>>>Include Terry... even though he's defending the language, ...
>
>Defending the language? You of all people should recognise English to be one of the most versatile, flexible, evolving languages there are, with a great range of expressiveness, using "building blocks" - a "rapid reaction force" of a language.

Except the expressiveness, which I often find frustratingly limited in some areas (but then abundant in others), I agree with the rest. My take is that this came at a cost of excess ambiguity, and clumsy workarounds to avoid it. It seems to be a trade-off (which someone yesterday asked me to translate, and yep, couldn't find a proper Serbian for it).

>WHy be bogged down with thousands of specialised words that you have to learn when you can easily construct a concept with the arsenal of words and expressions that you already have.

So instead you reduce your vocabulary by a factor of four, and still have the daunting task to know all the meanings of this reduced number of words. The constructs are maybe clumsy (and paint the translator's hairs gray at times) but they do the job and I don't mind them much. It's when a new term is needed and no new word is invented for it, nor is an existing word used as a root for a new one, but rather a word which has four meanings already is assigned yet another meaning - that's when it gets worse, increases ambiguity and adds another mine to the field. (mine as landmine, not the ore extraction hole, field as figurative and not as piece of land and not as used in physics, word as used in grammar and not as used in computing, root as used in grammar and not as used in botany or algebra, mind as have objections and not as take care of, yet as more and not as in "not yet", one as a number and not as an indeterminate pronoun)

>It's like the difference between an army that has many different weapons, each using a distinct ammo, compared with one similar but much of the ammo is common.

If we follow this analogy, in many cases you get one similar to anything, and you actually don't know how is your opponent using it - as a club, as a handgun, as a cannon or as a blade. Then you can examine the wound and see what hit you.

Besides, nobody needs to learn those thousands of words; you mostly learn the roots and the logic of suffixes (proper Latin-in-English would demand suffices, but then it becomes a verb - and I want to wield it as a noun).

In the examples at hand:
trud: labor, effort
truditi se: to try (not as attempt, but as invest effort)
trudnica: pregnant woman (i.e. who will be "in labors")
trudbenik: laborer

bol: pain
bolest: disease
boleti: to hurt, feel pain ("boli me" - it hurts (me))
preboleti: to get over a pain (usually a personal loss)
zaboleti: to feel pain start
bolovati: to suffer from illness
odbolovati: to suffer through until healthy
bolestan: ill
bolesnik: ill person
bolnica: hospital
bolovanje: sick leave (a participle of bolovati)
Bolesnikov: a weird last name :)

English is actually rife with this sort of word building - mostly coming from Latin or French. Just think of all the words ending in -ment, -ess, -ision, -ition, -ism, -ise, -ize, -al, -alize etc etc. That's the same principle.

And it still works - note the number of unexpected verbs where the equivalent of -nik is appended to create the passive noun: -ee, as in payee, employee. You can append that to any transitive verb and everyone will understand the meaning, without any need to learn that new word.

If it would only be more widely used to build new words, instead of overloading the existing ones.

>German is a bit similar - using portmanteau words (although there's are over long and awkward).

Hungarian can be worse - I've found "elektromotorotekercselés" (electric motor rewinding), but at least their base words are very short, thanks to 14 vowels.

>For instance, An ex colleague was once in Australia, where he saw a green frog in a tree. "What's that called?" he asked a native. "Why, a green tree-frog" answered the native. Serbian would probably have a 6 syllable special word for that, with about 20 different endings depending on person, single, double,
>plural, between 20 and 30, part of the sentence. What a waste of life learning all that.

I wouldn't know. AFAIK, there's only about three kinds of frogs :).

>In what other language can you replace a sentence like: "This hat belongs to the boyfriend of the girl next door" with "This hat is the girl next door's boyfriend's" or even "This hat is the guy who came round last night's"?

Lemme try...
"ovo je šešir dečka devojke iz susednog stana"
2nd won't go
"ovaj šešir je od sinoćnog tipa" ("sinoć" is "last night", "sinoćni" is an adjective of it "the one of last night", "sinoćnog" - genitive case - would be "of the one of last night").

OTOH, this shuffling of words around the sentence is quite limited in English. The structure of the sentence is too rigid; among all the possible permutations only a minor percentage fits the grammar. In Serbian, only a minor percentage is impossible; you can convey the same meaning in a dozen, and anywhere between slightly different and very different shades of meaning by most of the remaining permutations.

>A language in which a noun, or noun phrase, can readily and easily become a verb, with no loss of understanding to the uninitiated. e.g. people who eat a packed lunch can be said to be "brown bagging"

Which is a nice technique when it's clear. Though, it's completely lost on the uninitiated, who don't know that lunches are carried in brown bags. Before I came here, I wouldn't have any idea what it meant - the only expression with a brown bag mentioned a bottle inside, so I'd think that "brown bagging" means secretly drinking.

>>...he's actually helping me prove a point. When I say a word is missing, he gives me a workaround and points out that it's not a syllable longer. It's still missing.
>
>and that point being that Serbian is an unweildy, over-complicated, antiquated language? (and it's written in VFP object code! :-)

The point is that English overloads words and creates ambiguity. Which is the main reason why machine translation isn't going anywhere soon :). Look up LojBan language, if you are looking for a contemporary, simple language with straight rules and no spelling.

>Maybe this is an American thing but what do you mean by "fellow"? In the UK it's like a university lecturer who's long-standing and has security of tenure.

Turned out to be something like that. I'm still not quite sure on the definition, though - and I don't really care.

>>I knew both words from long ago, and they didn't make much sense in the context of medical education. What does it matter if a doctor is residing or just temporarily assigned to the location - he'll do his job either way. And it shouldn't matter if he's a jolly good fellow or not; even if he's a she, it's none of app's business to track.
>
>You've hit on a good example here. Words for a person occupying a building:
>
>Resident
>Tennant
>Inmate
>Squatter
>
>Different meanings dep. on their type of occupation.

Well, the meaning in this case was "a doctor on specialization".

>>>At least, with a word you don't know, you know that you don't know it. Words that you know seem so familiar - except that you need to notice that what you know doesn't make much sense.
>
>er ... ummm ... ye-ahhh ... what?

I read something, and no red flags pop up - I know all the words. Yet the sentence doesn't make much sense. Takes a while to spot the offender - which word is used with a meaning that I didn't know of, and is there only one such word? Can be quite a puzzler.