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Why should Word formation be merged into this article? Compounding is just one kind of word formation. If the articles need to be merged — and I'm not convinced they do — then this article should be merged into that one, not the other way around. Ruakh 03:35, 28 October 2006 (UTC)
Corresponding to Duden's grammar, the -s is a epenthesis, not a genitive case marker! ~ Koocachoo 09:48, 19 November 2006 (UTC)
Epenthesis is phonologically motivated, so I don't think its the right word. But it is not genitive either, there we agree. I am pretty sure that Duden calls it 'Fugen-S', which may be translated as 'joining s'. I'm sure there is a linguistic term for that. Anyways, it used to be genitive, but is not anymore. It is attached to lexemes that form the genetive differently, e.g. 'Verhandlungszimmer' (negotiation room): 'Verlandlung' is feminine and has no -s in genitive case. Yet in compounds, -s- in inserted to join the two lexemes. 91.21.116.48 22:44, 30 October 2007 (UTC)
In official German often the Fugen-S is not used, whereas the colloquial language uses it much more often. For example the official German Armed Forces term for cadet is "Offizieranwärter" (officer candidate), but most people would rather say "Offiziersanwärter". —Preceding unsigned comment added by 77.176.67.113 ( talk) 19:10, 21 November 2008 (UTC)
If unsure, just refer to the extra s as an interfix, although it's only a collective term and doesn't explain its real function. As Germanic languages write compound nouns as one word, I'd say it's not meant to grammatically distinguish the words, but to facilitate pronunciation. In Swedish, there are other interfixes than the s, such as in familjefar, from familj (family) and far (father). I think this reinforces, if needed, the notion that the interfix isn't a genitive marker. Andailus ( talk) 20:16, 28 January 2009 (UTC)
The larger problem with the section on German compounds is that it deals with only a subtype, the endocentric ones. It completely leaves out the very common exocentric ones, like Rotkehlchen (a bird with a red throat), Großmaul (a person with a big mouth), or Gernegroß, a very interesting combination of an adverb with an adjective denoting a person! — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2601:183:4201:2000:F87E:39DD:381:71AB ( talk) 19:52, 11 December 2015 (UTC)
The definition is problematic in that it refers "more than one free morpheme". The Spanish example (which is fine) of ferrocarríl does not have two free morphemes in it. I would think it would be better to refer to the presence of more than one root.
The discussion also seems to dodge the issue of what is a word --- "science fiction" is a compound "word" written (at least) as two words. What strings of "words" are really compounds? Stevemarlett 17:43, 10 December 2006 (UTC)
Defining word is not trivial. FilipeS 23:47, 10 December 2006 (UTC)
Why is this an example of an endocentric compound rather than an exocentric one? Maybe I'm missing something. Stevemarlett 05:00, 19 January 2007 (UTC)
I've just packed it away for a temporary move, otherwise I would pull out the quote right now, but Huddleston & Pullum's Cambridge Grammar of English is excellent in so many ways, and it has some good things (of course) to say about English compounds. They remind us of the standard tests for distinguishing compounds from what they call "composite nominals". And spaces between written words are not a reliable guide in either direction. An example I thought of today to illustrate the problem: "glovebox" and (my dialect) "glove compartment" --- you know, that place in the car where one puts anything except gloves these days. My bet is that these are both the same --- either compounds or composite nominals. But standard English writes them differently. Stevemarlett 05:06, 19 January 2007 (UTC)
