Why the German language has so many great words
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15 years ago, when I was a young man in my early 20s, I lived in the top floor of a house, sharing that floor (and that floor's bathroom) with two other people: a German chap, and an English girl. Fast forward about six months and somehow one day a conversation took whatever turn would be required for it to be appropriate for me to say: "Well, I almost always leave the seat down, because I almost always sit down to take a piss." Cue a sudden burst of laughter from the German - who says they don't have a sense of humour? - because it turned out he did exactly the same thing. Good to know it wasn't just me at least, I suppose.
"Well" said our floormate. "I always wondered how such a pair of inconsiderately dirty bastards were still so consistently good at politely leaving the seat down."
There were 3 men in the house, and the 3rd man would occasionally use "our" bathroom. So the very next day the German guy put a sign up on the door in order to keep him out. SIT PISSERS ONLY.
E.g.:
werdend = becoming
Werdender = someone (male), who is becoming
Fun fact: These participles always have a neutral plural, so they are gender neutral and are thus abused all over the place. In official documents the German language is losing all of its proper nouns, until everything is built out of participles.
E.g.:
Studenten = students (male)
Studentinnen = students (female)
Studierende = people, who study
Studenten (male) + Studentinnen (female) = StudentInnen
Student*innen
This practice has even led to a new verb in German: "to gender", i.e., to use politically correct gender-neutral language.
[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binnen-I
[2] http://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/die-gruenen-machen...
Otherwise tell me how do you say niñ@s out loud.
In reality, probably “niños y niñas”.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-mid_central_rounded_vowel
The standard politically correct solution is to use both “tutti e tutte”, but of late a trend is to use the asterisk next to remedy this (“tutt*”), which irks my regex-informed sensibilities no end because it might also match “tutto” (“everything”), though in context is fairly clear.
If you now say that there is a group of students sitting in the bar drinking. It becomes a group of people who sit in a bar to drink and study.
Singular: Studentin = student (female) Student = student (male, or unspecified) Plural: Studentinnen = students (all female*) Studenten = students (at least one male, or unspecified)
Feminists (correctly) identified this imbalance as an issue of sexist language. The problem is, there isn't an easy fix. The common solutions nowadays are to use phrases like "Studenten and Studentinnen" (creating the new issue of which gender to name first) or in written form "StudentInnen". That's kind of clunky, creating a desire to use ungendered words where possible. So then people come up with constructs like this because they happen to be ungendered (but horrible in other ways).
I think in Austria, using the female form even for mixed/unknown groups is relatively common nowadays. But I'm just a very occasional visitor there and I'm not certain about the details. (Do they throw dice to determine which to use? Or did they just switch to the female, which then could be interpreted to be sexist against men.)
There is an easy fix: Using the plural particip of the verb.
Studierende.
Geflüchtete.
Werdende.
Edit: The point is, Latin “studens” also has the concurrency aspect to it, just as German “Studierender”. If you say “studens ambulat”, it means “He/she is taking a walk, while studying.”
Here are just a few of my favorite compounds you will likely struggle to form in less compound languages.
1. Spannungsbogen <=> the series of events which create suspense
2. Fernweh <=> the desire to go to other countries / leave your homeland
3. Torschlusspanik <=> being worried at the last minute
4. Leitmotiv <=> theme
And the list just keeps going. Because of the compound nature of German if you know the constituent parts of a word you will almost always have a pretty good idea about its meaning. Good examples of this from the IT world are : hochfahren vs. "boot", Zeichenkette vs "string", weiterleiten vs "forward", einhängen vs. "mount", etc.
1. They'd been organized enough to translate it into English for me (which shouldn't have been surprising, because Germans), and
2. It started with "Dear male voter, dear female voter", which I found hilarious.
There's a lot to be said for gender-neutral language.
This has actually happened, for example Blitzkrieg (commonly the "blitz"); now this does not simply mean "lightning war", it very much references a particular part of a particular war. Also, Zeitgeist is used in English, but doesn't simply translate to "spirit of the time".
Often such compound words mean more than the sum of their parts (as I guess the OP kind of meant), which is what makes them interesting to other languages. OTOH, it seems pretty rare these constructs actually describe something that English doesn't have a word/phrase for already. In fact, I would say that its not so much that German has such constructs in their language that makes them interesting, and more that as a different culture they have different words to describe different concepts.
