Words Sorely Needed in English

[This is part of a loose series of posts on languages, especially German and English. The first three installments were: “Why is There No Simple Word for German “an” in English?”, “My Job as the “Inofficial Capitalization Adviser to the President”” , and “What’s the Use of Grammatical Gender.” Trigger alert: May contain traces of humor. — Just kidding!]

Often English has an edge when it comes to creating short words for a complicated concept. It took me some time to understand that the German word “Streik” (pronounced: shtrike) is just the English word “strike,” which has assimilated to its German environment to an extent that it is hard to spot now. I only realized it when I read texts from the 19th century, where the spelling is “Strike.” There are also “purely” German words for the same concept, but you guessed it, they are much longer. One would be “Arbeitsniederlegung,” which is “Arbeits” (work’s), “nieder” (down), plus “Legung” (noun from “legen” (to lay), the “-ung” is the same as English “-ing”). However, I have to admit that “Streik” strikes me as much more handy.

But then sometimes German also has a short word where I find it regrettable that there is no English equivalent. You may import the German word if I convince you, but I am also fine if you make something up yourself. Maybe there is even an English word that I have missed. If so, alert me to it in the comments.

Here are few words that I sorely miss:

bunt

That’s so hard to translate to English. What “bunt” means is that something has many colors. In principle, there is “multicolored” for this in English, but it is rather complicated and technical. And then it is the opposite of “monochrome.” If that is your point, you would probably use a different word in German: “mehrfarbig” (“mehr” (more) + Farbe (color) + “-ig” (-y) which makes it into an adjective). However, “bunt” is used like another term for a color. So you could ask: Do you want the red one or the “bunt” one?

Here are some of the uses of having a word like “bunt” around. One is that you can call someone a “bunter Hund” (a “bunt” dog). That means they stick out and are out of place, just like a dog in psychedelic colors would. Another is a pun that is by now somewhat overused. The Federal Republic of Germany is “Bundesrepublik Deutschland” in German. That’s “Bund” (league or federation, basically a noun derived from “binden” (to bind)), and the rest is perhaps self-explaining. Now, “Bund” and “bunt” are very similar, so the joke is to call the Federal Republic of Germany the “Bunte Republik Deutschland,” which means it has not one specific color, but many, though still like one color. Of course, the German equivalent of Trumpists hate the pun.

naheliegend

I have found myself groping around for a good word in English for this one so many times, but to no avail. Literally, the word translates as “nahe” (near) + “liegend” (lying, in the sense of “it lies on the floor,” not that you tell a falsehood, which would be “lügend” in German). So a calque (a word-by-word rendering) would be: near-lying. The idea is that something is so close you inevitably have to hit upon it. Usually you would use it in the sense that if you have one idea, it is incumbent on you to also have the nearlying idea. It is the next step you just have to make.

There are certainly many words in English that capture the same notion like “obvious” or “self-evident,” but they fail to put the stress on the fact that it is so close you have to make the connection. All they tell you is that something is out in the open and in your face. There is also a good expression in English where I cannot think of a direct German equivalent: “something suggests itself.” But then it still does not express the idea that it is too close to miss.

schief

If something is the opposite of “straight” in some sense, it is “schief” in German. There are many English words that can capture this idea in a narrow way, but none as far as I can see that can be used for all purposes. There is “skewed” (maybe even the same word originally), “slanted,” “crooked,” “oblique,” “biased,” “lopsided,” “askant,” or “inconsistent.” But they all have a slightly different meaning and are mostly not interchangeable. “Schief” could be used in most situations, and it expresses the general idea of being the opposite of “straight.”

So you could say that a picture on the wall hangs “schief.” Or it is the “schiefe Turm von Pisa” in German, which means it has that quality in and of itself, whereas in English it is the “Leaning Tower of Pisa,” ie. it does something. In Italian, the situation is even more threatening: “la Torre Pendente di Pisa” is literally the “hanging tower.” Or you could say in German that someone looks at you “schief.” That may simply mean that they look in an oblique way, but it is usually more in a metaphorical sense that they look at you in a strange or critical way. Another use would be to say that someone has a “schiefe Weltsicht,” a worldview that is not particularly reasonable.

hin/her

That is so useful. The pair of words means that something moves towards you (“her”) or that it moves away from you (“hin”). You can also say “hin und her,” which is: to and fro. Of course, you can express the same idea also in English, but it does not come as a pair where you view it as an opposition. There is something like this also in English: “hither” and “thither.” But unless you are Shakespeare, it might sound a little funny.

What you cannot do in English, though, is combine the words for “hin” and “her” with others. So you can tag them onto prepositions, eg. “unter” (under, down) or “auf” (on top). Hence “hinunter” means: down and away from me, and “herunter”: down and towards me. Or “hinauf”: up and away from me, and “herauf”: up and towards me. You can also paste them in front of a verb: “hingehen” (to go to some place away from me), or “herkommen” (to come to some place close to me). Or even both: “hinuntergehen” (to go down to some place away from me) or “heraufkommen” (to come up to some place close to me).

Germans don’t always get this right. There are some dialects where “hin” or “her” is used for both, and in colloquial German “her” is often used incorrectly for “hin.” But if you think about it, it is jarring because it gets the underlying idea wrong.

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So much for this post, I will come across other words where I find it hard to come up with a good equivalent in English, but also the other way around.