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Comment by seanhunter | Hacker News Reader

Not sure this approach really accounts for the difference between a language like German where you have one compound word for a concept that would require multiple words in English. For one good example, the German "Nomenkompositum" is "compound noun" in English.

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Some giant portion of English vocabulary actually are compound words. English loves using compound words but only if the roots are sourced from Latin or Greek: words like electrocardiogram ("electronic heart picture", sourced from Greek), agriculture ("field nurturing", from Latin), and telecommunication ("far sharing", a hybrid of Latin and Greek roots). Probably the overwhelming majority of the words in an English dictionary will be compound words, and people regularly coin neologisms ("new words") using this formula.

An English speaker might be willing to accept componoma ("names placed together", Latin) or synthetonoma (also "names placed together", Greek) without breaking stride.

What sticks out to me is that the first word in these ends with a vowel so they don't sound like compound words.

A couple of ape cubs who learned sign language saw a duck and invented "waterbird". We have to know two dead languages to know if aquaplaning or hydroplaning is the right word.

Language while involved in that water related process is probably drawn from Anglo-Saxon or possibly Old Norse. No refined Mediterranean stuff.

I wasn’t saying there are no compound nouns in English at all. If you count portmanteau words like “Brexit” and jargon there are a massive abundance of them. All I was saying is the approach would count certain concepts as untranslatable when they clearly aren’t, simply because in one language you have a compound word and in the other language you use several words to express the same concept. It’s definitely not untranslatable but the translation function isn’t one to one.

I think your point basically asks the question "what counts as a word" because clearly German has infinitely more "words" than would ever appear individually in a dictionary. I'm saying that English does, too.

> English loves using compound words but only if the roots are sourced from Latin or Greek: words like electrocardiogram

This is false; English loves using compound words. One example of such a compound word is "fire department", which has identical syntax to the German compound "Feuerwehr". Whether a compound word is spelled with or without internal spaces is not a fact about the language, it's a fact about the spelling.

You'd call it a noun phrase, not a compound word. Definitely splitting hairs at this point, but hey that's what gets me off.

That's just a difference in orthography. English could easily have had an orthographic standard where we write "compoundnoun" for compounds. This is in contrast with a language like French, where compound nouns are relatively rare. Compare English "Olive oil" and German "Olivenöl" with French "huile d'olive". In French you need to have a preposition to combine the two nouns, whereas English and German do noun-noun composition.

You are right but neither yours nor those of the previous posters are good examples of compound nouns.

These examples have just the meanings of a noun + adjective or of a noun + noun in genitive case, where some languages are lazier than others and omit the markers of case or of adjectival derivation from noun, which are needed in more strict languages.

There are also other kinds of compound nouns, where the compound noun does not have the meaning of its component words, but only some related meaning (usually either a pars pro toto meaning or a metaphorical meaning). Those are true compound nouns, not just abbreviated sequences of words from which the grammatical markers have been omitted.

Such compound words were very frequent in Ancient Greek, from where they have been inherited in the scientific and technical language, where they have been used to create names for new things and concepts, e.g. arthropod, television, phonograph, basketball, "bullet train" and so on.

This kind of compound words are almost never translatable, but they are frequently borrowed from one language to another and during the borrowing process sometimes the component words are translated, but the result is not a translated word, it is a new word that is added to the destination language.

> There are also other kinds of compound nouns, where the compound noun does not have the meaning of its component words, but only some related meaning (usually either a pars pro toto meaning or a metaphorical meaning)

The example that people often quote from German is “kummerspeck” which would literally translate as “grief bacon”, but means weight you put on through comfort eating having gone through a bereavement or other trauma.

> There are also other kinds of compound nouns, where the compound noun does not have the meaning of its component words

Wouldn't cranberry morphemes be good examples this type of relationship? I don't know if, in the eponymous example, the cran- being bound precludes it from being counted as a closed compound word or not though.

If you ignore the spaces, the only real difference between German and English compound nouns are the infixes between elements to show bracketing. Case in point: Nomenkompositum

It's the same structure in both languages. Just because it's written as if it were a single unbreakable word doesn't mean it is--or contrariwise, the fact that it's written as two things with a space in between doesn't mean that it's two "words" in English. The problem lies in the meaning of "word." Is 'doghouse' one word in English, while 'dog house' is two? No.

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