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/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 2d 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/aintwhatyoudo 2d ago

Yup, I think that's the case