Re: "glow pear"

["Patricia M. Godfrey" priscamg@xxxxxxxx]

Flash wrote:
Speaking of "Gluhbirne" or glow pear, German has some very useful
linguistic mechanisms. For example, the suffix "-zeug" (unfortunately
rhymes with nothing I can think of in English) means "thing which does
something", and it can be tacked onto most any verb to make a noun out
of it.
Useful, indeed, but not unique among IE languages. English -ness
and -hood, and Latin -itas and -tudo (e.g., gravitas, beatitudo),
work much the same way. But German does use such methods of word
formation much more than English or French, say, which are more
likely to borrow a foreign word.
On the other hand, German sometimes runs a whole sentence together into
a single word in order to describe what a thing does, . A speed limiter or governer
on an engine would be "Geschwindigkeitsregler", and the screw which
adjusts it would be "Geschwindigkeitsreglereinstellschraube".
Oh, priceless. But I thought at first you were going to tell us
about what IIRC is called the extended adjective construction:
The owing-to-the-world-war-befallen destruction of capital, the
on-the-desk-lying book, the over-the-hills-and-far-away-leading
road. For some reason that linguistic idiosyncrasy really puzzled
my classmates in college German, to the extent that one quarterly
test was made up of nothing but sentences employing that
construction for us to translate. Into, I should add, idiomatic
English, not the literal versions I've given here.
--
Patricia M. Godfrey
priscamg@xxxxxxxx