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The Awful German Language (1880)

(faculty.georgetown.edu)
189 points nalinidash | 3 comments | 16 May 25 04:09 UTC | HN request time: 0.414s | source
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toolslive ◴[16 May 25 07:21 UTC] No.44002627[source]▶
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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1. hanshenning ◴[16 May 25 07:33 UTC] No.44002696[source]▶
In some languages there is an actual word for this in the dictionary: papabile

https://de.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/papabile

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2. umanwizard ◴[16 May 25 09:53 UTC] No.44003509[source]▶
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.
3. culebron21 ◴[16 May 25 18:07 UTC] No.44008275[source]▶
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.