Due to the combinatorial allowance of German grammar, combining more than two words, like the 39-letter Rechtsschutzversicherungsgesellschaften which translates to “legal protection insurance companies,” is not only common, but would be judged as the most correct option by most German speakers. But it would start to become grammatically cumbersome to get much longer than that (“green-leaf-licker” already seems strange). In English, you can get away with combining a few words which have likely never been uttered together to describe some novel occurrence (like “leaf-licker” for, perhaps, a child that can’t stop licking leaves). In German, creating compound words for specific situations is even more commonplace than in English. Another example of a similar process is the explanation word I used above to describe nominalization itself: “noun-ifying!” Anyone who knows the new slang “swole” would understand the word’s meaning immediately. An example of this is the word “carelessness” from the adjective “careless.” However, a new noun like “swole-ness” could be created by an English speaker from one of Merriam Webster’s newly added words, “swole” (meaning muscular, related to “swollen”). Like English, German also has some rules for word flexibility, which allow the creation of new types of words which are immediately understood by other German speakers on the fly.įor example, in English you can use the “nominalization” (noun-ifiying) process to create a noun from a verb or adjective. Try Lingvist for free Where do all of these new words come from?Ī large portion of new words across languages come from technology, often loaned (called “loan words”) from the English language due to its prominence in the technology field.
0 kommentar(er)
