4 ms·
What is a "growth tree"?
by urquhartfe 1y ago
What is a "growth tree"?
- MagnumOpus 1y ago((Old growth) tree), not (old (growth tree)). Old growth trees are trees or forests that are centuries old and not recently cultures.
- Timwi 1y agoThat should have been hyphenated then. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old-growth_forest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old-growth_forest
- 8n4vidtmkvmk 1y agoTangential, how do you hyphenate (((very old) growth) tree)?
- saltcured 1y agoIn English, we're making a compound adjective so it would be very-old-growth tree. It's one step short of the German compound noun, and we make it easier to find the fragments...
- ronjakoi 1y agoEnglish is the only language I know of that allows spaces in compound words at all. It's a very peculiar feature of English orthography.
- jodrellblank 1y agoancient-growth tree
- gowld 1y agoThis sort of thing comes up often for me. I use extended hyphenation to declare precedence: very-old--growth tree.
- JdeBP 1y agoIt does not have to be. The English language has a process where phrases become hyphenated compounds which then become single words. It's permissible to be partway along that path, and for people to disagree where something is on that path. Pick any point in the past few centuries, and there's going to be something, possibly nowadays always a single word, but not necessarily so even now, that was in a state of flux at the time. The same goes for today.
- pmontra 1y agoAnd "nowadays" is an example of that process https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=nowadays,%20now-a-days&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1;,nowadays;,c0;.t1;,now%20-%20a%20-%20days;,c0 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=nowadays,%20no...
- Timwi 1y ago“Old growth forest” is incorrect in any formulation of English grammar that I'm familiar with. It's not about fixed phrases. It's about using an adjective+noun pair (in this case, old+growth) as an adjective modifying another noun (in this case, forest). This is a general rule that applies across the board, not an isolated phrase example. The poster was correct in asking what a “growth forest” is, because without the hyphen, the phrase parses as an adjective (old) modifying a compound noun.
- CalRobert 1y agoHave a nice week-end! I fondly recall the days of my youth as a teen-ager. Though I still lament the loss of the subjunctive form. And diaeresis.
- halper 1y agoHyphenation is useful in phrasal adjectives, like "heavy-metal shield" (to distinguish it from a shield that is of metal and is heavy, but is not or a for example Pb) or in something like "four-day trips" (the trips last four days; they are not necessarily four in number).
- CalRobert 1y agoI like it too, and you're talking to someone who has been trying, mostly in vain, to teach his kids the difference between "I wish I was there" and "I wish I were there", or how you can get eggs from a coop or a coöp, and they're different things, but eventually the hyphenation dies out and the phrase remains.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- adamhartenz 1y agoNot "growth tree" but an "old growth" tree. It just means a tree that was left to mature, and never cut down.
- PaulDavisThe1st 1y agoTypically it also means one left to grow naturally, without forcing the rate by various methods (as is done in many modern tree farms).
- abdulmuhaimin 1y agois there any difference to just saying "old tree"?
- jaggederest 1y agoOld trees are not necessarily old-growth trees. A fallow tree farm left to age has zero old-growth trees, regardless of how old they are.
- spauldo 1y agoIt means a mature tree in an old-growth forest. Trees that grow in the dense shade of other trees grow slower, and their growth rings are much closer together. The result is that a tree takes a lot longer to grow but it's stronger and harder than the same species grown in the sunlight. The reason for the distinction is that most of the old growth forests have been clear-cut and the lumber available today is fast-growth farmed lumber. If you compare a 2x4 at Lowe's with a 2x4 out of a 150-year-old house, you'll see that the wood itself is very different even though the species might be the same. The tree the new 2x4 came from was fairly young, while the tree the 150-year-old 2x4 came from was probably centuries old.
- aaronharnly 1y agoYou have the real answer, but I suppose it is contrasted with a "value tree."