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In my experience, German parlance is full of nouns that have become verbs,
esp. foreign nouns. Its relatively easy when your language is declined.
There is one more relatively interesting facet of the discussion
about compound words in German and English.
The reason you don't find many compound English-root words in english is
that English uses latin roots for most of its words that are more than
two syllables. It is so pervasive that most english speakers don't even
notice. We just don't call things what they are in English. We use
latin cognates.
Thus a "tire tread depth gauge" is usually called a "tread caliper"
or micrometer. Just look at any technical manual. If the word is
over two syllables long, its usually come to English from Latin
through French.
The Germans self-consciously did not adopt many latin cognates.
Thus, for a German a word like hydrogen (water stuff in latin) is
wasserstoff( a compound german word )
Kent Dannehl
At 09:29 AM 2/26/97 -0800, Wayne J. Douglass wrote:
>At 03:01 PM 2/26/97 GMT, John Kohl wrote:
>>
>>In the above paragraph, I suppose you could translate "Mondayed" into
>>German as "habe...gemontagt". But "coffeed" would have to be something
>>like "gekaffeet," which looks very odd and is nearly unpronounceable
>>because I believe the "roots" of German past participles always end in
>>consonants, not vowels. There -are- prefixes in German that change root
>>words from one part of speech to another, but sometimes those prefixes
>>also change the meaning of the root word somewhat. (e.g., the prefix
>>"ver-")
>>
>Interesting that German is less "flexible" in some ways than English, even
>though English derives from German. German and English do share the ability
>to string together words to form a kind of compound noun. In English the
>words usually remain separated (for example, "tire tread depth gauge"), but
>in German they are usually squashed together (for example,
>"arbeitslosefursorge" - not sure of that spelling).
>
>--Wayne Douglass
>
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