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ndr42last Monday at 5:43 PM3 repliesview on HN

I imagine that languages like german that create composites of nouns have less of a problem with this:

English: cream of mushroom soup

Spanisch: sopa cremosa de champiñones

German: Champignoncremesuppe


Replies

looperhackslast Monday at 5:52 PM

I just checked, Champignoncremesuppe is not in my dictionary ;)

It has some compound words. But including too many of them would quickly get out of hand

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ticulatedsplinelast Monday at 5:58 PM

but can't you basically make anything a composite noun in German? That it's a single word doesn't really help you decided if it has enough presence unto itself to be defined in the dictionary.

Seems like they would have just as much of a problem since the issue is delineating when a "phrase" becomes a "word"

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agmaterlast Monday at 6:20 PM

In Dutch we indeed happily do this even for English loanwords like "creditcard" or something more obscure like "lockpick". When in doubt, remove the space.

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