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No, it's really not. Joining words into a compound word enables the new compound to take on new meaning and evolve on its own, and if it becomes widely used as

No, it's really not. Joining words into a compound word enables the new compound to take on new meaning and evolve on its own, and if it becomes widely used as a compound it always does so. The term you're looking for if you care to google it is an "open compound noun". A dog in the sun may be hot, but that doesn't make it a hot dog. You can use a towel to dry your hair, but that doesn't make the towel a hair dryer. Putting coffee on a dining room table doesn't turn it into a coffee table. Spreading Elmer's glue on your teeth doesn't make it tooth paste. The White House is, in fact, a white house, but my neighbor's white house is not The White House. I could go on, but I think the above is a sufficient selection to show that language does not, in fact, work that way. You can't decompose a compound noun into its component morphemes and expect to be able to derive the compound's meaning from them.

lostmsu 2y ago
You wrote so much while failing to read so little: > in most cases What do you think will happen if we will start comparing the lengths of the list ["hot dog", ...] and the list ["blue bird", "aeroplane", "sunny March day", ...]?
- lolinder 2y ago
  No, I read that, and it's wrong. Can you point me to a single compound noun that works that way? A bluebird is a specific species. A blue parrot is not a bluebird. An aeroplane is a vehicle that flies through the air at high speeds, but if you broke it down into morphemes and tried to reason it out that way you could easily argue that a two-dimensional flat surface that extends infinitely in all directions and intersects the air should count. Sunny March day isn't a compound noun, it's a noun phrase. Can you point me to a single compound noun (that is, a two-or-more-part word that is widely used enough to earn a definition in a dictionary, like AGI) that can be subjected to the kind of breaking apart into morphemes that you're doing without yielding obviously nonsensical re-interpretations?

lostmsu 2y ago

You wrote so much while failing to read so little: > in most cases What do you think will happen if we will start comparing the lengths of the list ["hot dog", ...] and the list ["blue bird", "aeroplane", "sunny March day", ...]?

lolinder 2y ago
No, I read that, and it's wrong. Can you point me to a single compound noun that works that way? A bluebird is a specific species. A blue parrot is not a bluebird. An aeroplane is a vehicle that flies through the air at high speeds, but if you broke it down into morphemes and tried to reason it out that way you could easily argue that a two-dimensional flat surface that extends infinitely in all directions and intersects the air should count. Sunny March day isn't a compound noun, it's a noun phrase. Can you point me to a single compound noun (that is, a two-or-more-part word that is widely used enough to earn a definition in a dictionary, like AGI) that can be subjected to the kind of breaking apart into morphemes that you're doing without yielding obviously nonsensical re-interpretations?