• Herding Llamas@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    This is today’s version of "Eskimos (Inuit, I know, but that’s not how the memes went) have __40 __65 250( insert your number, it won’t be wrong) words for snow. This is for the same reason and is now largely known as wrong.

    The problem is even German people (I live in Germany) also believe that they have a larger more expressive language than (for example) English… When it isn’t true. German has either 5.3 million++ words or 135,000 depending on how you count them. In reality you can endlessly combine words in German together, but it very rarely makes it a “new word”.

        • Herding Llamas@lemmy.world
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          3 months ago

          Antibabypille - contraception

          Stinktier (stinky animal) - skunk

          Stinkfrucht (smelly fruit) - durian

          Krankenhaus (sick house) - hospital

          Krankenwagen (sick wagon) - ambulance

          Krankenschwester (sick sister) - nurse

          Handschuhe (hand shoe) - glove

          Durchfall (through fall) - diarrhoea

          Regenschirm (rain shield) - Umbrella

          Stachelschwein (‘spikey pig’)= Porcupine

          ‘Pustblume’ (blow flower) = dandelion seed head

          Sauerstoff (sour stuff) - oxygen

          Wasserstoff (water stuff) - hydrogen

          Totenkopf (dead head)💀 - scull

    • lengau@midwest.social
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      3 months ago

      This is also largely responsible for why more English words have a Romance root than a Germanic one. English’s Germanic words tend to be counted as their base and get combined as phrases, while its Romance words are more likely to get double counted in compound words or variants of different forms being counted as separate words.

    • EmoDuck@sh.itjust.works
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      3 months ago

      If you compare german non-compund words with their english translation the german words tend to do be a bit longer on average. I think the same also goes for the word-count in german sentences

      • lugal@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        English has more auxiliary words so I think in word count, English as more words in a sentence.

        • sploosh@lemmy.world
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          3 months ago

          Spanish, too. Translating things that you lay out, like flyers or handouts, from English to Spanish is a massive pain because you need to rearrange for all the additional text.