Re:The Awful German Language
by toolslive on Friday May 16, 2025 @03:21AM
(#44002627)
The compositional powers of German, Dutch and plenty of other languages are really amazing. People invent words on the fly and promptly forget immediately after and the listener just understands what has been said. In my Dutch native language, we had the word "pausbaar" (which means something like "in possession of the necessary properties to become pope) coming up recently.
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Re:The Awful German Language
by hanshenning on Friday May 16, 2025 @03:33AM
(#44002696)
In some languages there is an actual word for this in the dictionary: papabile
Re:The Awful German Language
by umanwizard on Friday May 16, 2025 @05:53AM
(#44003509)
This word is widely known in English too, at least among people who follow papal elections. I’m not sure whether it’d count as “an English word originally loaned from Italian” (like “pasta”) or “an Italian word that a lot of English-speakers recognize” (like “buongiorno”), but it is there — probably somewhere in between those two extremes.
Re:The Awful German Language
by culebron21 on Friday May 16, 2025 @02:07PM
(#44008275)
Russian speakers can produce the same, basically its cognate, папабельный (papabelniy), using the borrowed suffix -bel- (same as -bile), and Russian suffix -n- (passive voice maybe), plus the ending.
Examlpe of pure Russian word: смотрибельный (smotribelniy) = watcheable. Root smotr- (Slavic root, "to watch") + suffix -bel-, + -n- + gender ending.
I bet the German -bar suffix and Latin -bil- are cognates.
Re:The Awful German Language
by melvinroest on Friday May 16, 2025 @03:25AM
(#44002653)
Ah, I read "pausbaar" as the "ability to pause" since "pauzebaar" would be odd to say :')
if you want to build "ability to be paused" you would end up with "pauzeerbaar"
from "pauzeren" (to pause)
Re:The Awful German Language
by melvinroest on Friday May 16, 2025 @07:33AM
(#44004101)
ah yea, fair
Ahhh, the recurring themes of popeability and pope-worthiness.
also, I've noticed that French and Spanish speaking people have problems trying to perform the composition: "XY" and "YX" will end up meaning completely different things. fe DataRequest fe RequestData.