The German compound noun thing also works in other Germanic languages like, say, Dutch, Swedish and Old English. You can blame the Normans (i.e. a bunch of snobbish Vikings who, a generation earlier, decided to speak only French) for modern English’s lack of them.
swedish and german have a significantly overlapping vocab and can be pretty fun to compare, one of my favourite examples showcasing the relationship between the languages are the respective words for iron: originally derived from proto-germanic īsarną, proto-norse took the ending turning it into járn, which became the modern järn in swedish, meanwhile old high german went the other way transforming it into īsarn, middle high german īsen, then the contemporary Eisen
North Germanic, descended from Old Norse; there are varying and debatable degrees of mutual intelligibility between it, Danish and Norwegian, to the point that instructions on product packages sold in the three countries are sometimes written as one phrase for all three, with differing words written with slashes, and linguists occasionally lump all three together as “Scandinavian”.
Out of interest, what did you think it was if not Germanic?
And it leads to a neverending stream of newly invented hype words.
We even have a yearly word of the year tradition, where the organisation behind our most famous dictionary picks one of these newly invented words based on coverage in media.
Last year’s word was “graaiflatie”, a combination between “graaien” (no direct translation, means to grab, but in a greedy way), and “inflatie” (inflation).
In Belgium there’s a radio segment where every lunch they create a new word, most of them are for situations or feelings that are quite specific. Of course it’s just a little bit of messing around, it’s not like there’s 5 new Flemmish words to memorize every week.
From a Dutch perspective, there’s always 5 new Flemmish words to memorize. You’d think we speak the same language, but we really don’t.
In some ways, Flemmish is more Dutch than the language anyone from the Netherlands speaks. Which seems especially true when it comes to loan-words from French, which some of you seem to avoid at all costs.
All of this leads to interesting situations where any conversation with our southern neighbours has a risk of needing a mental double take to make sure we derived the right meaning from your fancy words.
One example of how crazy things can get is the word for roundabout. The Dutch will generally refer such traffic control measures as rotonde, which is a French bastardization. The Flemmish, in turn, sometimes refer to them as rondpunt. …which the French seem to have adopted when they say rond-point.
The French definition of rotonde is actually from architecture. Where it is used for dome-shaped constructions, and is originally derived from the Latin rotondus, which just means “round”. Conclusion: Dutch is a weird language.
I usually associate yoink with playfully stealing something, whereas graaien in this context refers more to behaviour seen in landlords and high level executives. You know, the kinds of people that are so far up their shareholder’s butts that they can’t see the damage they’re causing.
Let’s just reserve yoink for stealing each other’s hoodies and similar endearing behaviour.
We do it so often we have a term for it: compound words.
I would explain more but I gotta turn off my desktop computer and do some chores like loading the dishwasher and cleaning up the bathroom before I sit down and watch the baseball game this afternoon before my girlfriend comes over.
I love putting words together! I’m Swedish but we do the same thing here. It makes new words easier to understand and is amazing in general. Also, here is a long word
Socialdemokratiskaungdomsförbundets talarstolsupsättarsmössasemblem aka The Social Democratic Youth Association’s pulpit setter’s cap emblem (also pulpit is literally named speakers chair in Swedish)
How else would you name a law delegating responsibilities for the supervision of the labelling of beef, other than Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz?
It’s true. In English we string words together instead of putting them into one word, so there’s not really much difference beyond the odd bit of morphology.
It does make a difference though. The long chains of words in English are kinda clumsy compared to the Swedish/German words. In practice this just leads to English using abbreviations more.
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