27 ms·

Opinion of a Polish guy: In my eyes, English is pretty bloated, when seemingly almost every concept can have three or more alternative words, each from a differ

Opinion of a Polish guy: In my eyes, English is pretty bloated, when seemingly almost every concept can have three or more alternative words, each from a different source. It is all matter of perspective, I suppose. :) I think such feeling can be caused by languages that rely strongly on creating compound words rather than borrowing a new ones (example from the site: Dictionary > Wordbook).

wolfram74 4y ago
The counterargument is that lots of words allow for precise concision. wordbook can be ambiguous, as almost all books are filled with words. Is wordbook specifying that this book is a word book as opposed to a picture book? wordkenbook might be less ambiguous, but maybe this referring to all nonfiction books using words? all that being said, I think uncleftish[0] beholding is an amazing piece of text and a good exercise for young physicists [0]https://groups.google.com/g/alt.language.artificial/c/ZL4e3fD7eW0/m/_7p8bKwLJWkJ?pli=1 https://groups.google.com/g/alt.language.artificial/c/ZL4e3f...
- guidoism 4y ago
  I feel this way when I speak Spanish. I'm constantly looking for the right word and it always seems that there is only one word in Spanish that fits multiple words in English. I've had the opposite happen where there are more precise words in Spanish, but not as often as the reverse.
- lifthrasiir 4y ago
  > wordbook can be ambiguous, as almost all books are filled with words. Is wordbook specifying that this book is a word book as opposed to a picture book? wordkenbook might be less ambiguous, but maybe this referring to all nonfiction books using words? Your description only applies to a word phrase "word book". The lexicalized word "wordbook" would have its own meaning (presumably one of your suggestions), just like "dictionary" does, but without requiring additional foreign morphemes.
  - atchoo 4y ago
    I was curious about "thesaurus" given that is not a dictionary but still a "word book". According to Google Translate, apparently Wörterbuch also means thesaurus so OP is correct, it is more ambiguous than dictionary. The first suggested translation for thesaurus is... thesaurus... so much for compound words eh?
    - oefnak 4y ago
      Synoniemenbüch, probably?
      - biztos 4y ago
        Synonymwörterbuch, apparently: https://shop.duden.de/collections/worterbucher-und-sprache/products/duden-das-synonymworterbuch https://shop.duden.de/collections/worterbucher-und-sprache/p...
        hoseja 4y ago
        Synonym, of course, being latin.
        oblio 4y ago
        Lazy just like us. Thesaurus in Romanian is "dicționar de sinonime". I won't bother translating it back to English, you can figure it out :-D
    - mgaunard 4y ago
      A thesaurus is a type of dictionary.
    - lifthrasiir 4y ago
      I specifically said "lexicalized" because the word "wordbook" would be somehow related to "word" and "book" but can mean something else so these words can't no longer stand as a standalone word. Whether the word "thesaurus" can be said to be a "word book" or not is pretty much irrelevant here. If a "wordbook" meant a thesaurus then a plain dictionary would naturally use a different word (or phrase) to avoid confusion. Or more likely, "thesaurus" may not exist as a single word but would be just called a synonym dictionary.
- wirrbel 4y ago
  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 to be made a bit more explicit in englisch. So english for example has from the Germanic root "hunger", and from the french root (compare french "faim" hungry -> french "famine") "famine". Now in German, famine is "Hungersnot" (hunger crisis) and "hunger" is "Hunger". Both languages are precise, yet I would say as a German native speaker, that French is more precise than English (also German is more precise but in this argument I am not impartial). Just to be clear I am no opponent of loan words, and overall I believe modern-day languages that have a written culture probably converge towards an optimal information transmission rate, which is why english will gain and lose words, so will French and German.
  - MrJohz 4y ago
