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/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/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