Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by SV_BubbleTime | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

SV_BubbleTime

>unusually regular

Oh I’m sure there is a German phrase for this.

View on HN

I would go with “allzuregelmäßig”.

Similar to “allzuschön um wahr zu sein”, “allzugroß” etc.

However this is not a single word, but would be split as "allzu regelmäßig" cf. https://www.korrekturen.de/wortliste/allzuoft.shtml

Oh interesting that got reformed, too! Strange choice to split it in two instead of three words (the latter which would have mimicked English: “all too”).

Well, then it seems we don’t have any single German word for all too regular anymore :(

This never was one word actually.

Until the reforms in 1996, allzu… was one word: allzuoft, allzuschön, allzugroß, allzuviel, etc. But yeah, probably would have written such a long word in two words even then.

My new proposal would be überregelmäßig. Über+adjective is still one word only, post-reform. Sounds strange, but grammatically correct, and still conveys the “unusual” part.

Not a scholar of languages, but maybe something like "mit unheimlicher Regelmäßigkeit" (with un-home-ly regular-like-ness, read "home" like in "family" -> "familiar").

Thinking about it tactically, I’ll go with taktisch. :) Takt-isch.

Surely you mean Tick-Tacktisch?

rather tak-tisch if we are talking hyphenation

verdächtig !

uhrwerksmäßig

That doesn’t capture the “unusually” in “unusually regular”

Ungewöhnlichregelmäßig or Hyperregelmäßig works for me, but then there is Regelmäßigkeitsmonsterhaft.

Still, I think we can push the limits to Bürokratieapokalyptischhyperregelmäßigkeitsgötterungeheuerhaft and feel pretty comfortable with it.

While grammatically feasible, none of these sound natural

Yes true, but they sure are fun, and well .. a lot of GermanConjunctionSentences sound completely unnatural to us non-native speakers ..

Reply on news.ycombinator.com