News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Why the German language has so many great words by jacobolus on Friday March 11, 2016 @08:06PM (#11270749)
In high school, I took French classes, but my friends’ introductory German textbook had such vocabulary words (yes, they needed to memorize the proper spelling and gender of these to prepare for vocabulary quizzes, and invent sentences where the words would be appropriate in context) as:

“Feeling that the end of the world is near”, “kite flying festival”, “commemorative coin with Maria Theresa’s face on it”, “ship from the Hanseatic League”, and “cemetary for homeless, nameless people”.

These are on a whole different scale from “shoebox” or “raincoat”.

(Personally I suspect that the textbook authors were just trolling everyone.)

Re:Why the German language has so many great words by ekianjo on Friday March 11, 2016 @08:12PM (#11270767)
It's still nothing but a combination of other words without space in between.

In Japanese (or Chinese), do you consider that mixing kanji together to form a more complicated word is something unusual ? It's very much the same concept as what Germans do.

Nothing new, really.

Re:Why the German language has so many great words by kuschku on Saturday March 12, 2016 @08:02AM (#11272691)
Well, english doesn’t have participal construction of nouns. German does.

Any verb can be, by adding a prefix, converted into a noun meaning "he/she/it who does".

And you can similarly convert nouns into verbs.

Re:Why the German language has so many great words by dotch on Saturday March 12, 2016 @02:27AM (#11271713)
Endzeitstimmung - Feeling that the end of the world is near.

What a great word. Endzeit being composed of the nouns Ende (end) and Zeit (time) which form the word Endzeit, wich is the time when the world ends. And then composed with Stimmung (feeling).

Re:Why the German language has so many great words by kuschku on Saturday March 12, 2016 @08:05AM (#11272699)
> Personally I suspect that the textbook authors were just trolling everyone.

While that happens very often, surprisingly all the words you said are actual German words, and Endzeitstimmung, Drachenflugfestival (oder Drachenfestival, if you want to make it shorter) and Hanseschiff are quite common German words anyone would understand.

Fun fact: In German, except for a grammatical weirdness, Dragon and Kite are the same word. The word is also the same as Deltoid.