Re: VMs: Medeltidshandskrift 47

[Koontz John E <John.Koontz@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, 24 Nov 2004, Rene Zandbergen wrote:
> I think it is quite language-dependent. German likes to stick words
> together while English does not. Hyphens tend to be over-used. I suspect
> that I am often guilty of that myself, like in this short paragraph.

>From a linguist's point of view the definition of compounds (in English)
depends on the stress pattern.  For example, the accentuation (or
intonation contour) of White House is the compound pattern, while the
stress of "white house" in "I see a white house." is not.  Unfortunately,
editorially enforced orthographic convention on the use of space-separated
fixed expressions, hyphen-separated expressions, and (unseparated)
compound words is what we might call "uninformed"  by accentual behavior.
It is based, rather, on precedent and convention.  Accentual compounds can
be conventionally written in any of these three ways.  I believe forms
written as compound are always accentual compounds, but some hyphenations
and some word sequences are also accentual compounds, and and I suspect
some conventionally hyphenated forms are not.

Impressionistically, English accentual compounds tend to migrate from
being written separately to being written hyphenated, and finally as one
word.  I think native speakers tend to write accentual compounds as one
word or to hyphenate them, especially when they use them as technical
terms, e.g., user name > username (accentual compound, in computer
terminology), or autocorrelation, but cross correlation >
cross-correlation (both accentual compounds, in statistics).  (I don't
know the literature on this at all, but I run into actual examples all the
time.)

I have no idea how the linguistics and orthography of compounding interact
in other major languages, but I rather suspect German has a much closer
correlation between accentual compounds and orthographic compounds.

One additional complication.  It is possible to have a fixed phrase that
is not a compound.  A major class of examples in English involves use of
particular prepositions to govern complements with verbs.  There is some
difference with dialect and register, but this accounts for the jarring
feeling one gets when one hears a combination not contenanced in one's own
dialect, e.g., "rob from" or "consult about."  (Not everybody may object
to either of these.)  There are also particular combinations of adjectives
and nouns, e.g., terminal cancer or final decision.  Dictionaries of
English generally do a better job of recording the former class than the
latter, but probably don't do either very well.  In general compound and
other fixed forms written with spaces tend to be overlooked.  English is
not unique in having non-compounded fixed phrases.  Even champion
compounders like Eskimo have them.

One thing Eskimo languages have that is at least not common in English is
words that represent nonce (non-fixed) phrases.  Certain sequences of
ideas have to be expressed as complex words even though the resulting
words are not fixed expressions and are, so to speak, thrown together on
the spot.  Uncritical inclusion of such nonce words in dictionaries is
part of the reason why Eskimo languages are sometimes thought to have
numerous words for snow.  I don't know the specific examples, but there
are some Web sites that go into this scholarly legend.  (There are other
dimensions to the legend, too.)

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