Yeah, if "boiling water" is one word, what about boiling sugar? Boiling milk? Boiling volcano? Boiling soup?

Adding two words together creates a new and different concept. The permutations necessary to represent every concept ever formed by combining two or more different words would be endless.

Some of them on the list, like black hole, do make sense. That's a very distinct thing. It's not a hole in the conventional sense and it's not really black. Boiling water, though, is water. And it's boiling.

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vidarh 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

[To be clear, the below is me agreeing with you]

Norwegian is almost as compound-happy as German, and we could've filled many volumes with compounds. But what generally happens for one of the compunds to enter the dictionary is that the compound needs to have a meaning that is non-obvious from the individual parts, at least to some people, and typically that the compound has a non-obvious meaning if interpreted as two separate words.

E.g. "akterutseilt" is an example. "Akterut" means behind, aft. "Seilt" means sailed. "Behind sailed" helps as a way to remember it, but it's not obvious whether it's strictly a sailing term, or means that you've been left behind or have left someone else behind.

In this case if you say someone has been akterutseilt, it means they've been metaphorically left behind, often by their own failure to keep up.

Those kinds of compounds deserve dictionary entries whether they are actually written in two words or one, because they function as a single unit however it is written.

I think black hole is a perfect example in English. And in fact, this is a compound that is written in two words in Norwegian as well, but is in Norwegian dictionaries despite that[1] as "svart hull".

[1] https://ordbokene.no/bm/svart%20hull

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michaeld123 8 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

And I attempted to add your 'svart hull' note.

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Skeime an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Fun fact: I looked this up in the online version of the Duden (the predominant German dictionary). It does have an entry "Black Hole" (so the English term!) but not for "schwarzes Loch", which is the normal German term for it.

(In the printed versions, you might need to go to the Universalwörterbuch or so to find the English entry, it might not be in the normal "Die deutsche Rechtschreibung"; I have not checked.)

	▲	vidarh an hour ago \| parent [-]
		> Duden Just the name gives me flashbacks to German-lessons in highschool.

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michaeld123 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Great example — I added svart hull to the article as an illustration of a language that writes it as two words but still puts it in the dictionary because the meaning isn't obvious from the parts. That's exactly the instinct English lacks.

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ben_w 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Adding two words together creates a new and different concept. The permutations necessary to represent every concept ever formed by combining two or more different words would be endless.

May I introduce you to the German language?

We have "gesundheitszeugnis" (health certificate) and "bärenstark" (strong as a bear), and of course "[der] Donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaftskapitän" ([the] Danube Steamship Navigation Company Captain) and "[Das] Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz" ([the] cattle marking and beef labeling supervision duties delegation law).

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michaeld123 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Added a German/Norwegian section — but vidarh corrected me below: German doesn't 'remove the space,' the compound never had one. Adding a space changes the meaning or breaks the grammar. The article now reflects that.

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vidarh 21 minutes ago | parent [-]

The issue with German as well as Norwegian is that a space creates a semantically distinct structure, so it's not that they remove the space, but that one wasn't there in the first place, and some of those compounds then become important enough for the dictionary.

Absolutely not all - there's a near unbounded set of possible compounds.

In Norwegian, we in fact have a compound for the incorrect separation of compounds: "orddelingsfeil" (word separation error). Actually, we have two - technically it's "særskrivingsfeil" (separate writing error), but "orddelingsfeil" is more common... We take this seriously.

The problem is that while some are definitely wrong, others change meaning.

E.g. "en norsk lærer" means "a Norwegian teacher" but "en norsklærer" means "a teacher of the subject Norwegian". There's an infinite set of possible -lærer compounds: If you create a new subject then a teacher of that subject is a <subject>lærer. Obviously they can't all go in the dictionary.

Some other examples:

"Røyk fritt" means "smoke freely" while "røykfritt" means "smokefree". "Steke ovn", means "to fry an oven", while "stekeovn" means "oven". These two belong in the dictionary because they are so common and that though technically you can use "ovn" and "fri"/"fritt" to form a near infinite number of other common forms as well, in practice the number of common forms that use them is quite limited.

The key part is that most compounds in languages like German or Norwegian will only have one valid way of writing them. Add spaces, and you usually end up with something ungrammatical or with an entirely different meaning.

Whereas in English whether or not a word can be written with a space, with a hyphen, or combined much more often changes over time, and can differ in different places at different times, as the <separate words> -> <hyphenated> -> <compound> pipeline in English is slow and arbitrary and not necessarily reflecting a change in meaning.

	▲	michaeld123 11 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I just adapted your comments into the paragraph starting with "German". Hopefully accurately.

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account42 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

And we don't expect dictionaries to contain every compound word you could come up with in German either.

	▲	ben_w 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Not the ones that someone could come up with, just the ones people do use.

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traveler1 an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Boiling point?