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German compound nouns are just written without spaces. There's no grammatical difference between "Schlafsack" (= Schlaf "sleep" + Sack "bag") and "sleeping bag", except the way they're written down. In English we analyse a "word" as "a thing you write down with spaces on either side", which is valid as a definition or as an analysis, but it's not what we really think of when we talk about words, which we think of as something more fundamental.
If, tomorrow, we decided in English to write compound nouns without spaces, the language would have suddenly gained thousands and thousands of words, yet the only real difference would be a rule about writing things down. Spoken English would be exactly the same, so nothing fundamental about the actual bits of English would have changed.
One of my frustrations with English is that spaces in compound nouns are arbitrary. We have fishbowl but also fish tank.
Well the rest of the rules around written English are arbitrary, why would this one be different?!
I think I'd write fish bowl separately though.
What would you call this?
oh no. you broke the English language!
delightful?
Username checks out
Wikipedia explains "the rules."
Tap for spoiler
They're more suggestions.Orthography: open, hyphenated, or solid (closed up)
English uses many open compound nouns, a large subclass of which, by convention in accepted English orthography, are not closed up (not solidified) and are sometimes optionally hyphenated in attributive position (that is, when functioning as a noun adjunct). Examples are high school, kidney disease, and file format. Although some other languages would close up these nouns' components (for example, German usually does so), English has a tendency whereby it closes up only certain ones, usually only ones in which the head noun is monosyllabic (and even within that category, only sometimes, and in a way that is not fully standardized). For example, data set and dataset, or file name and filename, are accepted alternative forms, but file format, data format, and data analysis, which have multisyllabic heads (format and analysis), can only be spelled as open in accepted English orthography. This pattern holds for countless nouns with few exceptions. For the class with monosyllabic heads, there is a tendency that "compounds tend to solidify as they age,"[5]: 368 which is how a term such as data set becomes dataset, pin-up becomes pinup,[5]: 368 coal mine becomes coalmine, bottle cap becomes bottlecap, and so on. Such alternative forms usually continue to coexist in accepted use; style guides often convene on preferred dictionaries as a way of achieving consistency, by declaring that the headword form there will be the default styling for each such term.
Pink Floyd:
Seems I'm just old-fashioned:
Depends if it's a fish bowl (a bowl for a fish) or a fishbowl (a big watered down drink you can buy from bad nightclubs)
i too remember getting a fishbowl in the 90’s at applebee’s in the mall, then going to a movie, and then hoping by the time your movie was done you’d be sober enought to drive home.
My fish bowl in a fishbowl.
Mostly true, but in standard German one would normally vocalize "Schlafsack" without any audible pause between the f and the s.
If you were to pronounce "Schlaf sack", there would generally be an expectation of ~~a glottal stop~~ an audible stop between the f and the s (dialects excluded).
So while, yes, compound words in German are written without spaces, that's not just a writing difference.
This is the same in English between "sleeping" and "bag". The pronunciation of "ing ba" in "sleeping bag" is exactly the same as the pronunciation of "ingba" in "dingbat".
In German, just the same: there is not generally a pause between words written separately: there's no gap that you can find on a spectrogram of a recording of someone saying, say, "brauner Sack" between the two words.
I think people are surprised to hear this, so one explanation for what you wrote is that you genuinely believe in speech there is generally a tiny pause between words, that you don't find within words. It's difficult to find a good citation for this because it's a fairly basic fact in linguistics, in spite of how surprising it may be; the best I came up with was this Duolingo post
But you may already be aware of that and be getting at something else: in German, "Schlafsack" is a word that will be understood by anyone if you say it in the normal way. To get someone to understand that you're saying the two words "Schlaf Sack" next to one another without understanding "Schlafsack", you need to do something to make it clear, otherwise they'll understand the normal word. And one way to do that would be to insert a tiny gap. This is different though: in English if you wanted someone to understand "sleeping bag" not as the thing you use while camping but, perhaps, an anthropomorphic bag that is having a nap, you need to employ something similar. So this is not a difference between the languages.
