• lil_tank
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    9 months ago

    So cool, I need to remember this one. If there’s one thing I like about Germany its the language. It’s no wonder why German philosophy is so important for Western philosophy, their language allow them to naturally form cool concepts. English is also nice but not as elegant imo. I’m pretty jealous because French, my native tongue, is lame as f for new words. We even have a state sponsored institution full of monarchists who try to police our language to prevent us from copying English words since trying to translate them produces absolutely ridiculous results

    • fox [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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      9 months ago

      German isn’t particularly special for being able to form natural compound words like that. Every Germanic language can do it as well as Greenlandic, just off the top of my head, but Germany has a longer history of schools of philosophy

      • lil_tank
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        9 months ago

        Every Germanic language can do it as well as Greenlandic

        That’s cool, didn’t know that!

        • fox [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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          9 months ago

          Yeah, it’s called linguistic compounding. English is the odd one out here in the Germanic family since all of the others let you jam nouns together to create more specific nouns. You can do it in a lot of Asian languages too, and north American indigenous languages. Finnish and Russian.