More on the crippledness of the English language's word-building

In my article "The Astonishing Primitiveness of the English Language", I touched upon the striking difficulty of building new words in the English language, resulting in the need for many loanwords and acronyms. In view of the comments from rather upset native English speakers, I feel I should elaborate a little bit on that subject. Again, this is not a scientific paper. It is merely an attempt to make a thing or two clearer. I am not trying to convince you of anything. I want to make you think.

When a dog is able to fetch the slippers when ordered to, the people admire it and say how dogs are so intelligent. When a human servant is able to fetch the slippers when ordered to, people think nothing of it, because human beings are expected to be able to fetch not only slippers but any available and carriable item named.

The English and Estonian (for instance) language are like dogs and humans in that respect. Once upon a time, a native English speaker thought about naming in a more compact way the people who have the compulsion to buy things. He thought about alcoholics, and he thought about shopping, and it suddenly occurred to him that the shopping addicts could be referred to as "shopaholics". And the word catched on. The people found it brilliant. Non-English speakers, when seeing a word like that, are likely to think: wow, the English language is so cool.

In Estonian, you have the word "ostma" which means "to buy". "Ost" means "purchase", "sõltuma" means "to depend", "sõltlane" means "addict". When someone first felt the need to create a term to refer to shopping addicts by, he just put those words together and wrote "ostusõltlane". It requires no inventiveness whatsoever, it's the routine way of word-building in Estonian.

In other words, in Estonian many neologisms are just created without a second thought, and pretty much everyone can do it when the need arises. In English, they find themselves published in "top 20 coolest invented words" lists. They cause admiration because they are so rare. In most cases, the English language is unable to create a new word, cool or uncool. Instead, it needs to find a loanword from another language. As a result, a place where people become mothers is called a maternity ward. Sick (haige) people are cured at a hospital (haigla). Doctors are giving the patients medical treatment (ravi) by prescribing pharmaceutical drugs (ravim). The nurse gives the patient an injection (süst), using a syringe (süstal). And while we're at it, let's not forget that the treatment heals (tervendab) the patient, and the patient also heals (terveneb). The word "healer" can mean someone who heals another person (tervendaja), but it can also mean someone who is being healed (terveneja). Hilarious.

For fairness's sake, I should mention that the acquisition of loanwords instead of creating one's own has an important advantage (which, of course, I am nowhere near the first to point out): one can often find several English words originating from different languages meaning almost but not quite the same thing (speed; velocity; rapidity). That enables a preciser distiction between close concepts. For instance, the Estonian language has only one word for "victim" and "sacrifice". So when you say that a person was an "ohver" of the Aztec priests, you will have to specify whether you mean to say that he was sacrificed or that he fell victim to the religious zeal. Neither does Estonian distinguish between "venom" and "poison". "Rat poison" would be "rotimürk" and "snake venom" would be "maomürk". In English you could, I assume, distinguish between "snake venom" (a poisonous substance a snake's organism creates) and "snake poison" (a poisonous substance used to kill snakes). In Estonian you can only make that distinction by adding a few words of explanation. So in that respect, English is more efficient than Estonian. But then again, it is hilarious to hear the English say "take a look at your watch or clock" because they don't have a word like the German "Uhr". I mean, it simply doesn't exist, and I can't see an easy way of creating one. And, well, obviously nobody has, so far. (And let us not forget that the word "watch" has other meanings too, so when you say that someone took the first watch, you might want to watch out for being misunderstood.)

The English tendency to magnetically attract loanwords becomes outright absurd when things that are exactly the same are being referred to by different words. A tank (in the meaning of armoured military vehicle) which belongs to Germany, can also be referred to as a panzer. So you can take two exactly identical tanks, paint German colours on the first and the French colours on the second, and all of a sudden the first tank has turned into a panzer while the second tank has remained just a tank.

That is mind-blowing. If German submarines are called U-boots (or even U-bootens), why aren't Russian submarines called podvodnaya lodkas? When a partisan happens to operate in a Spanish-speaking country, he is called a guerrilla. Would that make a Finnish partisan a sissi?

Rather than making up different words to name a tank by, you would think that people would spend their creative energy on making up a separate word for a cannon-carrying armoured vehicle, so they wouldn't have to call it with the same word as a container for liquids or use an acronym like ACV. But strangely enough, that doesn't bother the English-speaking peoples.

