The "smashing" together of words is much less interesting to most of us who use languages that does so than it seems to be to others - it does little more than placing the words adjacent to each other does in English, with the exception that it disambiguated.
E.g. "hakke" on it's own is the verb to hack in Norwegian, but as part of a compound it will mean something that has been hacked, or is hacking (e.g. hakkespett = woodpecker - and there's another English compound)
Funnily, Norwegian (and Danish) has imported the French boef - Norwegian as "biff" - while we still use the Germanic ku for cow - but we also "smash" words together, so hakkebiff = hakkebøf (Danish) = boef haché.
But "hakke biff" would imply the act of chopping it. And so we compound to remove the ambiguity.
We also have flesk, from the same origin as fleisch and flesh, but in Norwegian it specifically means pork flesh, so hakkeflesk, while it's not a term I can remember having heard, would be understandable but refer to pork because the meaning of combining the words is fairly generic.
I never understood what they thought was so funny.
Today we’d write it menslol.
The one that grates on me most is “monolingual” (unilingual/multilingual or monoglottal/polyglottal)
The distinction between "fully merged" compounds, hyphenated ones, and ones with spaces is yet another one of those endlessly annoying quirks of English.
Being cognizant of these really helps develop empathy with ESL learners.
So I would argue that “streetcar stop” still parses as a complete compound noun grammatically. This is just a matter of orthography in my opinion. German may more readily “freeze” compound nouns and put them into writing as a single unit, but both English and German are full of long ad hoc compound nouns.
In German, you would have to create a single word from the start (possibly using a hyphen for disambiguation) and in some cases pluralise individual words so they can be joined together.
But you are right that in both cases the result is just a single noun, which contrasts with agglutinative languages such as Turkish where the entire grammar of a sentence can sometimes be packed into a single, potentially very long, word.
English speakers are often amazed at how we "have words for everything", which makes it seem like it's been some conscious act of establishing a new world on purpose. Of course sometimes that is the case, but that process happens in English too.
But exactly because of what you say, directing that amazement at us just combining words is pretty much the same as if we expressed amazement at how English has sequences of words for everything.
It just looks different to English-speakers for whom the merging of multiple words into a combination they've not seen before is not a frequent occurrence.
Norwegian has "trikk" for tram/streetcar and "stopp" for "stop", and so we have "trikkestopp" for tram stop (but see below). Trikk was a case of "sporvogn" - "track wagon" - being too long.
Meanwhile, while "streetcarstop" is not in use in English "streetcar stop" is some places. E.g.[1].
"Streetcar stopping place" of course would definitely be a step too far in English, but so would it be in e.g. Norwegian that otherwise mostly shares the German approach to combining words (to the point where newspapers regularly have articles about how the language is going to hell because people fail to combine words when they should) but where we'd go "hang on" and omit parts or otherwise rephrase to find a short alternative.
However, we do have "stoppeplass" for "stopping place", though more often used for somewhere to stop a car for a longer period, and "holdeplass" for "holding place" which implies a more temporary stopp, and so we can and sometimes do also use trikkeholdeplass - "tram holding place" [2], but these longer forms tends to gradually be replaced by shorter ones over time, as Norwegian has a tradition for contractions (to the eternal frustration of foreigners learning Norwegian, because spoken Norwegian tends to drop syllables and whole words with wild abandon) and replacing long terms.
[1] https://www.buildkcstreetcar.com/project-news/stages-of-a-st...
[2] We can, and also sometimes do (but a quick search of the Norwegian national library shows it's quite rare, with peaks of tens of uses in print some decades), use "sporvognholdeplass". If you were to say that people would probably wonder what century you are visiting from (even though the full term was no more common before), but it'd be understandable.
In Sweden there was for a few years a webpage dedicated to the fight against incorrectly writing words apart, famously producing red stickers that were then used as hypens where appropriate: http://www.skrivihop.nu/exempel/bilder/fika_sugen.jpg
They got wildly popular but shut down after just three years because they felt they ended up attracting a lot of asshole followers that outright harassed people in their name.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_language
See also: agglutination https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agglutination
A portmanteau is different, where parts of several words are blended, rather than retaining the substance of each word in a compound.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blend_word
And let's not forget xkcd's coinage of the malamanteau:
Read up on the Holy Roman Empire. Germany, France etc are quite complicated concepts.
Of course, the Franks came from further East and never replaced the populations they invaded, so even there and then both cultures and peoples were always mixed.
> Der Brand (The Fire), by the historian Jörg Friedrich, accuses Winston Churchill of a conscious policy of airborne terrorism against civilians … The word “brand” in English, of course, carries a distinctly different vernacular meaning.
The upper classes were French after 1066 (Harold had definitively repelled the Danes for the last time just three weeks before Hastings).
If you examine the richest landed gentry in England today a very sizeable number still bare the family names of those that fought for William at the Battle of Hastings.