Would the Japanese verbs 申し込む mōshikomu lit. "speak-CONJUNCTIVE-crowd/pack" which means 'to apply', and 引っ越す hikkosu lit. "pull-CONJUNCTIVE-cross over" which means 'to move (one's residence)' be considered sequential or compound? They don't seem especially sequential, compared to the Hindi examples given on the page, but they don't really fit the description of compound verbs either, since they have no one primary verb. LeeWilson 03:10, 19 April 2007 (UTC)
Text says:
Is an increasing error frequency a trend? My experience is that the level of protests from Swedish speakers was directly proportionate to the error frequency, so it cannot be a trend in the language. It is a phenomenon, allegedly connected to MicroSoft Word, that is so-so-common, but it has decreased considerably lately; probably something with some MicroSoft Word update... Said: Rursus ( ☻) 20:04, 6 October 2008 (UTC)
The business world seems to produce a lot of very long compounds, an example or two might enhance this good article. I'm thinking of things like:
I suspect there would be reliable sources that discuss trends in technical or jargon English regarding such compounds. Alastair Haines ( talk) 22:40, 16 November 2008 (UTC)
Should this article link to Syllabic abbreviation or include content from it? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 128.183.152.104 ( talk) 01:05, 16 December 2008 (UTC)
Is this a good chapter at all? Some of its content seems to belong to how the Germanic languages treat compound nouns (namely that it is considered erroneous in e.g. Swedish to split it into two or more words). The rest has to do with syllabic abbreviation, a totally different area. Some coherency, please! —Preceding unsigned comment added by Andailus ( talk • contribs) 20:25, 28 January 2009 (UTC)
In the entry for the Danish language we have this word kvindehåndboldlandsholdet translated as the female handball national team. Now if we were to write the femalehandballnationalteam (since English doesn't have the affixed article, this will have to be two words) what would be altered save the spaces? There are a few fun examples (or funexamples) floating about Wikipedia, and I must mention two, first the ever recurring (and meant as a joke) Donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaftskapitänsmütze from German and the less known, but every bit as jocular Vaðlaheiðarvegamannaverkfærageymsluhússlyklakippuhringurinn from Icelandic. But is it really not just a question of spelling, i.e. inserting spaces or not? Granted, the inflection of some languages demands one word, but is there any reason except for historical/traditional ones, that English could not produce such words. It is, after all, just like history, "just one damn thing after another". :-) Cheers 85.220.118.164 ( talk) 18:50, 14 April 2009 (UTC)
So what does the word 'lentokonesuihkuturbiinimoottoriapumekaanikkoaliupseerioppilas' mean? Invmog ( talk) 16:40, 12 May 2009 (UTC)
Dubiosity in Recent trends: the section tells that the trend to split words ("orddelingsfeil", word split errors) essentially is a new trend to create new compounds in Nordic languages, and then all logics is lost to me: since when is a new erroneous habit to split compounds erroneously a new way of word formation based on compounding? The contents of the section is kind of funny and enjoyable, the Swedish reknowned counterpart is "fryst kycklinglever" (frozen chicken liver) vs. "fryst kyckling lever" (frozen chicken is alive!), but these aren't word formations by compounding. The examples are grave semantic errors and very unintended. The content of the section doesn't belong to this article. ... said: Rursus ( bork²) 21:51, 4 July 2009 (UTC)
I just changed it from "the English way of compounding words" to "the English way of spelling compound words". —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.63.55.81 ( talk) 17:28, 6 September 2009 (UTC)
Also, compounds are pronounced continuously as one word in at least German and north Germanic languages, whereas English pronunciation may just reflect the way it is written.
