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That should have been hyphenated then. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old-growth_forest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old-growth_forest
by Timwi 1y ago
That 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.