Speaking of acronyms, their disadvantage is obviously their inaccessibility to the uninitiated. Everyone can guess that a "mirror-camera" must be some kind of a photographic device, but there is no way to know that DSLR is a photography term and LGBT isn't, unless you have considerable pre-knowledge. But for some incomprehensible reason, the English-speaking peoples seem to  p r e f e r  the acronym DSLR. It would seem that they not only use acronyms when forced to because they can't create words. They seem to actually enjoy memorising and using an acronym even when there is a word.

Which brings me to a couple of totally retarded photography terms which goes slightly off topic here but illustrates nicely the English-speaking people's obsession with tradition.

I kept reading about that ISO thing being referred to as "ISO speed" in the English language, until at one moment I stopped and thought: "Wait, what speed?"

Larger ISO "speed" means that the light entering the camera's sensor is being amplified, so that it's possible to produce a proper photo when there is little light. But what on Earth is it supposed to have to do with speed?

I suspected it was because this signal amplification thing corresponded to some antique technology which had something to do with the speed of something. As I found out, that was precisely the case. "ISO speed" was the term used to mark the sensitivity of a photographic film to the light. But again, what fucking speed are we talking about? I did some more reading and, well, apparently the ancient English photographers, not excelling in logic, chose to call a more sensitive film "fast" because it took less time to transform the same amount of light into an image of the same brightness, compared to a "slow" (meaning less light-sensitive) film.

Right. So keep in mind that buildings are not high or low. The buildings with more stories are advanced scream buildings or ASB's (because a falling person first screams out of fear and then hits the ground), and the buildings with fewer stories are delayed scream buildings or DSB's (because a falling person first hits the ground and then begins to scream out of pain).

Another competely retarded photography term in the English language is "shutter speed". It has, again, nothing whatsoever to do with speed (the magnitude of an object's velocity). What is actually meant by "shutter speed" in the English language is the time interval between the shutter's opening and closing. I doubt the actual speed of the shutter ever changes, and even if it did it would hardly make any difference.

Do I need to tell you that in our language we call the time interval between the shutter's opening and closing "exposuretime"? In fact, I dare to boldly suggest that the English-speaking peoples also have the ability to distinguish between the concepts of time and speed. But somehow they are so fixated on tradition that they can't get loose. That's why their SF writers put sailing masters on their spaceships.

Oh, and don't even get me started on English computer terminology. That totally merits an article of its own.

I'd like to give you one more example of that tendency of referring to the same thing by different words loaned from different languages (as well as unreasonable tradition-fixatedness). I mentioned in a previous article that the English legal language is sheer horror. One particularly retarded thing about it is precisely that habit of using two words to name the same thing. Examples:

any and all

null and void

terms and conditions

last will and testament

"All" obviously includes "any", only the lawyers in the English-speaking countries seem to be too stupid to realise it. "Null" and "void" are the same thing. "Terms" and "conditions" are the same thing. Etc. No other language in which I have read legal documents uses such needless repetitions (except sometimes when they have obviously translated an English text word by word).

Yes, I know, if one really wants to split hairs, one can argue that "null" and "void" are not quite exactly the same (in fact my native language has two separate legal terms to that effect, but they are never used together; you always choose the one that is appropriate, and you look like a bloody amateur when you get it wrong); one could argue that "last will" can be given a meaning slightly different from "testament". But the point is that it's never done. Those pairs of words are virtually always used together, creating verbal noise by unnecessary duplication. How many legal texts have you seen which say that something is just null but not void, or just void but not null? Can you take a "last will and testament" and show me which part of it is last will and which part is testament? I don't think so.

As to terms and conditions, one can argue that some terms are conditions and some are not. But if so, the nonsensicalness of the phrase "terms and conditions" is particularly obvious. It's like saying "vehicles and cars" or "animals and cats" or "human beings and Americans". It is inconceivable to me that a person who is too stupid to recognise the illogicality of that could ever get a law degree.

The English legal language clings mindlessly and pointlessly to such unnecessary duplications. Maybe it is because 500 years ago one scholar used one term and another one used another, and nobody has the courage to say "Hey, isn't it about time to cut the crap?" Or maybe one term originates from Latin and another one from Greek, and no one is absolutely certain that they couldn't be given different meanings in some obscure context, so everyone always uses both terms just in case. And strangely enough the English-speaking world doesn't seem to have a mechanism for improving its legal language, for ridding it of such nonsense.

So that is one of the things that makes the English legal language more confusing that it should be.

But now I have really written long enough and I have other things to do, so bye for now.