English generally does not use contractions at the end of a sentence. For example:
It’s what it is.
Instead of:
It’s what it’s.
Not in the example you gave, it doesn’t. But that doesn’t mean it can’t. I could give other examples but I won’t.
differently than, or differently from (as I would write).
As noted, this is nothing to do with “laziness” – a pretty “lazy” concept in linguistics – and all to do with how different languages work. English is not at all unique in this regard. First, German is famous for this type of word-stacking. (And, as English is a Germanic language, that’s not to be surprising.):
“Water meter” in German is Wasseruhr or, “water clock.”
Similarly, in Hungarian, not a Germanic language but a Finno-Ugric one, “water meter” is vízóra, also “water clock.”
In Polish, it’s expressed (rather cumbersomely, in my opinion, in comparison with other languages) as licznik zuźycia wody, or “meter of the use of water.”
In Greek, it’s just one word: υδρόμετρο (“ydrometro” or “water meter”)
Some languages use multiple words with pre/post-positions or noun declensions, others just stack the two nouns together, either orthographically as a single word or as two. There’s nothing “lazy” about any of these approaches. Hell, you can say it’s more “elegant” or “efficient” if you’d like. I would say it just is.
Personally, I like the compact forms better, when given a choice, to using “of (the/a)” type constructions. Back in college when I read and wrote a lot of poetry, I liked to avoid overly using prepositions where punchy and cleaner two-word constructions could be used (unless I liked the sound of the prepositional construction for its rhythm or sonority. Too many of them, though, I find tiresome.)
I recall a road sign I passed on the way to work every day when I lived in Panama. Back then most such signs were bilingual. For some reason it struck me funny every time I passed it. As best I can remember:
Even setting aside the greater syllable count of the individual nouns, the whole thing is a lot more verbose.
The order of adjectives in English is subconscious for native speakers.
See post #2. With a cite even.
Oh whoops!
I have noticed the same thing on product packaging and in user manuals, which are increasingly multilingual. The English version is almost always the shortest version.
That must be the reason why the right lane ends after 400 m for the English speakers but after 500 m for the Spanish speakers: they need more time and thus a longer lane.
Also interesting that our Spanish (in Spain) is different from their Spanish (in Panama).
I used to translate user manuals as a student: the shortest version is mostly the original version. Translations get longer all on their own, in both directions. The fact that translators are (were? - almost 40 years ago) paid by the line and the lines were counted by the number of characters used divided by 55 contributed to this. When I had two synonyms to choose from I took the longer one.
There is a rule of thumb in computer UI design aimed at English speaking designers. It says that however large a space you reserve on the screen for your English text or label or words on a button or whatever, plan on 2-2.5x as much space for the other alphabetic languages.
I just thought “my” bilingual sign was fun/silly because try as they might, they could not leave all the little connector words off. Certainly an English speaker with some pidgin Spanish (i.e. me) could have comprehended the sign without all the connectors. Whether native Spanish speakers would have or would have been laughing instead is a different question.
Flowery English can be as verbose as the terser forms of other Germanic or Romance languages. IMO where we differ is in preferring the terse form, especially for imperatives.
It may have something to do with cultural expectations of courtesy as well.
In the last 3 years there have been a lot of ad hoc signs posted about COVID precautions in public areas such as airports, hotels, and shopping malls. I often see signs where the English version says something close to “Please maintain 6 foot distance from others” and the other language, which I’ll transliterate into English here, says something like “Dear esteemed guest. To preserve everyone’s health, please consider maintaining a 6 foot distance from others not in your party.”
The tone of the message is very different. And it takes a lot more words to carry all that courtesy baggage.
Thinking about it some more, it looks like the rule may be that it’s fine to end a sentence with a contraction if the contracted word is “not,” but not if the contracted word is a verb.
Compare
“You wouldn’t end a sentence with a contraction, but I’d.”
with
“You’d end a sentence with a contraction, but I wouldn’t.”
Compare
“Tell me where you’re.”
with
“Tell me where you are.”
or
“Tell me where you’re at.”
I believe you are experiencing some form of confirmation bias, at least regarding German imperatives. From a dog trainer manual: Nein! Komm! Hier! Fuss! Stop! Aus! Sitz! Fass! Platz! Still! Bring!
It’s also a feature that in Computer Science is called “overloading”. A word can have multiple meanings (as an operator can have multiple functions - “+” can mean add two integers, or floating point numbers, or concatenate two strings of characters) So meter refers to the measure, the act of measuring, and the device for measuring. “bank” can refer to a financial institution, a tilt while turning, the edge of a river or some built-up earthworks - noun and verb. A more interesting aspect of English is (unintuitively) its simplicity - the lack of change in a word from form to form.
I recall my Spanish teacher in high school complaining that he had to stop Spanish class to give the students a quick few months of grammar. While we learn to speak English instinctively, as a result of English simplicity we rarely think about things like tense or person, let alone noun vs. verb, there are so few variations. (By contrast, Spanish is so full of verb endings that it is normal to leave off the subject of the sentence, tense is obvious and person and plurality is implied.)
The information content of a message (e. g. texts in different languages) can be quantified. The whole content of a message is the sum of the information content and its redundancy, which are all measured in bits. So you can quantify the information content of different languages and compare their redundancies. For languages I know, German and French definitely are more redundant than English, in other words they are more verbose and use more characters to convey their information.
I’d take “water meter” to be a tool that measures water – “the town installed new water meters to make billing more fair”; while “meter of water” would to me mean water to that depth – “the new water meter broke and I wound up with a meter of water in my basement!”
Another example of US/UK differences. Here, a meter is a measuring instrument, while the length is a metre.
The general rule isn’t that English is usually shorter. It’s that translations are usually longer. And how much longer usually depends on the length of the original: A single-sentence sign might double in length, but a 300-page novel will probably only gain a few pages.
That’s a pretty sophisticated bit of reasoning going on behind a casual conversation - and not the use of a simple rule. If we change the situation slightly - this time you know Steve well, but haven’t met his wife, because they married only recently and you generally only see him at work, you might say “that Polish woman” instead of “a Polish woman” - again automatically deciding that was appropriate, without any conscious thought.
To salvage this, I’d say that it doesn’t use contractions for the forms of “to be” at the ends of sentences. Nor does it allow contractions of the words “shall” or “will.” But “not” is perfectly okay.
The actual rule is that you can’t contract a stressed (accented) word. But, of course, we then get into which words are stressed in a sentence.