Incorporation (was: Re: animate _wa-_)

["Alfred W. Tüting"]

 >>On Wed, 7 Jan 2004, Heike Bödeker wrote:
Well, how the orthography reform came into being was a very dubious
process which had a lot to do with politics, but less so with linguistic
insights, not to speak of a concern for folk linguistics. Ironically,
these rules have been criticized exactly because they completely ignore
that German does have incorporation.<<<<

 >So does English, though to a different extent.  One of the most difficult
spelling problems in English is determining how to write given compound
properly, as a single, a hyphenated form, or as two words.  It doesn't
make any difference at all what the intonation pattern (or your instincts)
might be, you have to follow the dictionary or some equally arbitrary
organization or profession-specific set of rules.<<

I heartfelt can't but agree with Heike, be it on most of the (pretty
nonsensical) rules of so-called German 'Orthografiereform', be it the
fact that German too has incorporation!

As for building compounds in German and English (also mentioned by
Rory), I've been reflecting about it, coming to a - maybe preliminary -
conclusion that (at least in German) this is highly idiomatic due to
historical reasons. Basically, there seem to be three ways to form
compounds: noun-sg.+noun (Kuhjunge/cowboy; Kuhmist/cow dung),
noun-pl.+noun (Pferdemist/horse manure), noun-sg. genitive
(Feindesliebe/love for enemy/enemies; Schweinsbraten/roast pork;
Rindsroulade/roll of beef). One has to recognizes that in modern
coinages  compounds based on genitival forms no longer seem to be
productive E.g. 'Schweinsbraten' today is regarded as a Southern German
variant (which actually is more conservative in many regards) and widely
replaced by 'Schweinebraten' Same with 'Rindsroulade' where my online
dictionary was asking back: "Did you mean 'Rinderroulade'? ;-) So, the
genitive forms  in so-called High German are mostly traditionally coined
  like 'Windsbraut', 'Meeres-/ Waldesrauschen'/about: brawl of the sea/
wood's rustling etc.

It is quite impossible to 'calculate' the correct compounds by using the
rules - one's got to have the forms stored in memory (not unlike the
different forms of irregular past tense in English).

I've the impression that it's somewhat comparable with Dakotan noun +
'adjective' forms (e.g. sunkawakan waste wan bluha vs. wicahpi wan
kinyan ca wawanyanke): the rules of grammar are correct but don't help -
one simply's got to know from memory which topics are 'felt' as fix
compounds and which ones still as topics plus kind of dependent clause
that has need of a conjunction using _ca_).

Kind regards

Alfred






Best regards

Alfred