Knowing relations between words can help understand their meanings and build a more connected vocabulary network. Here, you can explore parents and offspring and discover the whole family.
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Sources for Etymology:
- Check "sinnvoll-2" on DWDS.de
Biggest German Dictionary, great for etymology, usage frequency and collocations) - "sinnvoll-2" on Wiktionary (English version)
(For etymological connections across European languages. Not always accurate) - Etymonline.com - Origins of English words
My favorite source for the origin of English words.
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I was looking into the noun der Sinn – I read the article on Zweck, I reread the article on sensibel / sensible and I read a bunch of articles in the dictionary ….and to be honest i’m a little confused still.. wasn’t entirely sure where to post this because it relates to a few different articles and i figured here is as good as anywhere.
• “Siri, warum ist die Welt so ungerecht?”
• “Polarwind.”
• “Das ist keine sinnvolle Antwort.”
• “Siri, why is the world so unfair.”
• “Polar winds.”
• “That is not a sensible answer.”
I’m wondering about “sensible” in this translation.
Are you implying Siri’s answer is not comprehendible – that is makes no sense? Or that Siri is trolling?
If it’s about Siri’s being incomprehensible or unintelligible using “sensible” here would be wrong in everyday speech.
If you suspect Siri is giving a deliberately stupid answer on purpose as a joke or to derail the conversation then i think “that is not a sensible answer” is ok i think. I am thinking of a child running around out of control doing stupid things on purpose and the parent says “don’t be silly, be sensible”.
I also saw you have this example for sinnvoll
Dein Vorschlag ist nicht sinnvoll.
Your proposal is not reasonable/ sensible (not: senseful)
Here is how i would understand these. Would sinnvoll work for my two examples below?
Your proposal is not reasonable : I want you to work 4 hours overtime everyday for no extra pay and I get a pay rise for organising this.
Your proposal is not sensible: Lets drive around fast, drunk with the car lights off.
I actually had to look “senseful” up as I was totally convinced it wasn’t a word. It wasn’t in my dictionary and my spellchecker doesn’t recognise it although it was on wiktionary https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/senseful which mentions it is archaic.
So I’m wondering if sinnvoll has nothing to do with (semantic) intelligibility?
So if I say “red cat dog pig bump big bleep pig” this sentence would be described in english as nonsense. Could you say “Das ist kein sinnvoller Satz” Or must you use something like “unsinnig”
Das ist ein unsinniger Satz?
Or if the sentence makes sense
Das ist ein sinniger Satz? Is “sinnig” what you mean by senseful?
I started looking at how, say, Lewis Carrol’s work gets described in German because in English you use “nonsense”. I noticed on Wikipedia it says “Nonsens” gets used instead of Unsinn because it isn’t devoid of meaning (although you have Unsinnpoesie )
I guess where “sense” and “nonsense get tricky is the overlap between a) understanding something in terms of the semantics b) understanding behaviour /intention .
If someone says “I am going to get drunk on the train track” from the point of view of semantics this is a sentence which makes sense BUT from the point of view of rational behaviour this makes no sense. I think this overlap causes some confusion.
Nonsense can refer to either semantics or content. A slang word like gibberish I think only refers to speech rather than content. Is there a german word like gibberish?
It might be that it’s because I am hungover from last night but I can’t quite follow your train of thought here and what questions you want me to answer.
About the Siri-example… what I mean here is that the answer does not make sense in the context of the question, but it is “intelligible”. I’m not necessarily implying that Siri is trolling… think of it like “this is off topic” or “this doesn’t answer my question.”
“unsinnig” leans a bit more toward “dumb”.
But yeah, it’d be great if you could split this up a bit, into separate questions.
Hi : ) Ok lets give this a second go and I will try to keep it concise : ) Btw the formatting seems to be weird. I did, at least, break up what i wrote into paragraphs but the text seems to be compacted together. I also don’t seem to be able to edit afterwards anymore (and add paragraph breaks).
ok so:
“If sensible is used in the sense of reasonable, then the best word is vernünftig, if the focus is on purely having some sense, then you’d say sinnvoll.”
The thing is in english I don’t think you can always use sensible to describe something having some sense. It depends what you mean by sense.
“I will wear appropriate clothing to climb a mountain” – this makes sense – and it is sensible.
“iron dog cheeese pig steel iron ” – this sentence makes no sense – however – you would not say this sentence is not sensible.
So “Sensible” and “Making sense” can not always be used interchangeably. I think your fridge example may be falling into this area and this is why I am confused. I suspect sinnvoll and sensible might be false friends in this respect. What do you think?
So just in terms of where you might be able to help me more concretely.
