Comment by arkensaw 13 hours ago
> It’s full of silent letters, as in numb, knee, and honour. A given sound can be spelled in multiple ways (farm, laugh, photo), and many letters make multiple sounds (get, gist, mirage).
that last one is hardly fair - gist and mirage are french words. might as well complain about the silent letters in rendezvous or faux pas.
Almost every English word is French, except for the most important ones.
The food is French, the animal is Anglo Saxon. At least English lacks compound words or whatever German calls those 30-character constructions.
> At least English lacks compound words or whatever German calls those 30-character constructions.
Not entirely true. English, as any other Germanic language, still likes to compound words to produce a new meaning, the main difference is that, as opposed to most other Germanic languages, spaces are usually retained in writing. But this is just a spelling difference, the underlying process is the same.
Does that mean, that "compound word" counts as a single word? And how do I distinguish between "a" "compound" "word" and "a" "compound word"?
Depends on your definition of a word and how it relates to writing. It's not such a simple question, actually.
Let's consider "scheepskapitein" and "ship captain". Both are formed the exactly same way and mean roughly the same thing, but it's customary in Dutch to spell it without a space and in English it's considered correct to have a space between them. Note, that there are no spaces in speech, it's simply a writing convention. So, how many words are there in this example?
"Cattle labeling meat labeling supervision task transfer act" is just as bad as Rinderkennzeichnungsfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz, English just gets to use spaces where German doesn't. The underlying construction is the same. (I definitively got that translation wrong)
English gets to use a sentence. It can be reworded any number of ways. I did a bit of quick googling and the clearest English I came up with for `Regulation (EC) No 1760/2000` is "Requirements for the Labelling of Minced Beef" which is a lot easier to process than Rinderkennzeichnungsfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz. The reason we split code over lines is the same reason we split sentences into words. Easier for the brain to parse.
I wonder do German brains work on a much longer context window because of the language?
Usually English will try to come up with a single, Latin-or-Greek-derived word for compound ideas like this, which is another bad habit.
So surgery is full of -ectomies instead of -cut-outs.
In Danish knee is 'knæ' and the K is pronounced very clearly. It's interesting that English speaking people have forgotten how to pronounce K before N, so the Danish king Knud became Canute.