• herrvogel@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    18 days ago

    Compound words are very different than agglutinative conjugation though. In such languages, you don’t just mash words together, you also modify them to encode all sorts of extra information into one word. You can form full, grammatically correct sentences that way. Can’t do that with compound words because you can’t compound them into a complete sentence.

    A famous, powe example is the word “çekoslovakyalılaştırabildiklerimizdensiniz” from Turkish, which is like Finnish in that regard. It’s a complete sentence that means “you are one of those who we have managed to make a czechoslovakian”. The object, subject, verb, tense, and more are all in there. Obviously that’s quite a bit more complex than word together-mashing.

    • dafo@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      18 days ago

      This is above my linguistic pay grade as I’m barely able to string together a coherent sentence when working, but, I think the moral here is that English is a crap language (at the very least very messy and lacks qualities found in other languages).