Is “sinvoll” an adjective that can always describe something that “macht Sinn” ?
Can “Sinn” and “sinvoll” just be about linguistic coherence? If I say “das Haus ist blau” could you say “Dieser Satz macht Sinn / ist sinnvoll”.
If “unsinnig” leans a bit more towards dumb how would you describe, for example a sentence from a language learner who isn’t stupid but
basically produces a sentence that makes no sense – unverstehbar ?
What adjective would you use to describe poetic / literary writing that is highly abstract to the point that figuring out what it means is difficult, but it retains at least somehow some kind of sense?
So basically the very very concise version is: What Siri says makes no sense but you can’t express this in other words by saying what Siri says is “not sensible “.
So “not a sensible answer” is okay, and “what she says is not sensible” is not okay?
Did I get this right?
Actually I don’t think so. I’d say neither of these are correct
Here’s an example where those two sentences would however be correct:
me: Siri, what should I wear when I climb mount Everest?
Siri: Flip Flops and Speedos.
Heres another example where those two sentences cannot (imo) be used:
me: Siri, what should I wear when I climb mount everest?
Siri: Mark Zuckerberg is 38 years old.
BUT: You could respond to both of Siri’s answers in my examples with:
“That makes no sense”.
I’d say sensible is mainly an adjective that has to do with the appropriateness of behaviour within a social context or actions within an environment.
In philosophy it has an additional meaning that i would translate as “spürbar”
If you like i could type out the definition from my english dictionary?
I think this is a really tricky one.
I suspect it’s its best to think of sensible as vernünfitg. But i’m still figuring vernünfitg out as reasonable and sensible are kind of different (thats a question for another day)
Okay, I see. I think I slowly start to understand what you’re after.
I’d actually say, just go to linguee or DeepL and check out like 10 sentences for “sinnvoll” and then create a mental meaning cloud from that. Dictionary definitions are not very helpful, imo, because it’s basically words defined with words. Which is quite hard to do.
mmm i don’t know. I think if its just a synonym then yes I’d agree. But dictionaries can be very helpful too… and because you mentioned dictionaries I did actually just look at Duden entry for “sinnvoll” again and I’d say only the 1st of the 3 definitions could be translated as sensible, (and then only in certain instances).
I’m thinking “meaningful” might be a better fit for definition 2 and 3.
So yeah. Interesting. A lot of words have been written but I think i have figured this out. Sinvoll is definitely a tricky, as are the english words sensible and sense….
I would absolutely not call the words “false friends”.
The Venn diagrams of two translations will almost never fully overlap. False friends is what they barely overlap or don’t overlap at all, even though they’re “looks” overlap.
“Is “sinvoll” an adjective that can always describe something that “macht Sinn” ? “
i’d lean toward “yes”, but that isn’t going to help you because “macht Sinn” has the same “double meaning”. So it can describe something that is “nonsense” and it can describe something that “is pointless” or “not reasonable”.
Yes, “sinnvoll” is used in linguistics to describe a sentence that makes sense, as far as I know.
For the sentence of the learner I would say use “macht keinen Sinn”. If I had to use an adjective “nicht sinnvoll” would be the choice, bc. “sinnlos” leans too much toward “pointless” and “unsinnig” too much toward “dumb”.
What adjective would I use for highly abstract poetic writing… “abstrakt” :). What would you use in English there :)?
Thanks for your answer this is much clearer.
Yes, “sinnvoll” is used in linguistics to describe a sentence that makes sense, as far as I know.
In english you could not use the adjective sensible in this context.
Yes, “sinnvoll” is used in linguistics to describe a sentence that makes sense, as far as I know.
What adjective would I use for highly abstract poetic writing… “abstrakt” :). What would you use in English there ?
Other than abstract or poetic there isn’t really a single word for it….there are more specific terms referring to specific styles / techniques.
Stream-of-conscious refers to writing that is supposed to emulate the fragmented experience of consciousness (associated with writers like James Joyce / Virginia Woolf)
There is of course “Nonsense” which is the specific literary genre for stuff like Lewis Carrol with lots of made up words ( the term doesn’t have any negativity attatched to it and indicates humour usually. )
I should clarify – the term “nonsense” in the context of nonsense literature has no negativity attatched to it. Context is important ; )
Oh, by the way… the weird formatting is because the comment is too long and my system is displaying a “snippet”.
There’s a little unformatted “button” read more under it and of you click that, it’ll show the full comment including formatting.
I haven’t styled that button because I don’t really ever see it, so I just forget.
Not sure how to fix the missing formatting for the “snippet” (which is almost the entire comment anyway.).
Maybe I can turn off that truncation.