It’s a similar story for Swedish and German for example. Not exactly the same as Finnish, but the whole mashing words together for them to make better sense. I’m starting to think that English is the odd one out.
One example could be “kommunikationsdepartementssekretariatsanteckningar” (communication department secretary’s notes). But an English example would be where Swedish, German, I guess Finnish, would say “blackboard” instead of “black board” to remove the ambiguity while English mostly does the latter.
Compound words are very different than agglutinative conjugation though. In such languages, you don’t just mash words together, you also modify them to encode all sorts of extra information into one word. You can form full, grammatically correct sentences that way. Can’t do that with compound words because you can’t compound them into a complete sentence.
A famous, powe example is the word “çekoslovakyalılaştırabildiklerimizdensiniz” from Turkish, which is like Finnish in that regard. It’s a complete sentence that means “you are one of those who we have managed to make a czechoslovakian”. The object, subject, verb, tense, and more are all in there. Obviously that’s quite a bit more complex than word together-mashing.
This is above my linguistic pay grade as I’m barely able to string together a coherent sentence when working, but, I think the moral here is that English is a crap language (at the very least very messy and lacks qualities found in other languages).
It’s a similar story for Swedish and German for example. Not exactly the same as Finnish, but the whole mashing words together for them to make better sense. I’m starting to think that English is the odd one out.
One example could be “kommunikationsdepartementssekretariatsanteckningar” (communication department secretary’s notes). But an English example would be where Swedish, German, I guess Finnish, would say “blackboard” instead of “black board” to remove the ambiguity while English mostly does the latter.
Compound words are very different than agglutinative conjugation though. In such languages, you don’t just mash words together, you also modify them to encode all sorts of extra information into one word. You can form full, grammatically correct sentences that way. Can’t do that with compound words because you can’t compound them into a complete sentence.
A famous, powe example is the word “çekoslovakyalılaştırabildiklerimizdensiniz” from Turkish, which is like Finnish in that regard. It’s a complete sentence that means “you are one of those who we have managed to make a czechoslovakian”. The object, subject, verb, tense, and more are all in there. Obviously that’s quite a bit more complex than word together-mashing.
This is above my linguistic pay grade as I’m barely able to string together a coherent sentence when working, but, I think the moral here is that English is a crap language (at the very least very messy and lacks qualities found in other languages).