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Comment by coldnose | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone else find spicing up ordinary words with new cognates amusing? Super-researchers are ultraconcerned about hyperalarming insect megaloss.

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Prefixes, not cognates.

One of the examples that coldnose offers has a suffix appended to it, so I think you're incorrect, too.

Maybe affixes?

By the way, yours is an example of Muphry's law. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muphry%27s_law

And because I'm correcting your incorrect correction, I have a feeling that I've gotten something wrong, too.

Which one is a suffix? super- hyper- ultra- mega- are all prefixes

the usual term is superlatives for intensifiers like that.

Super-pedantic.

Megadantic

It is literally what I love about the English language. You can easily generate new words that are easily understood.

In the same thought, it's completely unnecessary.

Hmm what do you mean by English language? I cannot think of a language that wouldn't let this (maybe a very analytic language, like Mandarin?). This is probably a universal property of human languages.

I don't speak German but I've always had the impression they love mashing words together to make super long but informative words.

Yes, that's a thing they do in German. Instead of post office it would be postoffice. Instead of train station it would be trainstation. (Only in German, obviously.)

Not exactly what's being described above though.

People always go ”oh those crazy German words” when in reality all Nordic countries do this, and I’d bet at least Dutch too.

We do this a lot! Woordsamenvoegsmania! (The mania of connecting words)

At least in Norwegian the general rule is: if it is one thing, it is one word. Is sad to see how the English rules influence how many write now. Auto-correct end "spelling-checkers" are often terrible at this, and many think if MS Word or Google say it should be written a way it is the correct way

I have to say, Mandarin is the absolute best at this. One of my favorites is the fact that the word for precedent is simply the character for "first" followed by the character for "example." So simple and straightforward. Even as a non-native speaker, once you get the hang of it you can just glue words together and often hit on the right compound word for some vocabulary you haven't ever studied. And also make mistakes... of course.

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