    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. Personally, I feel like I can be much more precise in English than I can in German (although that's probably mostly impartiality again!) Yes there are lots of words that are ostensibly just synonyms of each other, but they're mostly not true synonyms, because they have different connotations and can be used in different ways. I miss that wealth of vocabulary in German, where it often feels like I say more to get across the exact idea that I want to. That said, a lot of that is probably familiarity and bias. I grew up in English, and learned German later in life, and I suspect you did the opposite, so obviously we're going have more intuition for our native languages.
    - Someone 4y ago
      > and German has just invented its own: Ampel vs traffic light, for example That’s not an invention, but a loan word from Latin ampulla (small oil bottle), which got a meaning “hanging lamp” (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Ampel https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Ampel)
- jojobas 4y ago
  Almost all books have text in them, yet nobody suffers from the ambiguity of what a textbook is.
- Dalewyn 4y ago
  >The counterargument is that lots of words allow for precise concision. In fact, the hallmark of writing/speaking good English is conveying yourself using the least words required with the utmost precision. Don't believe it? Watch a British politician roast someone in Parliament. That is bloody masterful English literature right there.
  - mogrim 4y ago
    That's just modern fashion - in other eras "flowery" language would be considered superior.
- culebron21 4y ago
  In Slavic languages it's even simpler, it's "slovár" or "slóvnik", meaning something like "worder".
ithkuil 4y ago
Being bloated is a boon to the poet and a curse to student
taylorius 4y ago
As a native English speaker, I think the multiple choices of word are a strength. They usually have subtle differences of style (if not meaning), which can affect the tone of the sentence. In my opinion, this is where English achieves its precision - at the phrase or sentence level, rather than the level of individual words.
culebron21 4y ago
Depends on what part of vocabulary you look at. Some words, on the contrary, have many names: "nut", "beam", "housing", "tell", "well", etc. I used to think it's the contrary to Slavic languages, where borrowed words in professions get exact meaning (marine industry, or IT).
LeonB 4y ago
C# is headed in that direction too.
nine_k 4y ago
> three or more alternative words Wait until you start studying Sanskrit ;)
memsom 4y ago
Having a Polish wife an knowing something about Polish through a few failed attempts to learn some, Polish is a lot more "bloated" to an English eye. The moods and aspects make learning Polish super hard. If you learn the morphology of the individual elements I guess you can guess what a verb means, but it all seems a bit alien. An needing to know if a verb is in one aspect or another, and that sometimes the aspect is "past" and sometimes "future" in tense... it is hard unless you are a native speaker or really dedicated. As for English and bloated - I'm probably a high A2/low B1 Swedish speaker. I can read a lot better than I speak. I also dabbled in Norwegian out of fascination of how absolutely similar and yet different the two languages are. (It's like Czech and Polish.) So much looks the same, just spelt differently, but you also have a large corpus of vocabulary that is on the surface different - but in reality a native speaker would know there is a word that is equivilent (maybe just not used as much or archaic.) The one I found today, which blew my mind was "trenge". This means "need" in Norwegian. It is one of those odd "Norwegian seems to prefer another word". Swedish seems to mostly use "behöva" and Norwegian does also have "behøve", but I see trenge way more. Today I saw some Swedish song lyrics with "tränga" (which is basically a Swedish equivalent of the Norwegian spelling.) Synonyms happen in all languages. Even if languages that are purely Germanic with minimal Latin influence. Caveat: this is obviously my own observations. Not claiming any thing other than casual knowledge and no actual expertise. More examples, from a Swedish speaking point of view, are jente/jänta (latter is archaic, flicka is more contemporary), snakke/snacka (the latter is normally tala or prata), bruke/bruka (bruka in Swedish is seeminly used to mean "usually" rather than "use", and änvenda is used for "use")... the list goes on. I find this really interesting. I think the Hanseatic league and Low German it brought explains an least some of these synonyms.