At the cost of appealing to authority: As a native German speaker, I can absolutely hear ~~the glottal stop~~ a stop between two separate words. It exists. It can also often be found between consecutive vowels within a word, but not necessarily between consecutive consonants like in your example. ~~There's a reason why it's in the IPA. It's also e.g. the basis for the "gender not-really-neutral" dialect of German, which injects an additional glottal stop into a word (like Bürger:innen, which is pronounced like Bürger innen, not like Bürgerinnen).~~
Paradoxically, non-native speakers tend to be better at analysing this kind of thing ;) German for sure does not have a glottal stop between most words. "Das Kind" is /daskınt/ not /dasʔkınt/.
I'm not sure if I've misunderstood you and this isn't what you're saying happens...
~~It absolutely is /dasʔkınt/ in the standard German I've grown up with. I've never heard ~~anyone~~ any native speaker pronounce it as /daskınt/.~~
Can you find a recording (not necessarily of someone saying "das kind", but of any two words, the first ending and the second beginning with a consonant) where you can hear this glottal stop put in between? It should come from flowing speech, not the boundary of a clause or sentence where the speaker might insert an extra pause, of course. If you want to record yourself demonstrating it, that would be perfect but I appreciate you may not want to.
Ideally also a recording of as much of the same sequence of sounds without it, for comparison, but that's less important :)
edit: realised I could give you an example myself. Here's a recording from Wiktionary, a native speaker saying "aus Kindern werden Leute". There is no glottal stop between any of the words.
And while finding that I realised there is a point from the other direction: in precise speech, there is a glottal stop in German compounds where the second part starts with a vowel sound. So Spiegelei is listed in the Duden as having a glottal stop before the "Ei".
If you provide storage to upload four audio .wav files (each about 400 KiB), I can send you samples generated by me speaking, then cloned with w-okada using a generic voice I believe is freely usable. It's far from perfect, but it's good enough for me to clearly tell which is which just by listening.
I don't know of anywhere suitable, sorry. Also if you are not comfortable sharing your own voice (which I perfectly understand, I also would not want to) I don't think a voice changer is the way to go.
Maybe we will have to leave that thread here then - I also understand if you don't want to go digging for examples. I would be interested to know still if you hear the glottal stops you're talking about in the example above, though?
Generalising the Spiegelei example: in order to read a word in a language which writes its compounds without spaces, you need to be able to break words down into their compounds correctly. Just reading the letters, with no knowledge of vocabulary, "Gewinnspiel" could be analysed in at least two ways: "Gewinns·piel" or "Gewinn·spiel". The "s" would be pronounced differently between the two analyses (respectively as a /z/ or a /ʃ/ following regular German pronunciation rules).
Fun stuff!
In the voice changed output for "Das Kind"? It's not perfect, but yes. If you're interested in the "biomechanics": It's the difference between a miniscule stopping of the continuous exhalation from your mouth for the
sbefore starting a new burst exhalation for thekvs doing both as part of the same single exhalation that directly changes from continuous to burst.I meant the "aus Kindern werden Leute" recording
Yes, there's a stop of exhalation between the s and the K. If there wasn't, it would sound more like the
skof the English wordskyinstead.EDIT: He does not, however, stop between
Kindernandwerdenand not betweenwerdenandLeute, which does sound weird to me. Less like standard German and more like a dialect.Well, there has to be a stop of exhalation, because the "k" sound is a stop and that is basically the definition of a stop! One thing I want to be pedantic about though: this is not a glottal stop, which is a specific sound made by closing the glottis. "k" denotes a velar stop, which is different.
You can see this stop as a dark area on the spectrogram:
But here's the spectrogram of someone saying sky:
You can see there is the same dark area! Pronouncing a "k" requires cutting off the airstream in the middle of a word also. The duration is about the same; 30 or 40ms in both cases.
If you look further through "aus Kindern werden Leute" in an audio editor you won't see this dark area between "Kindern" and "werden", nor between "werden" and "Leute". These don't have stops between them, so the sound is continuous, even though they're separate words.
It's easy to see the stop in "Leute" - this is almost as complete as that between "aus" and "Kindern". Less obvious are those in "Kindern" and "werden" (both for a letter "d"), but you can also see the dark areas.
I hope this is enough to explain how what you're hearing between some words also occurs within words, and between many words this phenomenon doesn't happen. Phonetics is tricky. It's like learning to draw - at first you don't hear (or see) just what is there, but instead what you know is there. You know that "aus Kindern" or "das Kind" is two separate words, so you hear a break. You know that "Leute" or "sky" is one word, so you don't hear any break.
