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| ℹ | This leaf is a drawth wordwrestling a riddle or a wen that has arisen in the making of Anglish. See other drawths. |
The word schadenfreude is a German loanword meaning joy form the misfortune of others. Due to spelling differences between English and German, the word is hard to spell to non-English speakers, which would guess to spell /ʃɑːdənfrɔɪdə/ as "shardenfroyder" or somesuch. A further consequence of its eldritchness is that the word is often mangled and rarely pronounced properly in the first place. Consequently English equivalent is often sought, for byspell frayns in yahoo answers and the section "English equivalents" in Wikipedia's page on Schadenfreude.
It is technically one of those grey words, which is acceptable under some definitions of Anglish (namely under the aim of removing all non-Germanic words), but not others (namely under the aim of removing all aft-1066 loanwords). I abide by the latter, so it must go!
In its place I offer a nice and simple solution: scathemirth. To scathe is the cognate of schaden (to damage). The cognate of freude is frith, an obsolete word for peace. However, the word freude means joy. The word joy wellsprings from Old French, joie —the j is a give-away—, which is a sullied version of the Latin gaudium. The Old English wellsprung equivalent is mirth, which is rather antiquated, but is a full synonym. Consequently, schadenfreude in Anglish is scathemirth, which is easy to say, remember and spell.
A further quirk is that the adjective schadenfroh would be obviously scathemerry. Anglish is not always intuitive/obvious*, but in this case it truly is.
- unless you are well versed in Old English and deal solely with fore-1066 technology or ideas.