Exsiccated/Exsiccation - was trying to think of a single English term that could be the equivalent of starvation; like if someone was dying of thirst, but I felt parched isn’t weighted enough to fulfill the gravity of it.

In latin exsiccare meant to dry up completely, so that’s how we got here I guess.

Thoughts? Is there a term I have forgotten that fits what I was looking for?

  • FishFace@piefed.socialEnglish
    11·
    5 days ago

    This kind of thinking usually comes from English native speakers, where compounding words isn’t really a thing

    Oh but we can! We have footballs, handbags and smartphones. But also, is there really a grammatical difference between a charging cable and a Ladekabel? A brake pedal and a Bremspedal? Gold medal and Goldmedaille? In all cases both languages just jam the components together without applying any special grammatical constructions. The only difference is that, in written English, new constructions must be written with a space in between. But in spoken English you can’t hear spaces (by that I mean: there is no auditory gap between words that is different from the gaps between syllables within a word)

    This is the same thing with the indigenous peoples of the north having a lot of words for snow. They combine multiple concepts into one word, to describe the kinds of snow.

    With Inuit languages, it’s more than this. They form “words” written without spaces that in European languages would be entire sentences!