I've corrected my previous comments w.r.t. the terminology, thank you.
That being said, assuming those two spectrograms are using a comparable frequency scale, they show quite a bit of a difference: The upper spectrogram shows a near complete "black" stop across all but the lowest frequencies, while the lower spectrogram does not: The 2nd-lowest frequencies continue virtually unchanged, the mid frequencies are only reduced to a dark purple, not completely dark, and only the upper frequencies are truly dark. Those are not the same sound.
Well you're right that there is colour in the "sky" spectrogram, but if you loop the dark segment (easy in audacity) you will hear that it's just background noise. The "Kindern" sample has had noise removed or been recorded in a studio setting. It's also worth bearing in mind the colours are on a log scale; if you switch over to looking at the waveform you can see just how little is going on in both of those little gaps.
If this interests you there's a whole world of phonology and linguistics out there waiting for you... my mind was blown as a teenager when I learned about ich-Laut and ach-Laut.
I didn't believe you at first so I checked a few. This kind of ruins the magic tbh.
Wow, I actually learned something today.
Which really explains most of the weird things with English...
English isn't a "real" language, it's a hodgepodge peasant language that was completely unsupervised by any sort of written down words let alone rules. Like, shit just wasn't even really written in English, everyone educated enough to know how to write, knew "proper" languages and used them. It's why English words are used for animals rich people ate (pig, cow, deer) and French was used for what rich people ate (pork, beef, venison). English just didn't need a word for eating them as food, because no one who spoke only English could afford it. Meanwhile the simple chicken was called chicken regardless of if it was in a coop or in soup.
It was only standardized with the early use of the printing press by Dutch workers who didn't know English, but still felt the need to edit what they were printing. That was like 1470ish, and written old German has been traced back to like late 700s with a consistent usage. So even though English is standardized now, it's built on an absolutely nonsensical foundation. While other European language had educated people building logical systems.
It just seems weird to people who only know English and assume it's actually normal because they learned as a baby how to speak it.
Also the reason any random American can make decent money teaching English to foreigners, it's almost impossible to learn all the random shit intentionally.
The reason English speakers can make decent money is that English is a high-demmand language and people naively value native speakers.
Untrained native speakers of any langauge are fucking horrible teachers because they can't explain anything to you. All they can say is, "I would say this in this situation, but can't tell you why I'd say that in that situation."
Please, don't pay an untrained native speaker for anything but conversation practice.
The idea that English's orthography is crazy because it came into written use late doesn't really hold water. The ancestors of Modern English have all been written down for many centuries, even though post-1066 no-one was using it for a good while at court.
It's more that English as a whole is split between a Germanic and Romance ancestry, with the orthography of both sources being represented, while standardisation took place right around the time of a huge shift in pronunciation - the great vowel shift - fossilising an orthography that represented a bygone pronunciation.
In fact I think more can be blamed on English writing being standardised early than late, and then not keeping up with changes in pronunciation: the infamous cluster used to represent a pronounced /x/ sound - compare English night with German Nacht, or knight with Knecht, or freight with Fracht. All these spellings were standardised from a language that pronounced this consonant! If English really standardised late, then the likelihood would be that these words would not have a (written) consonant where the pronunciation doesn't have one.
It's way more than those two...
That has absolutely nothing to do with grammar, just spelling...
Like, you seem to be solely focused on spelling.
And that's my entire point, you don't notice the other shit because it's "normal" to you. That's why you'd be paid money to "teach" English...
The rules are so convoluted and nonsensical (the adjective order is a great example) that even native speakers are often unaware of the rules, we just follow them without understanding them.
You can't teach a non native speaker all the rules, it's too much to remember. They need that whole "immersion" thing everyone says but never understands. They need to figure it out thru trial and error and learn it subconsciously otherwise they'll always be focused on translating into English and abiding every rule and remembering each exception.
That's also why you see internet comments of absolutely perfect classroom English, where the writer constantly apologized for their poor English. Textbook can be learned, but authentic English speakers rarely speak/write how we were taught, and that is what wealthy foreigners want their kids to learn, how the language is actually used.
That is nowhere near as big of an issue with any other language.
Because English isn't consistent or logical. There's a shit ton of exceptions to every "rule" and users constantly change things.
