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Funny, but as a speaker of Greek I never realised that it's in principle possible to basically create infinitely many, infinitely long new Greek words by stitch

Funny, but as a speaker of Greek I never realised that it's in principle possible to basically create infinitely many, infinitely long new Greek words by stitching together word-roots and connectives, like "λόπαδ-ο τέμαχ-ο", etc. I mean, has any linguist noticed this? The ability to (again in principle) embed infinitely many sentences is AFAIK an argument for the infinite generativity of natural language. Can the same argument be supported at the word-level also? And does anyone know whether it has? Also, I think in German it's very common to string together words like that to form longer words. Are there more languages with that characteristic?

willtemperley 9mo ago
There are quite a few agglutinative languages: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agglutinative_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agglutinative_language Important knowledge for those suffering from hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia.
BalinKing 9mo ago
From what I've read, the German phenomenon isn't actually German-specific after all, and English does it too; the difference is just that English keeps the spaces when written. Like, linguists apparently consider "vending machine" to be a perfectly cromulent compound word (among other things, consider that the stress falls on "vending" instead of "machine," which wouldn't(?) happen if "vending" was being used as a bona fide standalone word). Turns out, there's not even an accepted general definition of what a "word" even is in the first place, because different languages vary so much. A slightly more thorough discussion from an actual linguist: https://youtu.be/tfnANe2YUwM?si=LAxriH-RuqmUgrxl https://youtu.be/tfnANe2YUwM?si=LAxriH-RuqmUgrxl.
thaumasiotes 9mo ago
> I mean, has any linguist noticed this? Yes. > Also, I think in German it's very common to string together words like that to form longer words. Are there more languages with that characteristic? Yes. All of them. > Can the same argument be supported at the word-level also? Here it depends what you mean by "the word-level". "Words" are commonly taken to be compositionally opaque. Compound expressions are not compositionally opaque and are not "words" in this sense.
zvr 9mo ago
Really, never realized it? Πίτα, τυρό-πιτα, σπανακο-τυρό-πιτα, ζαμπονο-σπανακο-τυρό-πιτα, ...

willtemperley 9mo ago

There are quite a few agglutinative languages: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agglutinative_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agglutinative_language Important knowledge for those suffering from hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia.

BalinKing 9mo ago

From what I've read, the German phenomenon isn't actually German-specific after all, and English does it too; the difference is just that English keeps the spaces when written. Like, linguists apparently consider "vending machine" to be a perfectly cromulent compound word (among other things, consider that the stress falls on "vending" instead of "machine," which wouldn't(?) happen if "vending" was being used as a bona fide standalone word). Turns out, there's not even an accepted general definition of what a "word" even is in the first place, because different languages vary so much. A slightly more thorough discussion from an actual linguist: https://youtu.be/tfnANe2YUwM?si=LAxriH-RuqmUgrxl https://youtu.be/tfnANe2YUwM?si=LAxriH-RuqmUgrxl.

thaumasiotes 9mo ago

> I mean, has any linguist noticed this? Yes. > Also, I think in German it's very common to string together words like that to form longer words. Are there more languages with that characteristic? Yes. All of them. > Can the same argument be supported at the word-level also? Here it depends what you mean by "the word-level". "Words" are commonly taken to be compositionally opaque. Compound expressions are not compositionally opaque and are not "words" in this sense.

zvr 9mo ago

Really, never realized it? Πίτα, τυρό-πιτα, σπανακο-τυρό-πιτα, ζαμπονο-σπανακο-τυρό-πιτα, ...