I believe it's not that English pronounces compounds as separate words, nor even that German pronounces compounds as single words; it's that German pronounces non-compounds as separate words. Speech inside a prosodic unit isn't really broken into staccato, but a language may have particular phonological processes that work on the word level, and may distinguish single compound words from series of words. English uses only stress for this (and compounded words often retain secondary stress, making the distinction less salient), while German has final obstruent devoicing. You could make the case just as easily that English pronounces all words in a prosodic unit "continuously as one word". — ˈzɪzɨvə ( talk) 00:27, 30 November 2009 (UTC)
I was looking for an article explaining Greek and Latin compounds, but this article does not mention them. I found the article Classical compound via Google after not finding it here: in the very least, it should be mentioned in the article that words of Greek and Latin origin are called as such and not just linked to in the "see also". -- Squidonius ( talk) 03:06, 1 September 2011 (UTC)
I'm not sure who wrote that, in the Romance languages, the verb appears in the third person singular present indicative, but anyway that is not correct. It's very clear that, in the Romance languages, the verb is in the second person singular imperative (and the same is true for English, by the way). This becomes obvious whenever the second person singular imperative is different from the third person singular present indicative. In Spanish, this happens only in a few cases when the second person singular imperative is irregular; e.g. haz from the verb hacer (the third person singular present indicative is hace), thus: hazmerreir (from haz + me + reir) = 'laughingstock' (lit. "make me laugh"). But, in Italian, this happens with all the verbs in -ere, which have the third person singular present indicative ending in -e and the second person singular imperative regularly ending in -i, thus: reggipetto and reggiseno (from the verb reggere = 'to hold, support'), both meaning 'bra' (lit. "breast-holder" or "breast-supporter"), and countless other examples. Pasquale ( talk) 18:00, 3 July 2014 (UTC)
I'm surprised no mention is made of verbs like sleepwalk or playfight, which certainly seem like verb-verb compounds to me. Other Germanic languages have such compounds too, like Dutch slaapwandelen. CodeCat ( talk) 22:55, 3 July 2014 (UTC)
The linguistics article “Compounds (linguistics)” could benefit from a couple alterations. The lead section although interesting doesn’t capture the intention of the article. The article seems rather wordy and long, this is most likely because the topic “compounds” is such a broad topic. I would suggest having a general page introducing main categories and point with links to pages that have a more detailed explanations and examples. Finally, I think the article would be more creditable with more references. There is so much information presented and several examples yet only four references used. -- Maebaran ( talk) 01:18, 19 September 2014 (UTC)
This article gets particularly confusing around the portion where it addresses examples from other languages. There are already portions of examples present in the "Subclasses" section, and although they seem to be well developed, combining the examples would probably help to clear up some confusion. Perhaps the addition of a table may help? The article is also a little wordy, especially around the "Syntactic classification" section, with the portion on verb-verb compounds in particular being rather cramped, example and word wise. Rrrrrllllleeeee ( talk) 02:37, 19 September 2014 (UTC)
That last is a bad example; it must have at least three components, as ä or y cannot occur in the same morpheme with u or o (see vowel harmony). The passage previously said:
— Tamfang ( talk) 23:14, 13 January 2015 (UTC)
In a-stem verbs, the second person singular imperative is indistinguishable from the third person singular present indicative, which is how I've always (mis)understood this element; se llama ‘sacacorchos’ porque saca los corchos. Can we have a Romance example where these forms are dissimilar? — Tamfang ( talk) 07:16, 14 January 2015 (UTC)
What is the extra S doing in compounds like communications protocol and systems programming? I hate constructs like that, because my brain cannot parse them.
-- 84.209.119.158 ( talk) 22:11, 21 May 2015 (UTC)
Yet another example: Linguistics article. In this case, linguistic article would not have unambiguously been a compound noun in English, because the adjective-noun sequence is also syntactically valid as separate words (not that it makes much semantic difference). But inflecting the adjective as if it was a noun rules this out. Multiple consecutive nouns are always a compound noun. -- 84.209.119.158 ( talk) 23:09, 26 May 2015 (UTC)
Why, among the examples, are not a section for English ones included? Like "football", "laboratory coat", "lobster sauce", "freeze-dry"… This would be of great value, as it shows the (inconsistent) tendency, in English, to often separate the component parts of a compound, with spaces.
