/out/ - Outdoors » Thread #616813

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Anonymous Fri 23 Oct 2015 16:19:10 No.616813 View Reply Report Delete

Quoted By: >>616816 >>616821 >>616836 >>617333 >>617355

>look up various nature phenomena or outdoors terms on Wikipedia
>pages are only available in Swedish, Norwegian and Finnish. There literally exists no applicable words in English

Every time. Why is the English language in particular so devoid of these terms?

Is it a "100 words for snow" sort of thing, where Anglos have never had any real connection to nature?

Anonymous

Anonymous Fri 23 Oct 2015 16:27:02 No.616816 Report Delete

Quoted By: >>617092

>>616813
It's because english absorbs words from other languages more readily than swedish, finnish etc
Instead of transliterating a word english speakers use the original pronunciation and definition without the need to claim it in any way
That's why english is the most spoken language in the world because it is far more fluid than any other language and is therefore most adaptable which is important when communicating

Anonymous

Anonymous Fri 23 Oct 2015 16:32:51 No.616821 Report Delete

Quoted By:

>>616813
English is a language that is inherently rootless, due to its mercantile history and cosmopolitan spread. The English burned or logged most of their forests, while Scandinavians had the privilege of still retaining vast chunks of wilderness to enjoy.

Anonymous

Anonymous Fri 23 Oct 2015 16:55:39 No.616836 Report Delete

Quoted By: >>616858 >>616949 >>617087 >>617108

>>616813
Can you describe an example of a word English doesn't have?

Anonymous

Anonymous Fri 23 Oct 2015 17:58:55 No.616857 Report Delete

Quoted By: >>616864 >>616960 >>617065

it doesn't matter if there's no word. there doesn't need to be. people inherently like the idea of a single word to describe a concept because its compact and simple, 'impossible to translate' is just a meme. take the german word 'backpfeifengesicht'. it means a face that's incredibly punchable. there's no english equivalent, but you can still express the meaning. if you wanted to, you could just start saying slapface. "that guy has a slapface.", bam you just created a 'new' word. realistically a word is just a noise that carries significant meaning, so as long as someone understands what you're trying to express, it's a word.

also, the "100 words for snow" is retarded. the inuit don't have 100 unique words for snow. eskim-aleut languages are agglutinative or polysynthetic, meaning their words are really just built up out many morphemes/smallest word you can make that carries meaning conjugated and stacked together, like grammatical building blocks.

for example, the 'word' tusaatsiarunnanngittualuujunga, means 'i can't hear very well'. it's not just one long word, it's made up of parts. -tsiaq- means well, -junnaq- means to be able to, -nngit- means not, -tualuu- means very much, -junga is the 1st person singular present indicative non specific. so there's not exactly 100 different words for snow, just snow with a descriptive morpheme plugged to it.

Anonymous

Anonymous Fri 23 Oct 2015 18:04:28 No.616858 Report Delete

Quoted By: >>617086

>>616836
Is there a specific word for vagina? Word only for that?

Anonymous

Anonymous Fri 23 Oct 2015 18:11:43 No.616864 Report Delete

Quoted By: >>616947

>>616857
Germans and their compound words drive me crazy. It seems there is no limit to how long they can make a word.

Anonymous

Anonymous Fri 23 Oct 2015 21:02:21 No.616947 Report Delete

Quoted By:

>>616864
Really? I fucking love that Germans have words that describe entire concepts or situations.

Like fremdschamen, the embarrassment you feel when someone is being an ass and doesn't realize it.

Or backpfiefengesicht, a face the cries out to be punched.

Anonymous

Anonymous Fri 23 Oct 2015 21:04:56 No.616949 Report Delete

Quoted By: >>616964

>>616836
Not OP and not really /out/ related, but English doesn't have a word for someone who isn't a virgin (other than the hyphenated "non-virgin").

They're called lexical gaps and all languages have them.

Anonymous

Anonymous Fri 23 Oct 2015 21:13:58 No.616953 Report Delete

Quoted By: >>616962 >>617065

Or here's another one, there's no formal plural of "you" in English.

The closest is ya'll, which is an informal contraction.

Anonymous

Anonymous Fri 23 Oct 2015 21:26:34 No.616960 Report Delete

Quoted By: >>616963

>>616857
>impossible to translate' is just a meme
This.

Long messy words are retarded. They require completely useless effort. Words that are made or shorter words inherently make sense without knowing them, and not having a word and instead describing is even better.

Same with other useless data you are forced to learn, like objects having gender.

Anonymous

Anonymous Fri 23 Oct 2015 21:33:20 No.616962 Report Delete

Quoted By: >>617066

>>616953
"You" is plural for "you." It's not a separate word, but it is accepted as grammatically correct.

