>>BTW, "fall asleep" is another funny expression -- no English word for "zaspati" (start sleeping).
>
>To re-animate an old debate of ours, we don't need these compound words: Yours is 3 syllables, so is fall asleep. What would it save?

This should go into programming - as another "but can you make it an one-liner?" thread :).

If you go into speech economy, we make savings in different places. While Serbian (and I figure any other Slavic language as well) has longer words, it has a lot of redundancy in them, so many of the words can be easily omitted, which is normal. For one, the pronouns are used only when explicitly referring to a person or thing, and not in every sentence which has a verb :).

IOW, "I fell asleep" is usually not "ja sam zaspao", it's just "zaspao sam"; "when you think about it, you'll understand" is "kad razmisliš, shvatićeš" etc etc. The long form is used mostly for emphasis.

> BTW also we "drop off" (to sleep), "conk out", "drift off", et al. The act of sleeping: "catch some zeds (zees)", "enjoy some Egyptian PT", "be in the land of Nod", ...

"Gone to San Salvador" (san - sleep, dream); "zasovio" (sova - owl), "zacrkao se" (impossible to translate - "crći" is to die, but applies to animals and machines only), "throw the corpse into the bed" (implies "dead tired").