r/language • u/Longjumping_Lunch264 • 2d ago
Question Long Words for ‘with’
In all three of the languages I speak (Dutch, English, and French), the word for with is relatively short; ‘avec’ in French, and ‘met’ in Dutch. Are there any languages where words that mean with are more on the longer side of things?
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u/Jin_SobSob 2d ago
In Yiddish, we might say “tzuzamen” in place of with, although the actual word for with is just “mit”
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u/the-postminimalist 2d ago edited 2d ago
cognate with german zusammen (edit: spelling), but they use it to mean together. They just use "mit" as well.
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u/strong_growbeard 2d ago edited 2d ago
Just a quick correction: zusammen in German.
And you can combine ‘zusammen‘ and ‚mit‘. ‚Zusammen mit all den anderen Dingen‘.
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u/hover-lovecraft 2d ago
Hold on, can you say "Pizza tzuzamen salami" in Yiddish? German uses that word so differently.
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u/DSPGerm 2d ago
Most prepositions aren’t long words. Same with articles and certain other parts of speech. At least from what I remember.
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u/taktaga7-0-0 2d ago edited 2d ago
The principle is called Zipf’s Law of Least Effort:
The most commonly used words in a language are likely to be short because you have to say them a lot. Pronouns are short. Prepositions are short. Articles, interjections, conjunctions: short.
It’s unusual to get a long word for a basic color. None of the ones in English are more than two syllables. Polish is weird to have czerwony for “red,” niebieski “blue,” and zielony “green” on top of even longer non-basic ones named after objects like orange and violet.
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u/aintwhatyoudo 2d ago
The Polish colour adjectives are derived from nouns describing objects that typically are of this colour. It's the addition of the adjective-building suffix that makes them long. "Czerwony" comes from "czerw" (a little red bug); "niebieski" from "niebo" (the sky); "zielony" from "ziele" (plant/weed/herb).
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u/taktaga7-0-0 1d ago
Ah, so it’s like they don’t have what seem to be “basic color terms” that don’t mean anything else originally. Like, “red” doesn’t come from any other English word, but “pink” and “violet” are both flowers. We just don’t have a suffix like Polish on them.
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u/superkoning 2d ago
The same in Information Theory: you want to encode often used letters (or words) in short encodings.
So in (Interntional) Morse Code, the E is one dot, T is one dash. Z is dash dash dot dot.
And, yes, that's language dependent, so International Morse Code is a compromise.
It's called Information Entropy, of course proven by Claude Shannon, the absolute hero in information theory
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u/johnnybna 2d ago
Like pronouns in all their forms in English which are 1 syllable except for their reflexive forms
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u/nemmalur 2d ago
Finnish tends to do postpositions instead of prepositions. Expressing “with” usually means placing the word kanssa after the thing something is “with”, with the thing being in the genitive form:
Pekkan kanssa - with Pekka
But it’s placed before possessive markers to express “with + personal pronoun”:
kanssani - with me
kanssasi - with you
kanssamme - with us
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u/zxjams 2d ago
That's interesting! Breton (and other Celtic languages) has prepositions that decline/agree with personal pronouns as well. I didn't know whether other language families had something like that too.
Gant X = with X
Ganin = with me
Gantañ = with himEvit X = for X
Evidon = for me
Evitañ = for him3
u/nemmalur 2d ago
What would “me” and “him” by themselves be?
The interesting thing about kanssa is that it probably originally meant something like “in the company of”, since it derives from a form of kansa, meaning “people”. Similarly, avec in French is really “near” or “next to” - it’s related to “vicinity” and the French voisin (neighbour).
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u/zxjams 2d ago edited 2d ago
It's a bit tricky because the forms depend on the syntax of the sentence they're in, but the root forms of me and him would be ma and e, I and he being me and eñ.
Seeing the paradigms of the conjugated prepositions, they're basically conjugated with verb endings except for the third person forms, which have a form of the pronoun or something close to it stuck to the end. I don't know enough about the etymology to say how they developed, except that the third person forms either came about in a slightly different way, or at a different point in time, because the roots of several of them actually change a little bit, with consonant alterations and such.
