe a lighter, but it also describes lots of other things pretty well. The compound parts give some clues as to the nature of the object in question (a Feuerzeug does have something to do with fire), but fundamentally you still need to know what the word means. So I don't think compound words magically remove ambiguity, a…
As far as I understand it, Zeug means thing in this context. Stuff is “Stoff” as in Brennstoff. Fire-thing and burning-stuff. Lighter is “Zünder“ in German. Feuerzeug vs Zünder To close to call regarding which is clearer.
Zünder is an igniter/detonator, Zündung is the ignition.
Zeug can be used as "thing", but it is frequently used when refearing to gear. So "Feuerzeug" is like "Firegear", "Werkzeug" is the "gear for working" (tools).
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na, you are missing the point here, in German "Wörterbuch" (literally wordsbook) is the standard term for a dictionary. No ambiguity because by default a book is with words and then all composita describe some kind of deviation (Bilderbuch= picture book, Handbuch = handbook -> manual, Fahrtenbuch = drive book -> driver's log). English just draws vocabulary from many roots and attaches connotations to them which have…
You're cherry picking examples here though. How do you explain the "-zeug" words? If you think of "Zeug" more as tool then some of them kind of make more sense ("Feuerzeug", "Werkzeug", at a pinch "Spielzeug") but are you really thinking of a plane as a flying tool? And there are also cases where English has opted for a compound word and German has just invented its own: Ampel vs traffic light, for example. Personall…
Ampel is a loanword from latin, "ampulla", it was used for oil lamps hanging from churches and thus kind of made its way into the "Ampel".
The legal texts use "Lichtzeichen" instead of Ampel IIRC.
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I don't know any English people who think that Scotland or Wales are countries. Most people understand that the four nations compete separately in football because the game was invented here, and the first ever international match was between England and Scotland. A great distinction I once heard was that the US is a nation made up of states, the UK is a state made up of nations.
Pleased to meet you. I'm English. Scotland and Wales are countries. There can't be a concept of a "Union" if there are no components to unite. Scotland has its own Parliament, Legal System and even bank notes, for example.
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I don't know any English people who think that Scotland or Wales are countries. Most people understand that the four nations compete separately in football because the game was invented here, and the first ever international match was between England and Scotland. A great distinction I once heard was that the US is a nation made up of states, the UK is a state made up of nations.
Every English person I know thinks that England, Scotland and Wales are countries. It's what we were taught in school. I find it odd that you find the opposite.
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This is because English has lost most of its Indo-European heritage (except lexical), and looks much more similar to Chinese that to an IE language like German, Spanish, Russian, Greek, Hindi / Urdu, or even Farsi (though Farsi has also lost grammatical gender). * English has no inflections; nouns and adjectives stay the same no matter what role in a sentence do they have. * English has no noun-adjective agreement, a…
Although vaguely off topic, one thing that grinds my gears is calling Persian "Farsi". Nobody goes around saying "hello I speak Español" but for some reason, rather recently, it has become popular to use the endonym for Persian in place of the already well established "Persian". I've more than once met people not knowing they are the same thing which is sad because using the new word loses well-rooted associations li…
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Except for the genders, which are completely arbitrary and very annoying to a learner.
Indeed, for a native English person who doesn't have genders for inanimate objects (I'm sure someone will come up with an exception) they don't seem to add any benefit. La chaise vs Le chaise. It's a chair, you sit on it. Someone articistic might decide that a chair has a masculine form, but another chair could be feminine, but that doesn't change the "le" vs "la" part. Do non-european languages have genders?
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You're cherry picking examples here though. How do you explain the "-zeug" words? If you think of "Zeug" more as tool then some of them kind of make more sense ("Feuerzeug", "Werkzeug", at a pinch "Spielzeug") but are you really thinking of a plane as a flying tool? And there are also cases where English has opted for a compound word and German has just invented its own: Ampel vs traffic light, for example. Personall…
I'd translate "Zeug" as "device": a tool or other contraption made to facilitate some activity. Flugzeug definitely helps flying, like Werkzeug helps working.
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> I'm not sure if the Latin-based words actually came via French or via English Or via anything else, really. E.g. the word for car "kocsi" seems oddly similar to Spanish "coche" (I think French would be voiture) and "tombola" to mean "bingo" seems Italian (french/english should be raffle, I think).
Coach/coche/kocsi all come from Hungarian. There is a Hungarian town called Kócs. Kócsi literally means "(a thing) from Kócs". Hungary used to sell some horse drawn carriages made in Kócs and from there, the word entered German and then English. Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kocs