wolfram74 4y ago

The counterargument is that lots of words allow for precise concision. wordbook can be ambiguous, as almost all books are filled with words. Is wordbook specifying that this book is a word book as opposed to a picture book? wordkenbook might be less ambiguous, but maybe this referring to all nonfiction books using words? all that being said, I think uncleftish[0] beholding is an amazing piece of text and a good exercise for young physicists [0]https://groups.google.com/g/alt.language.artificial/c/ZL4e3fD7eW0/m/_7p8bKwLJWkJ?pli=1 https://groups.google.com/g/alt.language.artificial/c/ZL4e3f...

guidoism 4y ago
I feel this way when I speak Spanish. I'm constantly looking for the right word and it always seems that there is only one word in Spanish that fits multiple words in English. I've had the opposite happen where there are more precise words in Spanish, but not as often as the reverse.
lifthrasiir 4y ago
> wordbook can be ambiguous, as almost all books are filled with words. Is wordbook specifying that this book is a word book as opposed to a picture book? wordkenbook might be less ambiguous, but maybe this referring to all nonfiction books using words? Your description only applies to a word phrase "word book". The lexicalized word "wordbook" would have its own meaning (presumably one of your suggestions), just like "dictionary" does, but without requiring additional foreign morphemes.
- atchoo 4y ago
  I was curious about "thesaurus" given that is not a dictionary but still a "word book". According to Google Translate, apparently Wörterbuch also means thesaurus so OP is correct, it is more ambiguous than dictionary. The first suggested translation for thesaurus is... thesaurus... so much for compound words eh?
  - oefnak 4y ago
    Synoniemenbüch, probably?
    - biztos 4y ago
      Synonymwörterbuch, apparently: https://shop.duden.de/collections/worterbucher-und-sprache/products/duden-das-synonymworterbuch https://shop.duden.de/collections/worterbucher-und-sprache/p...
      - hoseja 4y ago
        Synonym, of course, being latin.
      - oblio 4y ago
        Lazy just like us. Thesaurus in Romanian is "dicționar de sinonime". I won't bother translating it back to English, you can figure it out :-D
  - mgaunard 4y ago
    A thesaurus is a type of dictionary.
  - lifthrasiir 4y ago
    I specifically said "lexicalized" because the word "wordbook" would be somehow related to "word" and "book" but can mean something else so these words can't no longer stand as a standalone word. Whether the word "thesaurus" can be said to be a "word book" or not is pretty much irrelevant here. If a "wordbook" meant a thesaurus then a plain dictionary would naturally use a different word (or phrase) to avoid confusion. Or more likely, "thesaurus" may not exist as a single word but would be just called a synonym dictionary.
wirrbel 4y ago
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 to be made a bit more explicit in englisch. So english for example has from the Germanic root "hunger", and from the french root (compare french "faim" hungry -> french "famine") "famine". Now in German, famine is "Hungersnot" (hunger crisis) and "hunger" is "Hunger". Both languages are precise, yet I would say as a German native speaker, that French is more precise than English (also German is more precise but in this argument I am not impartial). Just to be clear I am no opponent of loan words, and overall I believe modern-day languages that have a written culture probably converge towards an optimal information transmission rate, which is why english will gain and lose words, so will French and German.
- MrJohz 4y ago
  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. Personally, I feel like I can be much more precise in English than I can in German (although that's probably mostly impartiality again!) Yes there are lots of words that are ostensibly just synonyms of each other, but they're mostly not true synonyms, because they have different connotations and can be used in different ways. I miss that wealth of vocabulary in German, where it often feels like I say more to get across the exact idea that I want to. That said, a lot of that is probably familiarity and bias. I grew up in English, and learned German later in life, and I suspect you did the opposite, so obviously we're going have more intuition for our native languages.
  - Someone 4y ago
    > and German has just invented its own: Ampel vs traffic light, for example That’s not an invention, but a loan word from Latin ampulla (small oil bottle), which got a meaning “hanging lamp” (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Ampel https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Ampel)
jojobas 4y ago
Almost all books have text in them, yet nobody suffers from the ambiguity of what a textbook is.
Dalewyn 4y ago
>The counterargument is that lots of words allow for precise concision. In fact, the hallmark of writing/speaking good English is conveying yourself using the least words required with the utmost precision. Don't believe it? Watch a British politician roast someone in Parliament. That is bloody masterful English literature right there.
- mogrim 4y ago
  That's just modern fashion - in other eras "flowery" language would be considered superior.
culebron21 4y ago
In Slavic languages it's even simpler, it's "slovár" or "slóvnik", meaning something like "worder".

ithkuil 4y ago

Being bloated is a boon to the poet and a curse to student

taylorius 4y ago

As a native English speaker, I think the multiple choices of word are a strength. They usually have subtle differences of style (if not meaning), which can affect the tone of the sentence. In my opinion, this is where English achieves its precision - at the phrase or sentence level, rather than the level of individual words.

culebron21 4y ago

Depends on what part of vocabulary you look at. Some words, on the contrary, have many names: "nut", "beam", "housing", "tell", "well", etc. I used to think it's the contrary to Slavic languages, where borrowed words in professions get exact meaning (marine industry, or IT).

LeonB 4y ago

C# is headed in that direction too.

nine_k 4y ago

> three or more alternative words Wait until you start studying Sanskrit ;)

memsom 4y ago

Having a Polish wife an knowing something about Polish through a few failed attempts to learn some, Polish is a lot more "bloated" to an English eye. The moods and aspects make learning Polish super hard. If you learn the morphology of the individual elements I guess you can guess what a verb means, but it all seems a bit alien. An needing to know if a verb is in one aspect or another, and that sometimes the aspect is "past" and sometimes "future" in tense... it is hard unless you are a native speaker or really dedicated. As for English and bloated - I'm probably a high A2/low B1 Swedish speaker. I can read a lot better than I speak. I also dabbled in Norwegian out of fascination of how absolutely similar and yet different the two languages are. (It's like Czech and Polish.) So much looks the same, just spelt differently, but you also have a large corpus of vocabulary that is on the surface different - but in reality a native speaker would know there is a word that is equivilent (maybe just not used as much or archaic.) The one I found today, which blew my mind was "trenge". This means "need" in Norwegian. It is one of those odd "Norwegian seems to prefer another word". Swedish seems to mostly use "behöva" and Norwegian does also have "behøve", but I see trenge way more. Today I saw some Swedish song lyrics with "tränga" (which is basically a Swedish equivalent of the Norwegian spelling.) Synonyms happen in all languages. Even if languages that are purely Germanic with minimal Latin influence. Caveat: this is obviously my own observations. Not claiming any thing other than casual knowledge and no actual expertise. More examples, from a Swedish speaking point of view, are jente/jänta (latter is archaic, flicka is more contemporary), snakke/snacka (the latter is normally tala or prata), bruke/bruka (bruka in Swedish is seeminly used to mean "usually" rather than "use", and änvenda is used for "use")... the list goes on. I find this really interesting. I think the Hanseatic league and Low German it brought explains an least some of these synonyms.