There is also a general tendency in the article, to confuse "word" with "bit of writing that is separated by spaces". "lobster sauce" is one word. Not two. If one takes a sentence with the term in it, in a sentence, and classifies which bit of the sentence is what, "lobster sauce" will not be classified as two separate parts, but as one single unified noun. One word. Just like "long sword" is one word, referring to a specific type of sword. One noun …whereas "long sword" (spelled exactly the same, as you can see), however, is a sword that is long. A noun preceded by an adjective. Similarly "space bar" is one word (noun), referring to the keyboard key, whereas "space bar" is two words, referring to a bar, that is in, or concerning, space. (look in Wiktionaries category "English multiword terms", and you'll find that most are single word terms. Some are genuinely multiword idioms or phrases, certainly, but most…)-- 213.113.114.132 ( talk) 17:44, 9 April 2021 (UTC)
The article reads: "mean the same as the sum of two words (e.g. German: Pressekonferenz, lit. 'press conference')". This makes no sense. A press conference is not in any sense the "sum" of "press" and "conference". It means "a conference/meeting for the press" or addressed to the press. It could have meant all sorts of other things, like a professional conference for the press or about the press (like a "math conference") or a conference where people are forced to go ("a press gang") or a meeting of people to iron clothes.... -- Macrakis ( talk) 15:02, 23 March 2023 (UTC)
I'm specifically talking about open compound words. You can say "a chicken egg" and "a chicken one". Since the latter isn't a compound word, one could argue the former isn't either. For comparison, in German you can say "Hühnerei" but you can't say anything akin to "chicken one", thus the German word truly is a compound word, but as I understand it, the English phrase isn't. This wouldn't be the case with all open compound words, though. For example, you can say "an apple tree" but not "an apple one", so this would be a real compound word. Disclaimer: I might be totally wrong as English isn't my language. 77.211.6.158 ( talk) 09:15, 20 August 2023 (UTC)
In coordination with the article's most recent edits, I redirected "open compound" to the proper article since there's no such thing in linguistics (and also no such thing as a spaced compound) but there is such a thing in chemistry. The article's now-deleted reference to concatenation targets the correct computer programming article. Kent Dominic·(talk) 16:14, 18 December 2023 (UTC)
The redirect
Compound (linguistics has been listed at
redirects for discussion to determine whether its use and function meets the
redirect guidelines. Readers of this page are welcome to comment on this redirect at
Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2024 February 21 § Compound (linguistics until a consensus is reached.
Utopes (
talk /
cont) 20:55, 21 February 2024 (UTC)
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![]() | The contents of the Nominal composition page were merged into Compound (linguistics) on 6 September 2016. For the contribution history and old versions of the redirected page, please see its history; for the discussion at that location, see its talk page. |
This article is or was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment. Further details are available
on the course page. Student editor(s):
AmnahEssa. Peer reviewers:
AmnahEssa.
Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT ( talk) 19:24, 17 January 2022 (UTC)
This article is or was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment. Further details are available
on the course page. Student editor(s):
Adnan1192,
Anitaebadi.
Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT ( talk) 18:13, 16 January 2022 (UTC)
Why should Word formation be merged into this article? Compounding is just one kind of word formation. If the articles need to be merged — and I'm not convinced they do — then this article should be merged into that one, not the other way around. Ruakh 03:35, 28 October 2006 (UTC)
Corresponding to Duden's grammar, the -s is a epenthesis, not a genitive case marker! ~ Koocachoo 09:48, 19 November 2006 (UTC)
Epenthesis is phonologically motivated, so I don't think its the right word. But it is not genitive either, there we agree. I am pretty sure that Duden calls it 'Fugen-S', which may be translated as 'joining s'. I'm sure there is a linguistic term for that. Anyways, it used to be genitive, but is not anymore. It is attached to lexemes that form the genetive differently, e.g. 'Verhandlungszimmer' (negotiation room): 'Verlandlung' is feminine and has no -s in genitive case. Yet in compounds, -s- in inserted to join the two lexemes. 91.21.116.48 22:44, 30 October 2007 (UTC)
In official German often the Fugen-S is not used, whereas the colloquial language uses it much more often. For example the official German Armed Forces term for cadet is "Offizieranwärter" (officer candidate), but most people would rather say "Offiziersanwärter". —Preceding unsigned comment added by 77.176.67.113 ( talk) 19:10, 21 November 2008 (UTC)
If unsure, just refer to the extra s as an interfix, although it's only a collective term and doesn't explain its real function. As Germanic languages write compound nouns as one word, I'd say it's not meant to grammatically distinguish the words, but to facilitate pronunciation. In Swedish, there are other interfixes than the s, such as in familjefar, from familj (family) and far (father). I think this reinforces, if needed, the notion that the interfix isn't a genitive marker. Andailus ( talk) 20:16, 28 January 2009 (UTC)
The larger problem with the section on German compounds is that it deals with only a subtype, the endocentric ones. It completely leaves out the very common exocentric ones, like Rotkehlchen (a bird with a red throat), Großmaul (a person with a big mouth), or Gernegroß, a very interesting combination of an adverb with an adjective denoting a person! — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2601:183:4201:2000:F87E:39DD:381:71AB ( talk) 19:52, 11 December 2015 (UTC)
The definition is problematic in that it refers "more than one free morpheme". The Spanish example (which is fine) of ferrocarríl does not have two free morphemes in it. I would think it would be better to refer to the presence of more than one root.