Arguably the biggest gap in English is the absence of a grammatically correct gender-neutral singular third person pronoun, or male/female plural third person pronouns. Many other languages do have these, since they are frequently used to refer to a third person of unknown gender, or a group of people of exclusively one gender.

And "ya'll" should be "y'all" since it is a contraction of you+all.

Anonymous

Anonymous Fri 23 Oct 2015 21:34:45 No.616963 Report Delete

Quoted By:

>>616960
>objects having gender

Truly one of the stupidest parts of any language.

Anonymous

Anonymous Fri 23 Oct 2015 21:34:57 No.616964 Report Delete

Quoted By: >>616965 >>617085

>>616949
The word is "slut"

Ask any group of virgins.

Anonymous

Anonymous Fri 23 Oct 2015 21:36:34 No.616965 Report Delete

Quoted By:

>>616964
>har har

Anonymous

Anonymous Fri 23 Oct 2015 21:42:30 No.616967 Report Delete

Quoted By: >>617088

Another one of my favorites is kommerspeck, which is excess weight put on from emotional eating.

It literally translates to "grief bacon", which would be an awesome band name.

Anonymous

Anonymous Sat 24 Oct 2015 02:21:05 No.617065 Report Delete

Quoted By:

>>616857
Always perks me up to see a fellow linguisticsfag on 4chan.
>>616953
"You/Ye" used to be the plural second-person pronoun and "Thou" used to be the singular. By the ~1200s "you" was the formal pronoun you might address a superior with, exactly homologous to the distinction between tu/vous, tu/usted, du/Sie, etc. Obviously this distinction has been lost in modern English.

Anonymous

Anonymous Sat 24 Oct 2015 02:30:35 No.617066 Report Delete

Quoted By: >>617068

>>616962
>"You" is plural for "you." It's not a separate word, but it is accepted as grammatically correct.
"You" is the plural. "Thee" or "thou" is the singular. I always assumed that "you" was used formally out of respect (like you call someone you don't know well "vous" in French, not "tu") until "thee" and "thou" fell out of use.

Anonymous

Anonymous Sat 24 Oct 2015 02:33:18 No.617068 Report Delete

Quoted By:

>>617066
Post-Norman Conquest was when "you" took on that meaning, it's a direct borrowing from French.

Anonymous

Anonymous Sat 24 Oct 2015 04:20:29 No.617085 Report Delete

Quoted By:

>>616964
A group of virgins is actually called a LAN

>Thse more you know

Anonymous

Anonymous Sat 24 Oct 2015 04:34:37 No.617086 Report Delete

Quoted By:

>>616858
you mean a term for a vagina that cannot be used to describe. say. a person or the way someones acting?

Anonymous

Anonymous Sat 24 Oct 2015 04:35:08 No.617087 Report Delete

Quoted By: >>617192

>>616836
The French word "terroir" refers to how the envrionment (i.e., sun, soil, water quality) affects the taste that of food. Doesn't really have an equivalent in English.

Madsen Maskingevær !!o9Rj2xAYif5

Madsen Maskingevær !!o9Rj2xAYif5 Sat 24 Oct 2015 04:36:47 No.617088 Report Delete

Quoted By:

>>616967
trostespise: eating to make oneself feel better. usually in vain

Anonymous

Anonymous Sat 24 Oct 2015 04:45:58 No.617092 Report Delete

Quoted By: >>617102

>>616816
English isn't the most spoken language in the world.

Anonymous

Anonymous Sat 24 Oct 2015 06:04:32 No.617102 Report Delete

Quoted By:

>>617092
yes it is, it isn't the most spoken native language but every chinamen and indian worth his salt speaks english

Anonymous

Anonymous Sat 24 Oct 2015 06:39:35 No.617106 Report Delete

Quoted By:

this is an interesting as fuck thread.

thanks /out/.

Anonymous

Anonymous Sat 24 Oct 2015 06:47:02 No.617108 Report Delete

Quoted By: >>617116 >>617141 >>617194 >>617195 >>617216

>>616836
The ones that made me make this thread: various effects caused by the ice age and glacials, such as the many different types of glacial (sedimented) ridges you find all over Northern Europe.

Another word is the one used for what is depicted in OP (a "kolbotten"), namely the effect of a now long-gone charcoil pile. It is that perfect circle of trees in the middle of the picture.

This is of course similar to a svedj- uh... the area affected by a forest fire, which may see a spurt of pyrophytic plants like the brandnäve, geranium lanuginosum, which doesn't even have an English Wikipedia page for the Latin names. Almost no pyrophytic plants even do.

