There is actually an English word for schadenfreude

That would make Chinese the quintessential purist. Due to the constraints of Chinese phonetics, it is pointless to borrow a foreign word. They end up having twice as many syllables as the original and the pronunciation is unrecognizable. So instead of the four-syllable words petroleum and automobile, they just coined their own words shi you, literally "stone oil" (the same meaning as the Latin in fewer syllables), and qi che, literally "energized cart."

Huh? The dictionary assures us that these are merely alternate spellings of the same word. In the UK it's sometimes pronounced with the stress on the second syllable and a long A, making the second spelling logical.

BTW, why did you italicize "albeit"? That's a contraction of "although be it," as incontrovertibly English as Mick Jagger.

 

One of the reasons for the (alleged) superiority of English, in the Post-Industrial Era with its rapidly changing reality, is that making up new words is both easy and allowable. The Germanic languages in general are highly synthetic but on top of that English has become highly agglutinative due to its wholesale adoption of Latin and Greek morphemes and rules for joining them. (Or maybe I've got "synthetic" and "agglutinative" mixed up, I'm never sure that I really understand the difference.) These properties give us a rich yet fairly standardized model for the creation of new words that will not be too difficult for other anglophones to understand.

We've even extended it to other languages. Since the launch of Sputnik, the suffix -nik has been adopted to mean something that hints suspiciously at communism, such as "peacenik." The Spanish adverb-forming suffix -amente is often used humorously in the American Southwest, where half the population speak at least pidgin Spanish. "You were coming on to that hot chick a little too gross-amente, that's why she walked away."

No. They are the same word. Remember that until quite recently there were absolutely no standard spellings for English words. And like French, the correlation between spelling and pronunciation is so vague, that there may have been four or five alternative renditions of one word, none of which gave a decent clue to how it sounded--in any of several distinctly different dialects!

The dictionary insists that the original spelling in English was the French spelling, and that it was changed later as an attempted transcription of British pronunciation. They shifted the accent to the second syllable, which is why their spelling makes no sense at all to us, who shifted it to the first. (All French words are accented on the last syllable.)

And they've given up on language purity too. I suppose L'Academie is still in business and still issues pronouncements, but young urban French people refer to their speech as franglais.

I'm very skeptical. Considering that zhong guo ren and zhong guo cheng are translated literally, word-for-word, as "China man" and "China town," rather than the more correct English "Chinese man" and "Chinese town," I doubt that they would have translated hao jiu bu jian as "long time no see," rather than literally, word-for-word, as "good time not see."

I have studied it and I cajoled my Chinese girlfriend into speaking it at home whenever practical for two years. So I have excellent pronunciation and grammar but the vocabulary of a two-year-old.

Without going into detail, sure. But Chinese has only nouns, verbs, a couple of other parts of speech of which there aren't very many instances such as number-classifiers, and a few particles which IMHO serve primarily to help parse sentences. People usually translate Chinese into English that sounds right rather than word for word, so the word order is changed. But if you translate it literally, then the sequence is quite similar. For example, remembering that there are no prepositions, a Chinese would sort clauses in temporal order: "I eat breakfast, ride bus, attend school," whereas an anglophone would more likely sort the clauses in order of importance, using prepositions: "I went to school on the bus after breakfast."

They don't say "I am coming to your house." They say "I, approach(ing) your house, come."

But perhaps your friends are talking about fundamentals. There are only a few different word orders among all the world's languages, and both English and Chinese happen to share the same one: subject-verb-object. This isn't much of a coincidence since hundreds of languages have that order. Subject-object-verb is another popular one. People like Chomsky say this has to do with the hard-wiring in our brains. It would be difficult for us to communicate in, say, object-verb-subject order because we don't have the synapses for it.

However, there's more to syntax than subjects, verbs and objects. Study linguistics very deeply and you'll soon be rolling your eyes and saying, "Yup, this entire discipline was invented by, developed by, and is still dominated by people who speak Indo-European languages. They're fixated on subjects, verbs and objects." For example, Japanese does indeed use the same SVO syntax... as far as it goes. But step back from the blackboard and read the entire utterance and you'll see that the basic pattern of their language is topic-description. This is why those Zen koans seem so exotic.

There are other differences among languages which, to me, seem to say much more about the culture and the thought patterns of their people than the order of their subjects and verbs. For example, Chinese verbs have no tense and their nouns have no number. "Cat eat fish." There's no clue to the number of cats, the number of fish, or when this happened or will happen. It's assumed that the listener or reader will fill in this information from context, OR, that it simply isn't important. After all, all cats like to eat fish, always have, and always will. You start to grasp what it feels like to be a member of the world's oldest continuous civilization. If any of that information is really critical, you just say "Next Thursday three cat eat seven fish." Woo, that was hard!

Topic-description syntax.

English is indeed a Germanic language, but it no longer sounds Germanic. After the Norman Invasion thousands of French words were added to our lexicon, including everyday bread-and-butter words like face, use, very, color, second and question. For a couple of centuries French was the language of government, commerce and scholarship. English, the language of the common people, was heavily influenced by this, in vocabulary, grammar and phonetics. English lost the noun declensions of continental German (nominative, genitive, dative, accusative), and the paradigm of verb conjugations was similarly simplified. We started forming our plurals in S, like the Romance languages, instead of N, like the Germans.

But when the French conquerors assimilated and English once again became the island's official tongue, for reasons not well understood it continued to undergo major changes. The Great Vowel Shift is probably the greatest of them all. This is why our A and E are pronounced the way all other European languages pronounce their E and I.

As England rose to prominence and its scholars became leaders in their disciplines, they assimilated another huge batch of words from their French colleagues, this time words formed from Latin and Greek roots. And eventually they began coining their own words like television and microwave.

As a result, English sounds a lot more like a Romance language than a Germanic language. "Epicaricacy" does indeed sound like a perfectly fine English word we should remember from one of our science or philosophy classes. But Schadenfreude?

That sounds like a Klingon word.

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