• FishFace@piefed.social
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    1 month ago

    German compound nouns are just written without spaces. There’s no grammatical difference between “Schlafsack” (= Schlaf “sleep” + Sack “bag”) and “sleeping bag”, except the way they’re written down. In English we analyse a “word” as “a thing you write down with spaces on either side”, which is valid as a definition or as an analysis, but it’s not what we really think of when we talk about words, which we think of as something more fundamental.

    If, tomorrow, we decided in English to write compound nouns without spaces, the language would have suddenly gained thousands and thousands of words, yet the only real difference would be a rule about writing things down. Spoken English would be exactly the same, so nothing fundamental about the actual bits of English would have changed.

      • FishFace@piefed.social
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        1 month ago

        Well the rest of the rules around written English are arbitrary, why would this one be different?!

        I think I’d write fish bowl separately though.

        • schipelblorp@sh.itjust.works
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          1 month ago

          Wikipedia explains “the rules.”

          Tap for spoiler

          They’re more suggestions.

          Orthography: open, hyphenated, or solid (closed up)

          English uses many open compound nouns, a large subclass of which, by convention in accepted English orthography, are not closed up (not solidified) and are sometimes optionally hyphenated in attributive position (that is, when functioning as a noun adjunct). Examples are high school, kidney disease, and file format. Although some other languages would close up these nouns’ components (for example, German usually does so), English has a tendency whereby it closes up only certain ones, usually only ones in which the head noun is monosyllabic (and even within that category, only sometimes, and in a way that is not fully standardized). For example, data set and dataset, or file name and filename, are accepted alternative forms, but file format, data format, and data analysis, which have multisyllabic heads (format and analysis), can only be spelled as open in accepted English orthography. This pattern holds for countless nouns with few exceptions. For the class with monosyllabic heads, there is a tendency that “compounds tend to solidify as they age,”[5]: 368  which is how a term such as data set becomes dataset, pin-up becomes pinup,[5]: 368  coal mine becomes coalmine, bottle cap becomes bottlecap, and so on. Such alternative forms usually continue to coexist in accepted use; style guides often convene on preferred dictionaries as a way of achieving consistency, by declaring that the headword form there will be the default styling for each such term.

        • Denjin@feddit.uk
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          1 month ago

          Depends if it’s a fish bowl (a bowl for a fish) or a fishbowl (a big watered down drink you can buy from bad nightclubs)

          • flandish@lemmy.world
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            1 month ago

            i too remember getting a fishbowl in the 90’s at applebee’s in the mall, then going to a movie, and then hoping by the time your movie was done you’d be sober enought to drive home.

        • DougPiranha42@lemmy.world
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          30 days ago

          Pink Floyd:

          How I wish, how I wish you were here
          We’re just two lost souls swimming in
          a fishbowl, year after year
          Running over the same old ground, what have we found?
          The same old fears, wish you were here

    • ExtraJudgement@lemmy.world
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      28 days ago

      Mostly true, but in standard German one would normally vocalize “Schlafsack” without any audible pause between the f and the s.

      If you were to pronounce “Schlaf sack”, there would generally be an expectation of a glottal stop an audible stop between the f and the s (dialects excluded).

      So while, yes, compound words in German are written without spaces, that’s not just a writing difference.

      • FishFace@piefed.social
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        29 days ago

        This is the same in English between “sleeping” and “bag”. The pronunciation of “ing ba” in “sleeping bag” is exactly the same as the pronunciation of “ingba” in “dingbat”.

        In German, just the same: there is not generally a pause between words written separately: there’s no gap that you can find on a spectrogram of a recording of someone saying, say, “brauner Sack” between the two words.

        I think people are surprised to hear this, so one explanation for what you wrote is that you genuinely believe in speech there is generally a tiny pause between words, that you don’t find within words. It’s difficult to find a good citation for this because it’s a fairly basic fact in linguistics, in spite of how surprising it may be; the best I came up with was this Duolingo post

        But you may already be aware of that and be getting at something else: in German, “Schlafsack” is a word that will be understood by anyone if you say it in the normal way. To get someone to understand that you’re saying the two words “Schlaf Sack” next to one another without understanding “Schlafsack”, you need to do something to make it clear, otherwise they’ll understand the normal word. And one way to do that would be to insert a tiny gap. This is different though: in English if you wanted someone to understand “sleeping bag” not as the thing you use while camping but, perhaps, an anthropomorphic bag that is having a nap, you need to employ something similar. So this is not a difference between the languages.

        • ExtraJudgement@lemmy.world
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          28 days ago

          In German, just the same: there is not generally a pause between words written separately: there’s no gap that you can find on a spectrogram of a recording of someone saying, say, “brauner Sack” between the two words.

          At the cost of appealing to authority: As a native German speaker, I can absolutely hear the glottal stop a stop between two separate words. It exists. It can also often be found between consecutive vowels within a word, but not necessarily between consecutive consonants like in your example. There’s a reason why it’s in the IPA. It’s also e.g. the basis for the “gender not-really-neutral” dialect of German, which injects an additional glottal stop into a word (like Bürger:innen, which is pronounced like Bürger innen, not like Bürgerinnen).

          • FishFace@piefed.social
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            29 days ago

            Paradoxically, non-native speakers tend to be better at analysing this kind of thing ;) German for sure does not have a glottal stop between most words. “Das Kind” is /daskınt/ not /dasʔkınt/.

            I’m not sure if I’ve misunderstood you and this isn’t what you’re saying happens…

            • ExtraJudgement@lemmy.world
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              28 days ago

              “Das Kind” is /daskınt/ not /dasʔkınt/.

              It absolutely is /dasʔkınt/ in the standard German I’ve grown up with. I’ve never heard anyone any native speaker pronounce it as /daskınt/.

              • FishFace@piefed.social
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                29 days ago

                Can you find a recording (not necessarily of someone saying “das kind”, but of any two words, the first ending and the second beginning with a consonant) where you can hear this glottal stop put in between? It should come from flowing speech, not the boundary of a clause or sentence where the speaker might insert an extra pause, of course. If you want to record yourself demonstrating it, that would be perfect but I appreciate you may not want to.

                Ideally also a recording of as much of the same sequence of sounds without it, for comparison, but that’s less important :)

                edit: realised I could give you an example myself. Here’s a recording from Wiktionary, a native speaker saying “aus Kindern werden Leute”. There is no glottal stop between any of the words.

                And while finding that I realised there is a point from the other direction: in precise speech, there is a glottal stop in German compounds where the second part starts with a vowel sound. So Spiegelei is listed in the Duden as having a glottal stop before the “Ei”.

                • ExtraJudgement@lemmy.world
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                  29 days ago

                  If you provide storage to upload four audio .wav files (each about 400 KiB), I can send you samples generated by me speaking, then cloned with w-okada using a generic voice I believe is freely usable. It’s far from perfect, but it’s good enough for me to clearly tell which is which just by listening.

  • remon@ani.social
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    1 month ago

    Not that I’m aware of but you can always make one up.

    Like “verarbeitiungszeitintensive Frage” or something like that.

  • Kazumara@discuss.tchncs.de
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    29 days ago

    Not that I am aware of, sorry.

    All the words posted before by the others in the thread are made up, and some of them aren’t even good at pretending to be German.

  • Zwuzelmaus@feddit.org
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    1 month ago

    I call it in a neat & translateable manner:

    Some do their thinking 5cm behind the forehead,
    and some do it 5cm before.