I think that sort of naming would end up REALLY long.
Basically you're talking about including the actual recipe/ingredients/method of cooking all together in the name of the dish.
We would need to invent whole bunch of words that would mean a very specific set of ingredients/cooking approach. Then using that we could end up with slightly shorter names.
You don't need to be specific to an absolute fault. People aren't machines. A compounding approach in practice would likely just result in English constructions similar to Dutch or German - eg Krautsalat -> Cabbage Salad (Coleslaw).
In German, "cabbage salad" == coleslaw. In English, "cabbage salad" != coleslaw. Coleslaw is a very specific type of cabbage salad, prepared with a limited set of ingredients beyond which it would be a specialized variety of coleslaw, e.g., apple coleslaw.
> Coleslaw is a very specific type of cabbage salad
Except when it isn't. Different cultures, different restaurants, different people make it differently, so when I hear someone saying "coleslaw", all I can be sure of is that it's a salad that involves cabbage and something bitter. At this point this gives me zero information over "cabbage salad", but I have to remember a new word for it. Rinse and repeat for whatever your city/country imports or renames this year.
You're changing your claim a bit. Originally You claimed giving the ingredients like that was more accurate. Now you're saying they're equivalent, but not how "cabbage salad" gives you any more information, because that's not the case. In many contexts gives you less.
If you're speaking English, coleslaw will give you a much better idea of what to expect, narrowing it down to two major variations. No matter what the actual result, cabbage salad leaves more possibilities. You talk about cultural variation on it, but I can't find any that don't fall under one of those two main varieties. Even when I could find a rare example that did not use cabbage, it referred to the product as the more generic "slaw", not coleslaw.
What it boils down to though you're complaining that language can be ambiguous. And it is! That tends to be more a feature than a bug though. It allows ever greater levels of abstraction that facilitate more complex ideas. If you really insist on a "cabbage salad" style of speech, you need to understand that it doesn't stop at "cabbage salad". That is so general as to be meaningless for the purpose of informing me on what I'll receive when I order it. Even if there are contexts where coleslaw would be ambiguous, it will always encompass fewer options than cabbage salad. For your style of speech to work, it would have to go much further to add information to this, something like "Shredded cabbage and carrots with mayonnaise sugar salt and pepper" Even then it wouldn't be enough, because method of preparation may vary, changing the dish.
Even if I grant you that coleslaw sometimes doesn't conform to what I've described, it's still the case that it will give more information in many more circumstances than cabbage salad. Cabbage salad will win many fewer "information" contests.
And, again, you mostly already get your way in this because the vast majority of restaurants actually to give a description of the meal. What you're complaining about is that in addition to such descriptions, there's also a single term abstraction that can be instantiated in a variety of different ways.
Fair. I concede the point, I guess I've been hiding a set of additional expectations under the term "cabbage salad" that's region-specific and also not explicitly stated in the name.
I admit that I'm just whining here (that's why I started the subthread saying I'm only half-serious about it). It's not the occasional new unique word that annoys me - just the impression that those new words seem to constantly pop out of nowhere, and half the time they are new names for some regular dishes.
> In German, "cabbage salad" == coleslaw. In English, "cabbage salad" != coleslaw.
Of course. This is a purely hypothetical exercise, in which we are speculating on an alternative means of naming food items which is more descriptive as to what those items are. Such a derivative of English, I contend, would look similar to German in construction. That is the point. Coleslaw is merely picked as an example of how such things would look.
You kinda have to be specific if you want to avoid common names for things. Lets say I give you a menu and it says "Oven baked ground corn". If you ask me for it, do you expect to get cornbread or polenta?
Likely, the more popular option will be known as "Oven baked ground corn". The less popular, more contextual option would have an attached qualifier to distinguish it from the one most people want, such as "Oven baked ground corn porridge". That will of course lead to regional differences, but that's normal.
I'm asking to use "corn bread" and "corn porridge". You'll note that all of the words - "corn", "bread" and "porridge" - are common categories that can be combined with other common words to describe a great amount of meals.
What I'm asking is to stop the constant introduction of dish-specific unique terms (and renaming of existing dishes so that they sound more exciting), and instead use words that can be combined. That's the 101 of preventing combinatorial explosion. When you write code, your functions have arguments. You don't create zero-argument functions for every possible thing a program does and give them unique names.
Basically you're talking about including the actual recipe/ingredients/method of cooking all together in the name of the dish.
We would need to invent whole bunch of words that would mean a very specific set of ingredients/cooking approach. Then using that we could end up with slightly shorter names.