Basque is certainly quite a language, wow

that is too many cases

@Felthry I'm guessing sentences are pretty short then?

@BatElite I have no idea! I just encountered this one in attempting to learn about the various indo-european words that mean bear

@Felthry @BatElite sentences in Basque generally have slightly less words in them than most Indo-European languages

@lizardsquid @BatElite Basque isn't indo-european, right?

@Felthry @BatElite it isn't, no!

but compared to most indo-european langauges, it has a slightly lower word count on average

@lizardsquid @BatElite right!

I wonder, on a broad scale, what language families tend to be the most long-winded

@Felthry @BatElite as in most words, or longest words?

or longest time for an average utterance?

(to be clear about the last one: Navajo has a much higher density of information per sound than English does, so in navajo the word "najiné" means "they are playing", but since Navajo is spoken at a slower pace, navajo sentences and english sentences take around the same amount of time to say)

@lizardsquid @Felthry For longest word Dutch and German can just append bits to words. It's just that it gets more specific to the point of nonsense.
(I forgot the name of the bits you append. I don't think it's adjectives.)

@BatElite @lizardsquid several north american languages are what's called polysynthetic, which basically means like how german or dutch glue words together but taken to the extreme

@Felthry @BatElite that's not quite the same process:

German and Dutch (and so on) glue words together to form compound words

Polysynthetic languages are glueing units-of-meaning together to synthesise a new word

The distinction is subtle, but important

@Felthry @BatElite the short version is that the meaning of compound words is not neccessarily derivable from its components without real-world knowledge, whereas synthetic words convey their more complicated information with grammatical systems.

(example in next toot...)

@Felthry @BatElite

So "lighthouse" is a compound word, but you don't neccessarily know what it is from just "light" and "house" — someone unfamiliar with the real world object might think it's a house made of very light materials.

"impossible" is a synthetic word, because you're attaching the grammtical affix "im-" to "possible". As long as you know the affix and the word, you understand what it means.

@lizardsquid @Felthry In that case wasn't what I was thinking of for Dutch/German synthetic instead of compound?

"Kunsttentoonstelling" is easily understood as a "tentoonstelling" (exhibition) pertaining to "kunst" (art).

Similarly "fietsbandventieldopjesfabriek" (bicycle tire* valve cap factory) technically is synthetic, even if the word refers to some overly specific nonsense.

*"band" should technically be "wiel" if you're pedantic, but AFAIK most people use tire/(the rubber bits) instead.

@BatElite @Felthry a quick rule of thumb is that synthetic words only have ONE root word (and a number of grammatical affixes.)

so in "impossible", "possible" is the root word, and "im-" is the affix.

but in strawberry is straw the root word and berry the affix? or is berry the root word?

in automobile is mobile the root word? or auto?

in Kunsttentoonstelling is tentoonstelling the root word and kunst the affix? or is kunst the root word?

you can't say, because it's not synthetic.

@BatElite @Felthry it's not about how easy it is to figure out:

automotor (or car engine in English) is easy to work out what it means (because compounding still follows grammatical rules!)
lighthouse is fairly obvious.

it's about whether the components of the word is lexical or grammatical.

@lizardsquid @Felthry ???
But my point is that Kunsttentoonstelling follows "As long as you know the affix and the word, you understand what it means.". Both "kunst" and "tentoonstelling" have self-contained meaning, independent of one another.

I'd say tentoonstelling is the root in this case, since it contributes more to the actual meaning. You can replace kunst with anything and end up with roughly the same concept, but replace tentoonstelling and you have something entirely different.

@BatElite @Felthry so an important thing I forgot to mention: affixes cannot stand on their own as words.

In english, I can't say "im" and have you understand what I mean, I can't say "ness" and have you understand – both of those MUST be attached to a word in order for them to have any meaning.

But I can say "light" or "house", or "straw" or "berry".

With Kunsttentoonstelling, you can say "kunst" on its own, and you can say "tentoonstelling" on its own and have it be understood.

@lizardsquid @Felthry I get your point, but I *can* understand the transformative properties that "im" and "ness" have on a word on their own.

(How do you define "ness" anyway? "having the quality of"?)

@BatElite @lizardsquid That inability to define "ness" seems to be exactly what Avery is talking about, or at least close to it

@Felthry @lizardsquid But "Im" is simply a negation.

@BatElite @Felthry sure, but it's not a word.

I can't use it in a sentence, unless it's already attached to a different word

@lizardsquid @Felthry Mmhm

I suspect that can be subject to change though (and I wouldn't be surprised if there's examples of similar things occuring). Suppose that standalone im becomes a common English synonym for "not", does "impossible" become a compound word rather than a synthetic one?

@BatElite @Felthry oh yeah, so things go in both directions.

grammatical affixes can slowly turn into grammatical words, and grammatical words can turn into grammtical affixes.

We can also end up with words that were originally synthetic (so there's a root word and an affix), but because the affix has fallen out of use, it's now just a compound word.

@BatElite @Felthry for your "impossible" question — it depends on what happens.

It can become two words "im possible", but it won't become a compound.

A more likely scenario is that "im" could become what's known as a clitic.

I intentionally avoided mentioning clitics because they make this whole thing more complicated: in some ways they act like words, but in other ways they act like affixes.

I think the wikipedia articlemight be able to explain it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clitic

@lizardsquid @Felthry I need to sleep at some point though.

@lizardsquid 💜 @Felthry