RE: Bistahieversor sealeyi, NM tyrannosaurid

[Jaime Headden <qi_leong@hotmail.com>]

David Marjanovic wrote:

<The exact same thing happens all the time in English, except that the spelling 
tries to deny it by putting spaces between the components. Look at the infamous 
three words _Rinderkennzeichnungs- und 
Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz_ 
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rinderkennzeichnungs-_und_Rindfleischetikettierungs%C3%BCberwachungsaufgaben%C3%BCbertragungsgesetz
 -- yes, that's the English Wikipedia). This monster, unusual even for German, 
translates straightforwardly, one component after the other, into English as 
"Cattle Marking and Beef Labeling Surveillance Duties Delegation Act" by 
insertion of six spaces and Gratuitous Uppercase (and removal of the four 
instances of connecting -s-); nothing has changed grammatically, it's still a 
branched compound noun.

In fact, in my experience, such long words accumulate more easily in written 
English than in German, because written English makes the writer believe that 
they're still legible. :-)>

  Wait, are you you trying to argue that the word you found up there in 
Wikipedia is an English word in any form, even exempting the idea of a 
German-to-English loan word, but that it's an honest-to-God English word? 
Because I'd be suspecting you're smoking hashish just because you found a 
perfect example of what _I_ was talking about in regards to German in an 
English wikipedia (note, not an English dictionary!). Moreover, the article 
clearly indicates that, despite being written in English (as if English 
speakers can only write about things where only their lanmguage is spoken), it 
is an article about a German law in a German state in the German nation. What 
point, again, were you trying to make?

  Unlike German, English tends to transcribe its compounds in rather specific 
ways, when not following loan-words from other languages and therefore their 
rules for compounds (i.e., French or Italian); these compounds almost always 
take the form of a hyphen ( - ) or an apostraphe ( ' ) and generally only occur 
in words in which two nouns are combined for hyphens or articles bound to 
verbs, for apostrophes.

  Oh, and good stab on the lysdexia bit.


Cheers,

Jaime A. Headden

"Innocent, unbiased observation is a myth." --- P.B. Medawar (1969)

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Backs)
                                          
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