Edit: I should probably point out that I am a native English speaker that can speak fluently Norwegian. "Ohrwurm" and "Wunderkind" are such nonsense examples in this case; they are literal translations (just without the space, and are understandable from any Scandinavian language), and they are pretty much anti examples. Using foreign words that mean exactly the same as the English equivalents is nothing but pretentious, and doesn't support his central argument at all.
Except is generally does. That is still the primary definition in any common dictionary, and the understood meaning of this word.
In German we would say "Goethe captured the Zeitgeist of his epoch", on the other hand saying "Dark rimmed glass are in the Zeitgeist" would be strange.
That reminded me of this great quote: "The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary." -- James Nicoll
It's not just commonly "The Blitz", that's the only term used to describe that specific period of bombing.
If people use the word "Blitzkreig" in English, they're talking about the military strategy (usually only used in the context of WW2, but still).
In fact, The Blitz isn't really even an example of what would be referred to as Blitzkreig.
I think the key is the understanding of "Blitz", which is associated with things like "fast" "hitting hard" "dangerous" "powerfull" "in a short amount of time" "to release a high amount of energy in a short amount of time" (and so on).
All of these words, formed like a tag cloud, are meshed into the the idea "Blitz" added to the german word for war ("Krieg").
If i think about the german language, its all about abstraction (and precision).
Waldläufer Himmelstürmer Götterdämmerung Doppelgänger Landstreicher Faulpelz Südseeplantagenbesitzer feine Pinkel Großkopferten Arschgeweih;
there could be hundred of those, invented, changed and transported through the centuries.
The analogous structures in Sanskrit to the articles German examples are various types of compounds, like tatpurusha, dvandva, etc.
https://www.babbel.com/en/magazine/funny-animal-names-in-ger...
Another example is Sitzpinkler. While this word is not ambiguous, it still sounds funny. I'd never use that and probably say "a person who pees while sitting". It might be used on some sign, although it makes the place where such a sign is found sound cheap because that word is really colloquial.
Nevertheless, it does create some great words such Schadenfreude, and Werdende. While i would never use Werdende, i believe it is used a lot in lyric (poems and that stuff). Schadensfreude is a really nice word through.
Disclaimer: my native language is German.
To me, the German expression feels the weakest of the three mentioned languages...
Most especially, he used to claim this when we played Scrabble.
Because, if you want, you can turn anything into a word.
Someone who turns anything into a word:
female: Allesinworteverwandelnde, male: Allesinworteverwandelnder, etc.
You can just string things together. It’s exactly like you name things in Java. Bus. BusStop. BusStopPosition. BusBusStopInteraction.
The author even says as much: "Both German and English can create compound words out of most parts of speech, not just nouns, and English sometimes hyphenates them or even writes them as one word".
So it seems like the answer to the initial question ("So what is it about the German language that allows for such constructions?") is "arbitrary spelling rules".
Why does english make a difference between housewive and middle school?
(You would think there was basically no other kind of wife until well into the Industrial Revolution.)
For instance a "blackboard" isn't a "black board": it is not simply any old board that is black. I.e. the semantics of the composition is not the composition of the semantics.
Some compound words in English have a history which starts as two separate words, then later joined with a hyphen, an finally conjoined without a hyphen. This roughly follows their evolution into a non-compositional noun.
"Newspaper" was once "news-paper" for instance.
Words like "high school" are the unfortunate exceptions; a high school isn't a school which is high, yet it's written as if it were two words. It's certainly not spoken that way; there is a difference between "high class", "high seas", "high concept" and "high school". The "school" is uttered without the slightest pause in front of it, and de-emphasized. Exactly like "board" in "blackboard", or "wife" in "housewife".
For what it's worth, at least English orthography doesn't string together long runs of words into an undelimited string.
Not as good as CamelCase, but easier to pronounce.
High school is high. It's higher than middle or primary school. It's not 'geographically elevated', but that's not the only common meaning of high.
"My son is in /'haisku:l/."
"3800 feet up in the mountains? That sure is a /'ha:i/ /'sku:l/!"
In some languages, the word for word translation for high school refers to something else. E.g. the Slovak phrase "vysoká škola" literally means "high school" if taken word for word, but actually it refers to some post secondary higher education. This corresponds corresponds to the German word Hoschschule which looks like a cognate for "high school", but meaning-wise isn't. High school is called "stredná škola" which literally means "middle school"! (And the university-prep variety of such a school is also called "gymnázium", the cognate of which denotes a sports or exercise hall in English.)
