[Lexicog] new nosey word

[Mike Maxwell]

Mali Translation wrote:
> Are there languages that can build tapeworm words like
> German "Automobilausstellungsleiterantragsformularvordruckspapier"
> (= automobile exhibition director application form preprint paper)?
> ...The interesting thing is that
> German has a tendency to combine all these words into one, while
> English would not.

I took German in college (probably before you were born), and I never
studied French until a few years ago--but I had taken Spanish.  And for
years I noticed an odd thing: I could read technical papers in French (with
the aid of a dictionary), but I couldn't read technical papers in German.
But with the spoken language, it was just the opposite: I could (sort of)
converse in German, but couldn't pick out any words in spoken French.

One of the factors, I decided, was that technical written German, and to
some extent non-technical written German, was full of compounds like this
(well, most were not quite as bad).  (Another factor is French spelling,
which is about as far from phonemic as English spelling.)  If the German
compound had been written with spaces--

    Automobil Ausstellungs Leiter Antrags Formular Vordrucks Papier

--I would have had a much better chance of understanding.  (I've left the
's' "linkers"--I think that's what they are--on the end of many of the
words).  Or you could just retain the capitalization on each noun (for
readers who don't know this, German orthography capitalizes all nouns):

    AutomobilAusstellungsLeiterAntragsFormularVordrucksPapier

Also, if I hear such a word spoken, I stand a better chance of understanding
it.  My guess is that this is because the accented syllables on the
individual nouns help in parsing.  (If German wrote the accented vowels,
this might help.)

So it appears to me--at least from my English perspective--that the problem
is not so much with the words, but with the way the German orthography
insists on running them together.  That is, German doesn't use compound
nouns all that much more than English does (I can say "aircraft emergency
systems maintainence program orientation"), it's just that German doesn't
write them in a helpful way.  (Lexicalized compounds in English, like
Fritz's "blackbird", are written that way precisely because they are
lexicalized; I assume
Automobilausstellungsleiterantragsformularvordruckspapier is not, at least
it's not in the on-line dictionary I consulted.)

    Mike Maxwell
    Linguistic Data Consortium
    maxwell at ldc.upenn.edu



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