I believe Canadians have adopted some Indian words for various nature-related stuff though. One being the tree "mikado" left by storms, which made paths hard to traverse by horse.

Anonymous

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Anonymous Sat 24 Oct 2015 07:24:31 No.617116 Report Delete

Quoted By: >>617139

>>617108
>mikado
(that is not the actual word but the game in pic rel)

Whoever knows what I'm referring to, please post what it is called

Anonymous

Anonymous Sat 24 Oct 2015 08:54:53 No.617139 Report Delete

Quoted By: >>617140

>>617116
pick up sticks?

Anonymous

Anonymous Sat 24 Oct 2015 08:57:57 No.617140 Report Delete

Quoted By: >>617144 >>617163

>>617139
The term for nature's large-scale pick-up sticks, not the table top game

Anonymous

Anonymous Sat 24 Oct 2015 08:59:10 No.617141 Report Delete

Quoted By:

>>617108
It's just a stand of trees m8, get over yourself

Anonymous

Anonymous Sat 24 Oct 2015 09:03:19 No.617144 Report Delete

Quoted By:

>>617140
Entropy?

Anonymous

Anonymous Sat 24 Oct 2015 09:39:05 No.617163 Report Delete

Quoted By:

>>617140
We call that ultimate pick-up sticks, I think the Scotts call it caber tossing

Anonymous

Anonymous Sat 24 Oct 2015 11:07:57 No.617192 Report Delete

Quoted By:

>>617087
>Doesn't really have an equivalent in English.
So we stole it and now it's an English word.

Problem solved.

Anonymous

Anonymous Sat 24 Oct 2015 11:10:17 No.617194 Report Delete

Quoted By:

>>617108
>The ones that made me make this thread: various effects caused by the ice age and glacials, such as the many different types of glacial (sedimented) ridges you find all over Northern Europe.

But how many words does Finnish have for describing deserts? Also, there are English geological terms to describe what you're talking about but they're obscure as fuck.

Anonymous

Anonymous Sat 24 Oct 2015 11:11:44 No.617195 Report Delete

Quoted By:

>>617108
Americans have absorbed some native words too, but we usually skew the meanings.

Like Podunk, which we use to mean an under-developed, out of the way town or place. The Podunk were an Algonquin speaking people who lived in the marshy areas of what is now Connecticut.

Anonymous

Anonymous Sat 24 Oct 2015 11:41:12 No.617206 Report Delete

Quoted By:

Oh oh, another favorite.

Binghuo, which is a Chinese word describing the general disarray and chaos visited on civilian populations during and after a military conflict.

It literally translates to "soldier calamity."

Anonymous

Anonymous Sat 24 Oct 2015 12:07:02 No.617216 Report Delete

Quoted By: >>617223

>>617108
>glacial (sedimented) ridges you find all over Northern Europe
We call them moraines.

I don't live in an area prone to forest fires so I'm not sure if I can help with the others.

Anonymous

Anonymous Sat 24 Oct 2015 12:18:34 No.617223 Report Delete

Quoted By: >>617279 >>617282

>>617216
Morraine is only used to describe ridges of till (i.e. unsorted glacial sediment) though

Anonymous

Anonymous Sat 24 Oct 2015 14:21:07 No.617279 Report Delete

Quoted By: >>617282

>>617223
I'm being very lazy about it also I'm not exactly sure what what you're describing but..
Do any of these fit?

http://academic.emporia.edu/aberjame/ice/gloss.htm

Anonymous

Anonymous Sat 24 Oct 2015 14:24:32 No.617282 Report Delete

Quoted By:

>>617279
>>617223
It turns out Morraine has a little bit of a different definition in america.

>Moraine: general term refering variously to glacial deposits or landforms. Used in America mainly for glacial landforms of constructional nature, such as end moraine or ground moraine. Used in Europe also to refer to the glacial deposits themselves, as with moraine clay or sand. Also refers to sediment in transport by a glacier, such as medial or lateral moraines. Derived from French word for piles of rubbly deposits in front of glaciers.

Anonymous

Anonymous Sat 24 Oct 2015 15:26:10 No.617333 Report Delete

Quoted By:

>>616813 >>616813
>Why is the English language in particular so devoid of these terms?

We use Adjectives

Anonymous

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Anonymous Sat 24 Oct 2015 15:49:15 No.617355 Report Delete

Quoted By: >>618429

>>616813
It's because english is a degraded language. The result of Normandy invasion. It's literally a frenchified version of olde english. It's the simplest language on earth and it was done to try and limit consciousness by hindering expression.

Anonymous

Anonymous Sun 25 Oct 2015 23:15:31 No.618429 Report Delete

Quoted By:

>>617355

You're a moron.

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