So the "high" in "high school" is simply not directly informative; you only know what kind of school that refers to from your cultural knowledge and context.
Maybe it's a cultural thing, but I pronounce both high class and high school without a pause, and with emphasis on both the high and the class / school.
In German, there are the “Fugenlaute”, sounds that are inserted between the words that a compound is made of. And it is not always clear, what these sounds should be.
Some examples:
* “Schaden(s)ersatz” (compensation for damages) – some put an “s” between “Schaden” (damage) and “ersatz” (substitute), some don’t. * In the German constitution the word “verfassungsgebend” appears, but some would call it “verfassunggebend”.
There are even words that have a different meaning depending on the “Fugenlaute”:
* “Landsmann” / “Landmann” (Land = country / land; Mann = man): “Landsmann” is a man from the same country; a “Landmann” is a peasant or farmer.
There really aren’t “rules” that apply.
There is a lengthy article in the German Wikipedia about this topic: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fugenlaut
That’s a Genitiv.
For most cases, Fugenlaute are completely meaningless, and both spellings accepted.
I think an article on German compounds would have been worthwhile on its own. To develop interest in it, however, the author has found it necessary--as many others have--to write of one language's richness as a factor of another's lack. English is actually quite pithy on some of the concepts he claims "require a mouthful when translated" from the German: "that which is in the process of becoming" (das Werdende) is (with varying nuance) nascent, incipient, inchoate, germinal, budding, springing, arising, dawning, crepuscular, in embryo, in the bud, in the gristle, forming, fashioning, styling, or becoming. To give rise to a noun to describe that thing which is nascent, incipient, etc., does not require the ham-fisted (there's a good, playful compound!) stroke which Duncan has used: he's playing it up! If you want a single word for it, bud, germ, etc., have their figurative uses as well. And if he wanted a dictionary definition for das Werdende, he could have dropped the relative pronoun and two prepositions and written, "a nascent thing." (In actual writing, thing would usually be replaced by a more precise identifier, and the phrase would be the richer for it.) There are some rare words, like inchoant, which also do the trick, and whose inception (or kick-off, throw-off, lift-off) looks rather like that of das Werdende.
- exit: out - go - prospect: forward - look - decide: down - cut - alarm: to the weapons
Such etymologies might still be somewhat intuitive to native romance language speaker, although in most of the cases the brain just treats them as opaque units of meaning and sometimes even an obvious alarm (italian: allarme) -> all'arme (italian for "to the weapons") which shares the same pronunciation is not immediately obvious to a native speaker until you point it out; after that an a-ha moment follows.
Thus I'm curious to know how does it work in German where so many compound words are accessible without being hidden by arcane etymology and the general rule is still productive: does it require some effort to actually break a compound in smaller parts once it became so common to be de facto a new word of its own ?
Older, well established compounds often deviate a bit from their original meaning over time, those are as opaque as allarme. "Creative" insults (where English also demonstrates a rich pool of compounds) for example will quickly erode from their literal meaning to "generic insult", only the rough position in the universal coordinate system for expletives (general magnitude, position in the spectrum between evil and stupid) remains.
For unknown compounds, there are some that follow standard patterns of known compounds ("Studentenvereinigung" - student union) and new ones can be read as fluently as an expression with blanks ("Studierendenvereinigung" - also student union, but properly gender neutral or "gegendert", "Crowdfundinggründervereinigung" - union of founders who are using crowd funding, hypothetical but would be easy to parse for anyone who has ever heard of kickstarter)
Other compounds however can be rarely used, yet still very much unparsable for much of the population. Take for example the "Backpfeifengesicht" that is cited here a lot, the sub-compound "Backpfeife" (a slap in the face) is strictly regional dialect (or even just local slang, and to make it worse from a time long past) and has been shortened from "Backenpfeife" which would still only make sense if you know what it is. I suspect that it was originally coined as an insider slang term deliberately misleading to outsiders. For those cases, you learn to quickly give up on extracting meaning when it does not work and learn it like any other new word, a meaningless GUID that could be anything, slowly narrowed down any time you encounter it in context. Some parsing may still happen, in the case of the Backpfeifengesicht one might for example infer/suspect that it is not about the face but about a person/type of person, because ending with "-gesicht" is also used in other compounds. For example the "Freibiergesicht", someone who will only grace you with his company when there is free beer (regional, typically used as a very low magnitude friendly provocation)
I have no idea how to parse this.
exit ~ ex-it = out + go
prospect ~ pro-spect = forward + look
decide ~ de-cide = down + cut
alarm ~ a-(l)-arm = to the weapons
I think what he's basically saying is that when English became a fusional language, forged by the collision of two alien languages -- one Germanic, one Latin; each with its own morphological building system -- everything just turned into a big jumble, and people forgot all these (once) nuanced rules for compounding / deriving words -- leaving us with the comparatively limited ruleset we have now.