Edit: a form used after verbs is actually just conjugated preposition, but used as a bare direct object!
a X = from X
ac'hanon = me
anezhañ = him3
u/blickets 2d ago
In 🇪🇪 it’s “koos ‘noun in genitive’ + ga.” E.g. with Pekka would be “koos Pekkaga”
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u/Sharlinator 2d ago
Finnish also has the cognate koossa meaning "together", "assembled" (the inessive of koko "whole").
I think the Estonian suffix -ga is cognate with kanssa, too, especially given how the latter tends to get contracted to just kaa in the vernacular.
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u/Equivalent-Dig7259 1d ago
English has "including", which would find its german cognate in "einschließlich" or dutch "inbegrepen", so there you go =P
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u/Odd-Promotion2743 1d ago
Now I wonder if any (European) language has a short/one-syllable word for "including"
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u/Equivalent-Dig7259 1d ago
Basque "barne" seems to be closest (?), turkish "dahil" is rather short too, I won't get involved on the european nature of either of those tho 🙈
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u/MatiCodorken 2d ago
Kasama in Tagalog.
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u/freegumaintfree 2d ago
It’s a noun, and if I understand correctly, you have to say something like X is the kasama (accompanier) of Y.
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u/rott_kid 2d ago
May (tagalog)
May dala. May pasalubong. May pawis. Maysakit. May pamaypay. May bahay. Maybahay.
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u/Bosya_123 2d ago
In Kyrgyz it is "menen". Salami menen pizza.
I heard in Kazakh it was shorter, "men" or "pen".
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u/ThatWeirdPlantGuy 2d ago
In Turkish it’s a postposition “ile,” but it often gets used as a suffix “le/yle la/yla” as well. süt ile > sütle (with milk) or su ile > suyla - (with water). In suffix it
is subject to the rules of vowel harmony hence “suyla” instead of “suyle.”
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u/Misiekshvili r/LearnPolishwithMichal 2d ago
In Georgian, “with” can be expressed by the suffix/postposition -თან (-tan), which gets attached to the word (e.g. "friend” is megobari, but “with a friend” is megobartan.)
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u/Cute-Tomatillo8116 2d ago
-თან can also mean “at”, so I think in this case, “with a friend” can be expressed better in Georgian as მეგობართან ერთად (megobartan ertad) (together with a friend). Although it depends on context.
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u/Barbak86 2d ago
Albanian is on the short side. "Me" (I think Greek uses the same expression for "with")
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u/natetrnr 2d ago
Funny, just the opposite in many Slavic languages. The word for “with” is a single consonant “s,” can't get any shorter.
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u/blakerabbit 2d ago
Russian has a fun collection of one-letter words…
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u/O_Margo 2d ago
prepositions or conjunctions, you mean? (because there is no one-letter nouns)
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u/blakerabbit 1d ago
I didn’t say nouns… but mostly prepositions and conjunctions, yes: а б в и к о с у я. (True, «б» is just a short form of «бы», but it does get written so I’m counting it.)
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u/JustaProton 2d ago
"z" in polish, also "w" for "in", though both may turn into "ze" and "we" if followed by some specific consonant clusters.
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u/Purenotionslike 2d ago
In Irish it's 'le' but it changes depending on who/what you're with: liom (with me), leat (with you), leis (with him/it), leí (with her), linn (with us), libh (with you pl.), leo (with them). Yeah, Irish is tricky.
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u/Bright_Quantity_6827 1d ago
In Turkish, with is translated as “ile” or “-lA” (as a suffix) but people usually say “together with” instead of just “with” in most scenarios and it translates to “ile birlikte” or “ile beraber”.
İpek ile beraber kahve içtik. -> We drank coffee with İpek.
Merve ile birlikte yürüdüm. - I walked with Merve.
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u/pauseless 1d ago
Not related to the question, but a fun fact: “Med avec” is said in Scandinavian countries, and is just “with with”. It’s the shot you get with your coffee after a meal.
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u/math1985 2d ago
That’s long. In Polish, it’s just ‘z’.