The discussion also seems to dodge the issue of what is a word --- "science fiction" is a compound "word" written (at least) as two words. What strings of "words" are really compounds? Stevemarlett 17:43, 10 December 2006 (UTC)
Defining word is not trivial. FilipeS 23:47, 10 December 2006 (UTC)
Why is this an example of an endocentric compound rather than an exocentric one? Maybe I'm missing something. Stevemarlett 05:00, 19 January 2007 (UTC)
I've just packed it away for a temporary move, otherwise I would pull out the quote right now, but Huddleston & Pullum's Cambridge Grammar of English is excellent in so many ways, and it has some good things (of course) to say about English compounds. They remind us of the standard tests for distinguishing compounds from what they call "composite nominals". And spaces between written words are not a reliable guide in either direction. An example I thought of today to illustrate the problem: "glovebox" and (my dialect) "glove compartment" --- you know, that place in the car where one puts anything except gloves these days. My bet is that these are both the same --- either compounds or composite nominals. But standard English writes them differently. Stevemarlett 05:06, 19 January 2007 (UTC)
Would the Japanese verbs 申し込む mōshikomu lit. "speak-CONJUNCTIVE-crowd/pack" which means 'to apply', and 引っ越す hikkosu lit. "pull-CONJUNCTIVE-cross over" which means 'to move (one's residence)' be considered sequential or compound? They don't seem especially sequential, compared to the Hindi examples given on the page, but they don't really fit the description of compound verbs either, since they have no one primary verb. LeeWilson 03:10, 19 April 2007 (UTC)
Text says:
Is an increasing error frequency a trend? My experience is that the level of protests from Swedish speakers was directly proportionate to the error frequency, so it cannot be a trend in the language. It is a phenomenon, allegedly connected to MicroSoft Word, that is so-so-common, but it has decreased considerably lately; probably something with some MicroSoft Word update... Said: Rursus ( ☻) 20:04, 6 October 2008 (UTC)
The business world seems to produce a lot of very long compounds, an example or two might enhance this good article. I'm thinking of things like:
I suspect there would be reliable sources that discuss trends in technical or jargon English regarding such compounds. Alastair Haines ( talk) 22:40, 16 November 2008 (UTC)
Should this article link to Syllabic abbreviation or include content from it? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 128.183.152.104 ( talk) 01:05, 16 December 2008 (UTC)
Is this a good chapter at all? Some of its content seems to belong to how the Germanic languages treat compound nouns (namely that it is considered erroneous in e.g. Swedish to split it into two or more words). The rest has to do with syllabic abbreviation, a totally different area. Some coherency, please! —Preceding unsigned comment added by Andailus ( talk • contribs) 20:25, 28 January 2009 (UTC)
In the entry for the Danish language we have this word kvindehåndboldlandsholdet translated as the female handball national team. Now if we were to write the femalehandballnationalteam (since English doesn't have the affixed article, this will have to be two words) what would be altered save the spaces? There are a few fun examples (or funexamples) floating about Wikipedia, and I must mention two, first the ever recurring (and meant as a joke) Donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaftskapitänsmütze from German and the less known, but every bit as jocular Vaðlaheiðarvegamannaverkfærageymsluhússlyklakippuhringurinn from Icelandic. But is it really not just a question of spelling, i.e. inserting spaces or not? Granted, the inflection of some languages demands one word, but is there any reason except for historical/traditional ones, that English could not produce such words. It is, after all, just like history, "just one damn thing after another". :-) Cheers 85.220.118.164 ( talk) 18:50, 14 April 2009 (UTC)
So what does the word 'lentokonesuihkuturbiinimoottoriapumekaanikkoaliupseerioppilas' mean? Invmog ( talk) 16:40, 12 May 2009 (UTC)
Dubiosity in Recent trends: the section tells that the trend to split words ("orddelingsfeil", word split errors) essentially is a new trend to create new compounds in Nordic languages, and then all logics is lost to me: since when is a new erroneous habit to split compounds erroneously a new way of word formation based on compounding? The contents of the section is kind of funny and enjoyable, the Swedish reknowned counterpart is "fryst kycklinglever" (frozen chicken liver) vs. "fryst kyckling lever" (frozen chicken is alive!), but these aren't word formations by compounding. The examples are grave semantic errors and very unintended. The content of the section doesn't belong to this article. ... said: Rursus ( bork²) 21:51, 4 July 2009 (UTC)