At least that's my basic interpretation of the coldly functional, atonal clusterfuck that is modern English.
No in general it's quite easy. You just have to pretend it's early latin before the innovation of spaces between words ;) And then there are semi-consistently applied rules about certain suffices (like -s, -er, -en + others) which somtimes go between the subwords to indicate that one of the in a declensional position. For example:
Volksempfänger = Empfänger (des) Volk(es) = "(radio) receiver of the people"
Forming compounds is a bit trickier; everyone "knows" the rules (for applying joining suffices) though they may not be able to articulate as to why -- the new compounds just pop out.
“Feeling that the end of the world is near”, “kite flying festival”, “commemorative coin with Maria Theresa’s face on it”, “ship from the Hanseatic League”, and “cemetary for homeless, nameless people”.
These are on a whole different scale from “shoebox” or “raincoat”.
(Personally I suspect that the textbook authors were just trolling everyone.)
In Japanese (or Chinese), do you consider that mixing kanji together to form a more complicated word is something unusual ? It's very much the same concept as what Germans do.
Nothing new, really.
Any verb can be, by adding a prefix, converted into a noun meaning "he/she/it who does".
And you can similarly convert nouns into verbs.
What a great word. Endzeit being composed of the nouns Ende (end) and Zeit (time) which form the word Endzeit, wich is the time when the world ends. And then composed with Stimmung (feeling).
While that happens very often, surprisingly all the words you said are actual German words, and Endzeitstimmung, Drachenflugfestival (oder Drachenfestival, if you want to make it shorter) and Hanseschiff are quite common German words anyone would understand.
Fun fact: In German, except for a grammatical weirdness, Dragon and Kite are the same word. The word is also the same as Deltoid.
Example:
green - grün - Begrünung ("planting with trees and grass") - Strassenbegrünung ("planting trees and grass along the street").
You may be able to use "greening" here, but at least AFAIK it is not common in English since it seems a bit strange to turn adjectives into nouns like that. In German I don't even think that anyone needed to explain that word - you immediately think of the older word "Bepflanzung" (planting) and notice that it's probably meant in this context. It's all about reusing known pre- and suffixes.
I guess to some extent the comparison is going to be subjective (and my German is so bad I can't really do so with confidence), but I think a big component in the discussion has to do with dialects. Were someone to say "street-greenin'" in my hometown, the phrase would be understood right away, and is entire grammatical in many American english dialect, but no in the standard dialect. Now if you walk on to a university campus and say that you are interested in neotransphilic interpersonalization most people will have little trouble getting at what you mean (though they might agree as to the specific meaning, and role there eyes at you if they study English). This is rather high brow, but these kind of fun and games with prefixes, suffixes, and a regimen of contractions are also common in 1337 and other dialects. But again, they are not part of the standard dialect.
I would be curious to see a comparison of difference in compound words across different German dialects.
Now, when it comes to the initial rules, they are common to all dialects, albeit with some variations (vowel / consonant shift etc.). So the "Be" in Begrünung would be universally understood as indicating a human activity in this context, rather than a passive process.
I think the equivalent in English would be "begreening." It looks weird written out, but I think your meaning would be clear if you said something like, "The city's begreening project will cost an estimated 1.5 million dollars."
In fact, you are able to use "greening" here. A google search for "greening" returns a great number of websites and articles about "greening" in exactly the sense you describe. There is nothing strange about it.
This google search also led me to another wonderful English compound word: "greenwashing" [0]. Undoubtedly, if this were instead a German compound ("Grünwaschen" oder so), we would fawn over the inventiveness of German and lament the inability of English to produce such compounds.
> https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rindfleischetikettierungs%C3%B...
I'll add hyphens to ease the understanding of this word and also put the s that are epenthesis and thus not important into square brackets.
