I'd point folks to the concept of "Construction Grammar", which is related to this problem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Construction_grammar
Half million 'Words with Spaces' missing from dictionaries
191–200 of 286 posts
Re: Half million 'Words with Spaces' missing from dictionaries
#192Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's ice cream then?
It used to be iced cream, which is more descriptive. Ice cream is a shortened pronunciation.
When was called it "iced cream"? The first published recipe for ice cream in 1718 called it "ice cream", not "iced cream". The first recorded mention in English at all was in 1671 and there, again, it was "ice cream", not "iced cream".
Re: Half million 'Words with Spaces' missing from dictionaries
#193Earlier quoted context omitted.
Some other words that are sorely missing from dictionaries: "Warm water", "hot water", "cold water", "dirty water"
As an idiomatic expression, "Hot water" = "trouble". Are there idiomatic expressions for warm/cold/dirty water, which mean something other than a literal adjective describing the temperature or condition of water?
> hot water - n. a difficult or dangerous situation
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hot%20water
> warm water - n. an ocean or sea not in the arctic or antarctic regions
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/warm%20water
> cold water - n. depreciation of something as being ill-advised, unwarranted, or worthless. e.g. threw cold water on our hopes
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/cold%20water
Seems that what makes sense to be in dictionaries is already there.
Re: Half million 'Words with Spaces' missing from dictionaries
#194> “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"
I’m so glad I’m not going insane. I don’t see any examples on that site that I agree are ‘one word’. Sure they’re singular concepts but so what? Are we going to have singular words to describe all adjective noun pairs now?
Really? none are one word? How about "of course"?
Re: Half million 'Words with Spaces' missing from dictionaries
#195Earlier quoted context omitted.
not anything. As a German I see no way to compound "boiling water". It remains two words: "kochendes Wasser".
'Boiling' isn't a noun.
true, but you'd be wrong to assume that Germans only compound words if both parts are nouns, e.g. "Gehweg" (walk way) and "Springseil" (jump rope) use the base of a verb.
We do actually have "Kochwasser" ("kochen" means "to cook", "kochend" means "boiling") but that's not boiling water ("kochendes Wasser") but for water used for cooking.
Re: Half million 'Words with Spaces' missing from dictionaries
#196Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Adding two words together creates a new and different concept. The permutations necessary to represent every concept ever formed by combining two or more different words would be endless. May I introduce you to the German language? We have "gesundheitszeugnis" (health certificate) and "bärenstark" (strong as a bear), and of course "[der] Donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaftskapitän" ([the] Danube Steamship Navigation…
Added a German/Norwegian section — but vidarh corrected me below: German doesn't 'remove the space,' the compound never had one. Adding a space changes the meaning or breaks the grammar. The article now reflects that.
The issue with German as well as Norwegian is that a space creates a semantically distinct structure, so it's not that they remove the space, but that one wasn't there in the first place, and some of those compounds then become important enough for the dictionary.
Absolutely not all - there's a near unbounded set of possible compounds.
In Norwegian, we in fact have a compound for the incorrect separation of compounds: "orddelingsfeil" (word separation error). Actually, we have two - technically it's "særskrivingsfeil" (separate writing error), but "orddelingsfeil" is more common... We take this seriously.
The problem is that while some are definitely wrong, others change meaning.
E.g. "en norsk lærer" means "a Norwegian teacher" but "en norsklærer" means "a teacher of the subject Norwegian". There's an infinite set of possible -lærer compounds: If you create a new subject then a teacher of that subject is a lærer. Obviously they can't all go in the dictionary.
Some other examples:
"Røyk fritt" means "smoke freely" while "røykfritt" means "smokefree". "Steke ovn", means "to fry an oven", while "stekeovn" means "oven". These two belong in the dictionary because they are so common and that though technically you can use "ovn" and "fri"/"fritt" to form a near infinite number of other common forms as well, in practice the number of common forms that use them is quite limited.
The key part is that most compounds in languages like German or Norwegian will only have one valid way of writing them. Add spaces, and you usually end up with something ungrammatical or with an entirely different meaning.
Whereas in English whether or not a word can be written with a space, with a hyphen, or combined much more often changes over time, and can differ in different places at different times, as the -> -> pipeline in English is slow and arbitrary and not necessarily reflecting a change in meaning.
Re: Half million 'Words with Spaces' missing from dictionaries
#197Earlier quoted context omitted.
'hot dog' belongs in a thesaurus, not a dictionary. It's just a type of sausage.
If people assume it's "just a type of sausage" it suggests a dictionary entry is needed to explain otherwise. It's a term referring to a small set of types of sausages served in a specific small set of ways . In some places , a hot dog can be used as a synonym for the predominant type of sausage most common in hot dogs in that place, but the term is still more commonly referring to the assembly of a wiener or frankfu…
> the term is still more commonly referring to the assembly of a wiener or frankfurter wrapped in a bread of some sort
I had that disagreement in an alpine resort once. A seller was vending some sort of sausage stuffed in a bread, i was hungry so I walked up to them with money in hand and said "A hot dog please" while pointing at the only thing they were selling. The lady was mortified by my utterance, and was not willing to accept the money until I agreed with her that it is a bratwurst and not a hot dog. :D The disagreement felt a bit academical, but given that she was holding the hot dogs hostage and money does not taste that good she won the argument.
Re: Half million 'Words with Spaces' missing from dictionaries
#198Re: Half million 'Words with Spaces' missing from dictionaries
#199> “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"
"a state of matter", no boiling water is not a "state of matter"
Re: Half million 'Words with Spaces' missing from dictionaries
#200> “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"
What's ice cream then?
And even more confounding, what's "water ice?"