I just changed it from "the English way of compounding words" to "the English way of spelling compound words". —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.63.55.81 ( talk) 17:28, 6 September 2009 (UTC)
Also, compounds are pronounced continuously as one word in at least German and north Germanic languages, whereas English pronunciation may just reflect the way it is written.
I believe it's not that English pronounces compounds as separate words, nor even that German pronounces compounds as single words; it's that German pronounces non-compounds as separate words. Speech inside a prosodic unit isn't really broken into staccato, but a language may have particular phonological processes that work on the word level, and may distinguish single compound words from series of words. English uses only stress for this (and compounded words often retain secondary stress, making the distinction less salient), while German has final obstruent devoicing. You could make the case just as easily that English pronounces all words in a prosodic unit "continuously as one word". — ˈzɪzɨvə ( talk) 00:27, 30 November 2009 (UTC)
I was looking for an article explaining Greek and Latin compounds, but this article does not mention them. I found the article Classical compound via Google after not finding it here: in the very least, it should be mentioned in the article that words of Greek and Latin origin are called as such and not just linked to in the "see also". -- Squidonius ( talk) 03:06, 1 September 2011 (UTC)
I'm not sure who wrote that, in the Romance languages, the verb appears in the third person singular present indicative, but anyway that is not correct. It's very clear that, in the Romance languages, the verb is in the second person singular imperative (and the same is true for English, by the way). This becomes obvious whenever the second person singular imperative is different from the third person singular present indicative. In Spanish, this happens only in a few cases when the second person singular imperative is irregular; e.g. haz from the verb hacer (the third person singular present indicative is hace), thus: hazmerreir (from haz + me + reir) = 'laughingstock' (lit. "make me laugh"). But, in Italian, this happens with all the verbs in -ere, which have the third person singular present indicative ending in -e and the second person singular imperative regularly ending in -i, thus: reggipetto and reggiseno (from the verb reggere = 'to hold, support'), both meaning 'bra' (lit. "breast-holder" or "breast-supporter"), and countless other examples. Pasquale ( talk) 18:00, 3 July 2014 (UTC)
I'm surprised no mention is made of verbs like sleepwalk or playfight, which certainly seem like verb-verb compounds to me. Other Germanic languages have such compounds too, like Dutch slaapwandelen. CodeCat ( talk) 22:55, 3 July 2014 (UTC)
The linguistics article “Compounds (linguistics)” could benefit from a couple alterations. The lead section although interesting doesn’t capture the intention of the article. The article seems rather wordy and long, this is most likely because the topic “compounds” is such a broad topic. I would suggest having a general page introducing main categories and point with links to pages that have a more detailed explanations and examples. Finally, I think the article would be more creditable with more references. There is so much information presented and several examples yet only four references used. -- Maebaran ( talk) 01:18, 19 September 2014 (UTC)
This article gets particularly confusing around the portion where it addresses examples from other languages. There are already portions of examples present in the "Subclasses" section, and although they seem to be well developed, combining the examples would probably help to clear up some confusion. Perhaps the addition of a table may help? The article is also a little wordy, especially around the "Syntactic classification" section, with the portion on verb-verb compounds in particular being rather cramped, example and word wise. Rrrrrllllleeeee ( talk) 02:37, 19 September 2014 (UTC)
That last is a bad example; it must have at least three components, as ä or y cannot occur in the same morpheme with u or o (see vowel harmony). The passage previously said:
— Tamfang ( talk) 23:14, 13 January 2015 (UTC)
In a-stem verbs, the second person singular imperative is indistinguishable from the third person singular present indicative, which is how I've always (mis)understood this element; se llama ‘sacacorchos’ porque saca los corchos. Can we have a Romance example where these forms are dissimilar? — Tamfang ( talk) 07:16, 14 January 2015 (UTC)
What is the extra S doing in compounds like communications protocol and systems programming? I hate constructs like that, because my brain cannot parse them.