Rind-fleisch-etikettierung[s]-überwachung[s]-aufgaben-übertragung[s]-gesetz
The first thing to note is that adding an "ung" to the stem of a verb usually means "the abstract process of doing what the verb describes". Even this simply property makes it quite easy to express rather abstract concepts that are quite clumsy in English.
Now we'll decode this word:
Rind: agricultural term for "cow" ("Kuh") fleisch: meat
So Rindlfleisch = "meat of cows" (beef)
"Etikettierung": The German word "Etikette" means "label" (it also has other meanings, but they are not important here). Form this we can derive the word "etikettieren" (to put a label on something). From this verb, as I explained above, you can derive "Etikettierung" - the abstract process of labeling something. What is the something here? Of course the beef.
"Überwachung": The verb "überwachen" means "to supervise" or "to monitor". You know the rules to find out what "Überwachung" means (the abstract process ...). Just one remark for those who are interested: "überwachen" consists of the prefix "über" and the verb "wachen" (to wake, to keep watch).
"Aufgaben": Could be simply translated with "tasks", but this, in my opinion distorts the meaning a little bit. I'll rather divide it into "auf" + "Gabe". "Gabe" is a slightly old-fashinoned word meaning "Something that was given to you by someone else" (derived from the past "gab" of "geben" (to give)). So "Aufgabe" is more correctly translated with "something that was given to you by someone else to do". "Aufgaben" is simply the plural of "Aufgabe".
"Übertragung": The verb "transfer" expresses in my opinion quite the same meaning as "übertragen", since the Latin prexix "trans" corresponds quite well to the prefix "über" as it's used here and the Latin verb "ferre" from which the "fer" in "transfer" is derived means "to carry" (in German: "tragen"). So (you know the rules) "Übertragung" is the abstract process of transfering something. What do we transfer: The answer is clear: The "Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgaben".
Gesetz: We could simply use the English word "law", but "Gesetz" is derived from the verb "setzen" (to set). Thus "Gesetz" carries the slight connotation of "something that was set into force by some authority".
Exercise ;-) : How should "Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz" be translated into English?
Edit: Bonus exercise: What about "Grundstücksverkehrsgenehmigungszuständigkeitsübertragungsverordnung"? I'm ducking away ;-)
I really hate this phrase. I just generally find it repulsive, but also 99% of the people who say it would never hit anyone.
While actually borrowed from Haitian "hamáka" (it entered German first in the early 15 hundreds as "Hamaco" or "Hamach"), it was soon adopted in the form of a similar sounding native compound. (Also compare the Dutch "hangmat".) Just few native speakers realize, it's not what it reads.
English, on the other is awesome for forming phrases that are nearly impossible to translate. "To go to town on somebody" is one I really like, for example. Also, English is much better for cursing, for some reason. People cursing in German always sound really, really lame (except for Bavarians).
I think all languages do this. Why would English be specifically better at it than german?
If you wanted to say that two cars crashed, you could use:
»Zwei Autos (prallten|krachten) gegeneinander.«
Both »prallen« and »krachen« are onomatopoeic.
Onomatopoeia is common in German as well.
A couple of months back, a bank failed in Italy. On a news piece, a lady was cursing (really cursing) at bank owners. It was one of the most aggressive speeches I've seen. Yet, if you listened to the "music" alone, it was an incredibly sweet speech.
OTOH, PHP has taken inspiration from Perl, so I do not disagree very strongly.
My overall impression is that German lends itself far easier to lengthy, nested, convoluted sentences. You can build long sentences in English, too, but their structure tends to be ... flatter?
So in translating, I would often break up monstrous monolithic sentences ("Bandwurmsatz", as we say in German) into several shorter ones.
It is different, I guess, when translating literature, but translating literature is probably really, really hard anyway. So try to have pity on those poor people who had to translate Kafka.
I generally prefer to read literature in its original language, but English is the only foreign language I know well enough to do that... :(
From exeō (“exit, go out”), from ē (“out”) + eō (“go”).
Sporttaschenvergesser - Sportbagforgetter. A guy who always "forgets" his sports bag at PE class.
Vorwärtseinparker - Forwardparker. A guy who parallel parks forward, rather than by reversing in.
Warmduscher - Warmshowerer. Rather than manly cold ones.
http://www.angelfire.com/or/mckennap/fuck.html
P.s. Angelfire... Now that brings back memories.
I thought that was French![1]
"It's like wiping your ass with silk. I love it".
to secure the best parts - selfish efforts
That and there's intrinsically more positional freedom for certain categories of words; e.g. Werdende in the above article is essentially the same word as the verb participle werdend, but placed in a position (that of a nounified adjective) which basically doesn't work in English.
