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A comment on “Beautiful” in the Constitution of the Chinese Communist Party. Parent comment

Re:“Beautiful” in the Constitution of the Chinese Communist ... by eru on Friday November 24, 2017 @09:03AM (#15771009)
That used to annoy me a bit (as a German), but it's actually quite resourceful from a linguistic point of view.

'Smoking' is another interesting pseudo-English German word.

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Re:“Beautiful” in the Constitution of the Chinese Communist ... by mmjaa on Saturday November 25, 2017 @11:07AM (#15776496)
Ahem, hand is a cognate of old German and Dutch ..

Also, the '-ing' part comes from the continent, as well. :)

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Re:“Beautiful” in the Constitution of the Chinese Communist ... by eru on Sunday November 26, 2017 @08:14AM (#15780747)
Sure, there are lots of cognates. Some of the hardest to translate words are actually cognates.

For example it's almost impossible to properly translate the German word 'Brot' into English. It's a cognate of 'bread', but Germans mean something very different by 'Brot' than the British mean by 'bread'.

Loaning a word ad-hoc is much easier by comparison. Eg Bundeskanzler means exactly the same in English as it does in German. As does Prime Minister.

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