Beautiful German words not for Anki

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Kamlari
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Re: Beautiful German words not for Anki

Postby Kamlari » Thu Sep 13, 2018 9:05 am

I would vehemently protest against some German words being written with spaces. Some of them are so intimately linked. Lügenpresse for instance.
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Re: Beautiful German words not for Anki

Postby patrickwilken » Thu Sep 13, 2018 9:39 am

In any case you can't just put spaces in and say there are four words. Grammar has to come in somewhere. Perhaps one of the German native speakers can re-write this as a proper grammatical sentence, but I guess in English you'd have to write something like:

the ship which is used for trade, that trades in jam, which is made out of raspberries.

I think even in English "raspberry jam trade ship" is one or two compound words even if there are spaces.
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Re: Beautiful German words not for Anki

Postby zenmonkey » Thu Sep 13, 2018 9:48 am

patrickwilken wrote:
zenmonkey wrote:a single distinct meaningful element of speech or writing, used with others (or sometimes alone) to form a sentence and shown with a space on either side when written or printed.


I don't think having a space is the critical point, at least not for compound words in English (e.g,, "water tank", "dry cleaning", take out", "driving licence", "printer cartridge", "public speaking").

Of course there are lots of compound words in English without spaces: bedroom; motorcycle; haircut; lookout; drawback; onlooker; bystander; greenhouse; software; redhead; output; overthrow; upturn; input.

Perhaps the space takes a while to be removed. "Electronic mail" becomes "e-mail" becomes "email".


Compound word are... made up of 2 or more words. Even the definition of compound words reinforces what a word is.
Compound noun can be written either as a single word, as a word with a hyphen, or as two words.

Armbanduhr is not three words. Armbanduhr mit Wecker is three words.
Handschuh is not two words.
Umwelteinflüssen is not four words.
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Re: Beautiful German words not for Anki

Postby zenmonkey » Thu Sep 13, 2018 9:53 am

patrickwilken wrote:In any case you can't just put spaces in and say there are four words. Grammar has to come in somewhere. Perhaps one of the German native speakers can re-write this as a proper grammatical sentence, but I guess in English you'd have to write something like:

the ship which is used for trade, that trades in jam, which is made out of raspberries.

I think even in English "raspberry jam trade ship" is one or two compound words even if there are spaces.


I think the jam is made of raspberries, not the ship. :D :lol:
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Re: Beautiful German words not for Anki

Postby patrickwilken » Thu Sep 13, 2018 11:24 am

zenmonkey wrote:
patrickwilken wrote:In any case you can't just put spaces in and say there are four words. Grammar has to come in somewhere. Perhaps one of the German native speakers can re-write this as a proper grammatical sentence, but I guess in English you'd have to write something like:

the ship which is used for trade, that trades in jam, which is made out of raspberries.

I think even in English "raspberry jam trade ship" is one or two compound words even if there are spaces.


I think the jam is made of raspberries, not the ship. :D :lol:


Agreed, but of course there is no such compound word in English. If there were, you could use emphasis within the word to disambiguate it, with the stress usually falling on the first syllable in compound words raspberryjamtradeship (a trading ship for raspberry jam) vs a raspberryjamtradeship (a ship made out of raspberry jam).

There is apparently a Youtube video for everything:

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Re: Beautiful German words not for Anki

Postby cjareck » Thu Sep 13, 2018 12:10 pm


There is a funny video about it. Unfortunately, it is only in Polish, but you may hear many lovely German words. You will surely recognize them ;)
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Re: Beautiful German words not for Anki

Postby patrickwilken » Thu Sep 13, 2018 1:47 pm

Hashimi wrote:Do you consider "red book" as one word?


No of course not. In this example red is an adjective for book. Though would you consider the "little red book" of Mao one or three words?
redbook.jpeg


Hashimi wrote:A word is the smallest element that can be uttered in isolation with objective or practical meaning.


I prefer the OUP definition of a word being A single distinct conceptual unit of language, comprising inflected and variant forms.

In this sense both "Pressekonferenz" or "doghouse" and are single (compound) words. They are both single distinct conceptual units which are treated as such by the grammar of their respective languages.

Anyway I am going with OUP and Duden who both regard these as single words:
doghouse https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/doghouse
Pressekonferenz https://www.duden.de/rechtschreibung/Pressekonferenz
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Re: Beautiful German words not for Anki

Postby zenmonkey » Thu Sep 13, 2018 2:23 pm

Hashimi wrote:
zenmonkey wrote: the conventional definition of what a word is.

a single distinct meaningful element of speech or writing, used with others (or sometimes alone) to form a sentence and shown with a space on either side when written or printed.


Writing or printing are irrelevant here.


Says you. :lol: And yet, here we are writing and not speaking.
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Re: Beautiful German words not for Anki

Postby Ani » Thu Sep 13, 2018 2:51 pm

Hashimi wrote:
Do you consider "red book" as one word?

A word is the smallest element that can be uttered in isolation with objective or practical meaning.

"take out" is a phrasal verb which consists of two words.

"Pressekonferenz" or "doghouse" are noun-noun compounds that consists of two words.


Take out is also a compound noun describing the food you pick up from a restaurant to eat at home.
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Re: Beautiful German words not for Anki

Postby Mista » Thu Sep 13, 2018 4:12 pm

What's the difference between black birds and blackbirds?
What's the difference between blue berries and blueberries?

I think we can all agree that not all black birds are blackbirds, and that not all blue berries are blueberries, therefore there has to be some difference.

I can think of three:
- semantic: the meaning of the compounds are not compositional, the meaning of the two words black and bird do not combine to give the meaning of blackbird, but they do combne to give the meaning of black bird
- syntactic: you can talk about blue and delicious berries and you can talk about blue- and raspberries (maybe...) but you can't talk about blue- and delicious berries (if you do, the berries will be understood to be blue in color, and not specifically blueberries)
- phonetic: the compound has a single stress, while in the adjectival expressions the two words each have their own stress

These are all valid for English. For other languages, like German and Norwegian, the already mentioned aspects of gender and grammatical endings come in addition. I don't think there can be any doubt that a compound word is a word. There is, however, some doubt whether you can say that a compound word is actually composed of words, some linguists would claim that the components are word stems rather than words.
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