181–190 of 286 posts
Entschädigungsleistungen - compensation benefits
Wiederbeschaffungskosten - replacement value
Kraftfahrzeughaftpflichtversicherung - motor vehicle liability insurance
Donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaftskapitän - Danube steamboat captain
Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz - beef labeling regulation law
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But water that has boiled into gas also gets a word: steam. As far as I'm aware, there is no separate word for freezing water -- i.e. water that is very cold and will, if it continues to get colder (and has something to crystallise around), turn into ice. So the symmetry seems complete: ice -> freezing water -> water -> boiling water -> steam.
Freezing water is already at or below 0, it doesn't need to get "colder" to turn into ice, it simply needs to exchange the energy with the environment and rearrange in crystals. Basically as it gets colder water exchanges energy with the environment and gets colder. But once it reaches freezing temperature, it can no longer get colder and all the energy is used for the formation of crystals.
But the semantic point still stands. Boiling water is still water -- in the specific sense of H2O in its liquid state -- while ice is not. The complaint that frozen water has a single-word synonym while boiling water does not is making a false equivalence.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
[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 tw…
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.)
Just the name gives me flashbacks to German-lessons in highschool.
I'm the author. Updated the article based on this thread — thanks to everyone who pushed back. Changes: reframed "boiling water" as deliberately on-the-fence rather than asserting it's a word; added a note that the obscure end of the slider is noise; acknowledged collocations as the established term; added a German/Dutch/Norwegian section on how other languages handle the space problem; softened "wasn't possible befo…
I'd really love to see the prompt(s) you used with Claude. The way the article was written I mistakenly thought you would expand upon that in a footnote or sidebar.
> But roughly 15% are plausible: “wooden chair,” “morning coffee.” That’s still 30 billion sensible pairs. (1) Who counted those? Whence those numbers? (2) The examples are normal two-word phrases with one word modifying the other, often categorised as an adjective. The examples are counter-examples to the very claim made in that article. (3) Using Clause to brainstorm s.t. is a weird thing to say... (4) I would say…
If the first example was "monkey wrench" instead of "boiling water", we'd never have seen the article.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It was mentioned in other comments but boiled water is steam, and frozen water is ice. We do not have separate words for freezing water or boiling water. in the slavic languages do they have a different way to describe boiling or freezing milk, or any other liquid?
> but boiled water is steam > We do not have separate words for freezing water or boiling water . I don't know how it is in other languages but in English "boiled water" and "boiling water" refer to different things - boiled water may be steam or water that has underwent some boiling, e.g. for sanitation, on the other hand "boiling water" refers strictly to water that is in the process of boiling. I can see why some…
Boiled water does have the extra connotation that it is presumed to be mostly sterile, which, while not hard to derive from the fact it has been boiling, is not immediately clear. After all the past tense does not tell us how recently it was boiled.
For that reason I'd argue that if one of boiling water and boiled water should be in the dictionary, it should be boiled water. Of the two, it is the term that potentially carries extra information.
in German, they just remove the spaces and keep the word, and this problem is solved: Entschädigungsleistungen - compensation benefits Wiederbeschaffungskosten - replacement value Kraftfahrzeughaftpflichtversicherung - motor vehicle liability insurance Donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaftskapitän - Danube steamboat captain Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz - beef labeling regulation law
It's just part of how language works that when there isn't a single word carrying the meaning you want, you put multiple words together and they can mean the thing together.
Even though there isn't a specific word for that, I wouldn't say "It's just part of how language works that when there isn't a single word carrying the meaning you want, you put multiple words together and they can mean the thing together" actually is one big word with spaces in it.
It's a bunch of words together that carry a more specific meaning when put together in that order.
> “Boiling water” isn’t “water that happens to be boiling.” It’s a hazard, a cooking stage, a state of matter I guess we'll have to disagree then, because "boiling water" is "water that's boiling" to me. It's not a different state of matter to "water", that would be "steam". It being a hazard doesn't mean it's a singular concept, same as "wet floor"
> Traditional dictionaries skip almost all such phrases, because they contain spaces.
Yes, because they're phrases, not words. I don't even understand what's surprising about this. Sure, the entire article talks about how dictionaries contain _some_ phrases; but it's clear it's not many of them. Dictionaries are for words, not phrases.