-- 84.209.119.158 ( talk) 22:11, 21 May 2015 (UTC)
Yet another example: Linguistics article. In this case, linguistic article would not have unambiguously been a compound noun in English, because the adjective-noun sequence is also syntactically valid as separate words (not that it makes much semantic difference). But inflecting the adjective as if it was a noun rules this out. Multiple consecutive nouns are always a compound noun. -- 84.209.119.158 ( talk) 23:09, 26 May 2015 (UTC)
Why, among the examples, are not a section for English ones included? Like "football", "laboratory coat", "lobster sauce", "freeze-dry"… This would be of great value, as it shows the (inconsistent) tendency, in English, to often separate the component parts of a compound, with spaces.
There is also a general tendency in the article, to confuse "word" with "bit of writing that is separated by spaces". "lobster sauce" is one word. Not two. If one takes a sentence with the term in it, in a sentence, and classifies which bit of the sentence is what, "lobster sauce" will not be classified as two separate parts, but as one single unified noun. One word. Just like "long sword" is one word, referring to a specific type of sword. One noun …whereas "long sword" (spelled exactly the same, as you can see), however, is a sword that is long. A noun preceded by an adjective. Similarly "space bar" is one word (noun), referring to the keyboard key, whereas "space bar" is two words, referring to a bar, that is in, or concerning, space. (look in Wiktionaries category "English multiword terms", and you'll find that most are single word terms. Some are genuinely multiword idioms or phrases, certainly, but most…)-- 213.113.114.132 ( talk) 17:44, 9 April 2021 (UTC)
The article reads: "mean the same as the sum of two words (e.g. German: Pressekonferenz, lit. 'press conference')". This makes no sense. A press conference is not in any sense the "sum" of "press" and "conference". It means "a conference/meeting for the press" or addressed to the press. It could have meant all sorts of other things, like a professional conference for the press or about the press (like a "math conference") or a conference where people are forced to go ("a press gang") or a meeting of people to iron clothes.... -- Macrakis ( talk) 15:02, 23 March 2023 (UTC)
I'm specifically talking about open compound words. You can say "a chicken egg" and "a chicken one". Since the latter isn't a compound word, one could argue the former isn't either. For comparison, in German you can say "Hühnerei" but you can't say anything akin to "chicken one", thus the German word truly is a compound word, but as I understand it, the English phrase isn't. This wouldn't be the case with all open compound words, though. For example, you can say "an apple tree" but not "an apple one", so this would be a real compound word. Disclaimer: I might be totally wrong as English isn't my language. 77.211.6.158 ( talk) 09:15, 20 August 2023 (UTC)
In coordination with the article's most recent edits, I redirected "open compound" to the proper article since there's no such thing in linguistics (and also no such thing as a spaced compound) but there is such a thing in chemistry. The article's now-deleted reference to concatenation targets the correct computer programming article. Kent Dominic·(talk) 16:14, 18 December 2023 (UTC)
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