The analogous construction in English would be "the becoming" or "the expecting", implicitly referring to a thing or person. Other than lyrical cases ("The Shining"), you pretty much wouldn't use that formulation in English.
So whereas in English we write "law school entrance examination test requirements", the German written transliteration of that will string the words together without spaces.
Calling that a "word" makes a strawman out of the concept of a word.
We can take the sentence:
"Achtung, Achtung, Luftlagemeldung!"
and substitute into it:
"Achtung, Achtung, Speicherverwaltung!"
:)
Failing memory management can be like an air raid, sort of. The program "bombs" and all. Map a guard page on both sides and dive into shelter! :)
The CLISP source file name "spvw.d" is an acronym of this word.
Also it helps to imagine that there is always an auxiliary. If you don't see it, it is invisible, but still there. When the auxiliary is invisible, it cannot take the tense, number and so on; these markers go to the main verb.
Now when you make a question, the auxiliary and sentence subject exchange places (subject-aux inversion). This still happens when the aux: is invisible.
Visible aux (will):
Statement: You will have the soup.
Question: Will you have the soup?
Invisible aux:
Statement: You [invisible] have the time.
Question: [invisible] you have the time?
But now, this invisible aux is dangling up in front of the clause and that is forbidden. In this situation, the invisible aux is instantiated in a visible form, and it appears as the verb "do":
Question: Do you have the time?
And, as usual, this invisible-come-visible aux now takes the tense, number, person, "not" negation away from the main verb. With that we can more or less semi-accurately understand how "do" works in forming questions.
The native "Es funktioniert nicht" negation doesn't use an auxiliary form; there is no parallel structure there on which to build an intuition, even though English has Germanic roots. It's more of a cognate to "It functions not".
Personally, I go for "It not worksy" (or shorter: "Not worksy!") when I want the language to be as broken as the thing it describes.
While generally neutral, a spaceless join does convey a sense of "hardness", or a deepening of the association between the joined parts in some contexts. It also can give a concept greater currency simply because it can be expressed more efficiently: compare Sitzpinkler with "[A male person / group of people] who pee while sitting."
I still don't understand how creating these huge, unwieldy words is an advantage. If a useful word contains more than about four syllables people tend to shorten it, just like they would an English phrase.
Disclaimer: I'm German. I like my native language. But I don't think that it is more concise than English in any use case I can think of and while I feel that the article is interesting and amusing, it's not comparing the real world German to English. The examples are valid, the article didn't seem wrong, but .. I doubt that this has any significance.
Unwieldy is a crappy attribute of course. They aren't unwieldy. Foreign, strange to you? Sure, can't argue with that. Unwieldy though? Don't judge what you don't know.
I do know that lots of things become a mess if you try to translate them to German (with my background, on this board: You certainly don't want to learn about German words for mother/main board, stack or similar things. Or - let's do one: "Stack" was taught as "Kellerspeicher" for a while, which is the combination of "Keller"/basement and "Speicher"/memory).
Back to the original question: Aren't the general concepts the same, can't you capture the same stuff in exactly the same precision in English? Are we just talking about the way ~some~ concepts can be compressed into a single noun quite well vs. a succinct sentence?
That said, PC components mostly are very direct translations that IMHO work well. main board = "Hauptplatine", hard disk = "Festplatte" (which apparently in the beginning led to confusion to why the IT departments are ordering such expensive catering, but nowadays is established), ... are all easy to map.
The closest I can think of is "Tüftler", but that really doesn't capture the science-y aspect and is more hands-on. More the guy building a fusion reactor in his garage, less the group designing a radar device in some government lab.
I meant unwieldy in the sense that they have a lot of syllables. I assume Germans can pronounce these words without tripping over them.
It can be a great deal of fun to force words together for the sheer perversity of it.
In English, on the other hand, I enjoy the less rigid grammatical structure and the ability to use phrases that can be nearly impossible to translate.
As a native speaker, I definitely prefer "Parkraumbewirtschaftungszone" over "Zone bewirtschafteten Parkraumes", "Zone, in welcher Raum zum Parken bewirtschaftet wird".
The example may show that once you start chopping up a long word, you tend to end up with a pile of messy inflections and possessive pronouns.
In English, you might say something like "paid parking area", but I'd argue that would carry less meaning.