Word for the Wise, January 7

[Uadzit]

Topic: Sprachgefuhl & karmadharaya

Every now and again we indulge in looking at a word or two whose existence seems just plain unlikely . . . as in, who would think to come up a word naming "the enjoyment obtained from the mishaps of others"? German speakers, that's who: the term schadenfreude was borrowed into English from German, the same language that also gave us the evocative sprachgefuhl ("language feeling" in German), which, in English, refers to the intuitive feeling for what is linguistically appropriate.

But German speakers are not the only people to have come up with shorthand for larger concepts. Consider karmadharaya. That term was born in Sanskrit of the same karma that motivates Buddhists and Hindu to achieve spiritual liberation, plus the dharaya the means "to hold"; "maintain." Karmadharaya names a particular sort of compound words, a group easy to comprehend but less easy to describe. Bluegrass, houseboat, and everlasting are all members of the class karmadharaya. Karmadharaya consists of a word in which the first part is a descriptive adjective (blue) and the second part is a noun (grass); the second part is a noun (boat) and the first part an attributive noun (house), or the first part is an adverb (ever) and the second part is an adjective (lasting). In karmadharaya, words hold the same syntactic function of their final constituent.

So why does English have this word? Like schadenfreude and sprachgefuhl, karmadharaya was considered so useful by English speakers that they simply borrowed it, in this case from Sanskrit grammar.

Questions or comments? Write us at wftw@aol.com Production and research support for Word for the Wise comes from Merriam-Webster, publisher of language reference books and Web sites including Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, Eleventh Edition.  

[chessiejo]

i have never heard of
Sprachgefuhl;

to me it sounds like some dire intestinal disease  

[leader of the rebelion]

those sound like very horrible STDs  

[chessiejo]

as opposed to the delightful stds that smell of flowers?  

[7raindrops]

I have heard of it, and I think all languages have words that are larger concepts  

[JoeyRay Smith51]

Interesting some new words to ponder over.  

[Jungle Boots]

pali and sanskrit are FILLED with words like that.

like Mahaparinibbhana, which is most often used to name the miracle of the final death of Shakyamuni Buddha (such as how the christians name certain miracles of jesus's life with words like the crucifixion, the ascension, the sermon on the mountain) but it is also the state of dying and through nirvana no longer existing and thus escaping the cycle of reincarnation.

sanskrit and pali are both filled with words that are linked to concepts and abstracts that have nearly no translation in other languages without long and wordy definitions that still don't quite hit the point. makes it rather hard to understand ancient indian literature and theology.  

[chessiejo]

so is german, in my opinion

so this topic covers them both  

[lemon addict]

eek  

[Marcias Bishie]

Sounds very familiar. Similar to swedish, i'd say.
And indian languages.  

[chessiejo]

i spose swedish is germanic?

but of course the sanskrit would be eastern Indian anyway, so do you mean First Peoples/Native Americans?

i believe there are uninvestigated similarities between some northwestern tribes and the basic Korean culture and language.