Getting deeper into how language influences our thoughts, and the rise of English could explain "the Americanization" of the world just because of how disorganized it can be leaving room for cheating and the importance it puts on the individual and capitalism:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_and_thought#Studies_concerning_the_Sapir%E2%80%93Whorf_hypothesis
It's a fascinating topic, but I fully expect it to be one of those things no one's heard of before, so people with no idea what is going on will reflexively defend English as a language.
Which ironically enough, they likely wouldn't experience that response if their native language wasn't English, even if someone was critizing their hypothetical native language.
I'm talking about orthography because the thread is about how language (German originally) is written - i.e. orthography. You didn't mention anything about grammar until this latest comment; your previous comment mentioned orthography and vocabulary. All I did was continue talking about what I was already talking about.
The adjective order is an old, overblown meme. The meme came with a ready-made exception ("big bad wolf") which is no less of an exception for the fact that it came with ready-made excuse ("ablaut reduplication").
Did you notice that "old, overblown meme" violates the order (opinion follows age)? That's because it's overblown.
Did you know that other languages have adjective orders of various specificity and rigidity?
Yes, it's a fascinating topic, and yes, there are many markers of non-native English speaking which are impractical to teach. But it sounds like you're trying to steer the conversation somewhere I don't want to go, and I'm not going down there. As soon as you start categorising languages as "real" or "not real" you're on your own. Your misunderstanding of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, likewise.
Did I notice how all the nonsensical rules have nonsensical exceptions...
Yes, that's why I said:
If someone said "the bad big wolf" would you as a native English speaker react?
You would...
You wouldn't be able to explain why, you wouldn't understand why thats an exception and couldn't explain it to someone else, you just know that's an exception, we all do.
Your subconscious would just flag it as off, because people not conforming means they may be from another tribe...
You're literally proving my point, the only way to learn "big bad wolf" is exposure and letting the subconscious handle that.
Then just dont reply?
It's literally that easy, buddy, if you can't manage that I'll just block you now that way you can always chime in not getting the point and then I won't "force" you into a conversation trying to help you.
In case anyone is interested now this "helpful" character has departed:
The conventional explanation for "bad big wolf" sounding "wrong" is that "big bad" is an example of ablaut reduplication, which has a fixed sequence of vowels.
This is a weak explanation for two reasons: a good example of ablaut reduplication is for example "bish bash bosh" where only the vowel changes. This is a weaker example, and so ablaut reduplication is a weaker predictor of the pattern, because the final consonant is not the same between "big" and "bad". Secondly, "big bad wolf" is a phrase from a folk tale and hence deeply embedded in the language in its own right. It's hard to disentangle whether "bad big wolf" sounds strange to native ears because it's a violation of the pattern of ablaut reduplication, or because it's a violation of the specific example, "big bad wolf," that all native speakers heard many times as children.
Remember, this is all a tangent from whether English has a rigid adjective order. A stronger example to consider is A1: "big beautiful house" versus A2: "beautiful big house", and B1: "little beautiful house" versus B2: "beautiful little house". As a native speaker, I strongly prefer A1 but B2. The adjective order adherents say it should be A2 and B2.
So, I don't think the supposed rule of adjective order really exists.
I think if the helper were still around, they would say that actually this just proves their point. Even though they complained about the "rule" of adjective order, actually the fact that there is no rule is even worse! (how convenient, if true), and you just have to learn each example - B2 not B1, A1 not A2 - one by one, and their real point is that English is particularly bad because of this.
Unfortunately, because they are apparently not any kind of linguist, they never presented any comparative examples. Tagalog has a strong preference for adjective order, for example. Languages with flexible word order in general, such as Finnish, nevertheless have a preferred default word order and if you don't learn it you will sound weird. Languages which use prepositions pair certain verbs with certain prepositions (so in English you sit in your seat, watch the performance in English, and in the end the good guys win) but this pairing is arbitrary and if you pick the wrong one you'll generally be understood but sound wrong (in German you sit im Sitz, watch auf Deutsch, and am Ende the good guys win).
Languages - all languages - abound with aspects that mark out non-native speakers. That's because they're complex things that incorporate huge aspects of culture, not merely a means of communication. That's not something that anyone needs to "defend" and it's not something that makes a language cease to be "real". Is it the same degree in all languages? I'm sure it isn't, but that's not the point either.
What exactly are you trying to "help" me with?
Welp, nothing now.
Best of luck
lmao.