Abyssinia-iffat

Note: the analysis below is not meant to be a formal paper on the subject. It is my reflection on a topic that, oddly enough, I wondered about after awakening from a dream about compound words in English.

Introduction

English has retained the Germanic linguistic construction of compounding words to create new words, though it has been retarded by the influence of Latin language importations, especially French. Germanic languages like Dutch, German, Frisian, Swedish, Icelandic, Norwegian, and others, all share the quality of being able to combine separate nouns into one word and thus create new nouns. English has since its modern period; beginning in the 17^th century, gradually retarded the usage of compounding. However, in recent years, this trend seems to have reversed.

Linguists refer to compound words as agglutinative. I will avoid this technical term. Instead, we will use the terms compound and decompound to mean the ability of this language to combine and uncombine one or more individual words. When referring to a compound word that contains two individual words, I will call them bi-compounded words; if there are three compounded words, I will call them tri-compounded words or tri-compounds. I don’t believe that compounding occurs with more than three words in any English morphemic construction; there is no need for any further coinage. An examination of compounded words in English shows that while we don’t construct infinite words and can’t form meaningful infinite words, we can create a huge finite set of compound words that increase the lexicon of the language with this rule of combination. Some characteristics of our language that compounding augments are variety, descriptive power, and precision of conceptualization. There are several aspects of interest in this subject. Here are a few:

1. Estimate of the total size of words in English. This does vary; I use a narrow scope and restrict it to non-scientific words, like chemical compounds based on Latin, Greek, or imports like coup d’état .
2. How many words are compounded in English?
3. Can we reverse-compound words, decompound them, and will they still make sense in sentential usage?
4. What are the percentages, averages, and other statistical quantities of questions 2 and 3?
5. Is it possible to compound any given English word such that it will create a meaningful word when it is compounded with any other English word?

Question 5 is particularly intriguing. It seems we can take almost any noun at random and combine it with another and still achieve a meaningful compound word. An example will give you a taste of what this means. Let’s take a color: blue. Now we can add another noun to it to create a new word that some meaning can be attributed to. It might be coined meaning, but still, it is easy to see that each of the words below can have some meaning assigned to them. It could be idiomatic or literal, but all have semantic content.

Bluewall, bluefloor, bluenight, blueday, bluearm, blueeye, bluehead, bluemind, bluesight, bluesun,blueboard, blueseat, blueback, bluetime, blueglass, blueworld, blueland, bluedoor, bluetalk. All of these words could be seen to have meaning. The only exclusion to compounding blue with others words would seem to be the other must be a noun. Though even this isn’t entirely true. I can imagine bluethinking as having some subjective meaning.

English and Compounding

I have found a total of 2276 compounded words in English via a Net search. They all are bi-compounded words. Of these, I have selected 190 to analyze. Interesting results were achieved for the idea of creating new words by using compounding. If we reverse these bi-compounds and use them in sentences a great many will be semantically meaningful. In some cases, the reversals can be compounded themselves and yield meaningful statements in our language. Here are some stats I’ve developed based on a survey of 190 compounded words out of the total 2276 compounded English words.

• 13% of the time, bi-compounded words can be reversed and compounded again to yield meaningful words.
• 40% of the time bi-compounded words cannot be reversed and yield any meaningful construction.
• 42% of the time, bi-compounded words can be reversed and do yield meaningful constructions if not compounded again.
• 4% of the time, bi-compounded words, when reversed, yield indeterminate constructions.
• The number of compounded words is very small compared to the total number of English words (taking 500,000 to be this number. They are .004% of the lexicon.

It should be noted that a very strict regime was used when bi-compounded words were reversed. No insertions of characters or other words between the reversed de-compounded words were allowed. For instance, greenhouse, when reversed, is house green. A sentence could be formed as such: The greenhouse was a house of green. But this would have required of to be inserted.

Source Data

Below is a table of all 190 compounds reversed, and examples of reverse usage where this can be done.

Below the same data without examples and a tabulation of counts of word quantities