Talk:почемучка

Untranslatable

Sometimes neologisms are the way to go. This yields easily to "whyner" which would be understood by native English speakers in context. Sci-Fi writers (and others) have to do this sort of thing all the time. If "untranslatable" means restricting yourself to currently existing dictionary words in the target language (which seems like an unreasonable restriction to me, given that communicating the original author's intent to the foreign reader is, or should be, the object) then this doesn't work. Mathglot (talk) 02:59, 23 November 2013 (UTC)

I’m a native English speaker and I would not understand "whyner" in context. To me it looks like a silly misspelling of whiner. I don’t think "whyner" is even a neologism...at best, it would be a protologism. —Stephen ^(Talk) 07:29, 23 November 2013 (UTC)

I didn't know the word protologism so thanks for the introduction. However, I have no intention or desire that this word become popular. It's sufficient if it's understood in the single context of an article explaining the meaning of почемучка, in which case perhaps adding a hyphen in the middle (why-ner) would resolve the issue of being mistaken for whiner.

Nevertheless, I think you meant you wouldn't understand out of context. And it's of course intentional that it recalls whiner to mind, as a child who constantly asks "why" would be exasperating, in the same way as a child who's a whiner, so that's hardly an accident.

My three-year-old is such a why-ner about everything!

Why is the sky blue? Why are there clouds? Why can’t I go outside? Why do I have to be nice?

Sometimes it doesn’t seem to matter what the answer is, he’s never satisfied. And I'm exasperated. How do I handle his questions?

With the exception of the replacement in the first sentence, this is an abbreviated actual example taken from the internet (why children ask why, drgreene.com). I have a hard time believing most people wouldn't understand the term in this context, even if one suspected a misspelling at first. In some regional accents, why-ner would be a homophone of whiner (except for a slightly different syllabic stress) so hearing it rather than reading it might indeed lead to misunderstanding for some people.

The point I'm trying to make is about the untranslatability (or not) of почемучка. The odds that "why-ner" will actually become part of English are approximately zero, which is also about the same as the odds of pochemuchka entering English as a loanword. Mathglot (talk) 07:54, 14 December 2013 (UTC)

I don’t see what the -n- in why-ner is for. I would understand why-er, buy why-ner makes me think he asks a lot of questions and whines all the times. —Stephen ^(Talk) 23:34, 14 December 2013 (UTC)