Pig/pork = cochon / porc
cow/beef = vache / boeuf
chicken/chicken = poulet/poulet
fish/fish = poisson/poisson
We'd say "vache" when it comes to milk or the female, but all "vache" are "boeuf".
Boeuf is used when the gender does not mean much (like for meat).
Cochon and porc are both used for the live animal, and both used for the food as well (cochon is a bit less used for food, but still common enough).
Boeuf and vache aren’t really synonymous as another commenter pointed out
Ehh, in German we talk about Rindfleisch, which comes from a Kuh.
The French used to routinely boil their beef but during a lengthy Parisian siege, the locals noticed that the peoples that they came to call "les rosbifs", roasted their beef (phnaaar!) We were chucking steaks on the barbies long before Australia was even thought of ... or something jingoistic 8)
These essays are a bit of fun, as you say. History and life and language are rather more messy than many would like. At one point the article witters on about France and Wessex. Both terms were valid "back then" and are still valid now but they are sodding complicated ideas and neither mean the same now as they used to.
Even the notion of English (and French - obviously) is pretty tricky. Nowadays, in the UK alone we have a largely homogenised language, with some localisations ... on the surface. For example: jitty - allyway, bairn - child, skritch - cry. Then we have the collisions between the Brythonic languages (Scottish, Welsh, Irish, Cumbric, Cornish and the rest) and English. So a Devonshire bird like my mum spoke what sounded like complete twaddle to a modern (!) lad like myself, when she was a child.
You (@gumby) might know the difference between twaddle and twiddle but I am sure I've lost a few readers right there.
My point is that language, nationality and the like are rather more fluid than people generally think.
Was hal!
Seen that word, with that spelling, IIRC, in Iranian restaurant menus in India.
Right, even for X = pork. But lately, it's fading in favour of "filete" (slice) of X, at least in Spain.
Heavy, heavy pronunciation going on to near comical effect.
Oops, too many spy novels plus a bad sense of humour ... ;)
It generally signalled the end of a night when you headed there.
I guess there’s probably been a few places called bifteki around the uk and other countries then.
Also, see the Czech, Macedonian, and other entries under the Descendants section at your own link above. Many of them spell it the way I did.
Small correction: neither Irish nor the two languages people might refer to as Scottish are Brythonic languages.
Drinkhail! ;-)
And was wondering if there might be an easy way to build a a tech geneology/etemology tree.
Their origin, I mean. I can google, but it's more fun to hear what others have to say. And argue, and put them down and up - or try to :)
Attitude frowned on by HN, I know, only they don't (seem to) know they are doing it themselves, via the voting mechanism, i.e. upvotes and downvotes.
Also, it's interesting that there are so many words for horses in English and Western (cowboy slang, I just made up the word :)
"Swine, fool, swine," said the herd, "every fool knows that."
"And swine is good Saxon," said the Jester; "but how call you the sow when she is flayed, and drawn, and quartered, and hung up by the heels, like a traitor?"
"Pork," answered the swine-herd.
"I am very glad every fool knows that too," said Wamba, "and pork, I think, is good Norman-French; and so when the brute lives, and is in the charge of a Saxon slave, she goes by her Saxon name; but becomes a Norman, and is called pork, when she is carried to the Castle-hall to feast among the nobles; what dost thou think of this, friend Gurth, ha?"
"It is but too true doctrine, friend Wamba, however it got into thy fool's pate."
"Nay, I can tell you more," said Wamba, in the same tone; "there is old Alderman Ox continues to hold his Saxon epithet, while he is under the charge of serfs and bondsmen such as thou, but becomes Beef, a fiery French gallant, when he arrives before the worshipful jaws that are destined to consume him. Mynheer Calf, too, becomes Monsieur de Veau in the like manner; he is Saxon when he requires tendance, and takes a Norman name when he becomes matter of enjoyment."
"By St Dunstan," answered Gurth, "thou speakest but sad truths; little is left to us but the air we breathe, and that appears to have been reserved with much hesitation, solely for the purpose of enabling us to endure the tasks they lay upon our shoulders. The finest and the fattest is for their board; the loveliest is for their couch; the best and bravest supply their foreign masters with soldiers, and whiten distant lands with their bones, leaving few here who have either will or the power to protect the unfortunate Saxon.
- from Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott
The example that I think most native English speakers learn at some point is the reason for the distinction in food words: we eat pork (porc) and beef (boef) but they are the flesh of the pig/swine (Schwein) or cow (Kuh). This reflects the elite's use of French (thus using French words for food on the table) while the English servants used their Germanic vocabulary for the animals they worked with.
In both French and German the same word is used for the animal in the field and on the plate.
And then there are innumerable hybrids (anglicized french words). With regards to food and husbandry, one my of favorites is "beeves" ("cattle" -- "beefs"): while I have never heard the word spoken aloud I have seen it in novels even as late as the early 60s.