compounding

Composition, or compounding, is concerned with free forms. The primary compounds cloverleaf, gentleman, and (less obviously, because of the spelling) already show the collocation of two free forms. They differ from word groups or phrases in stress, juncture, or vowel quality or by a…

…practice, as well as the compounding of nouns to form new words, as in bizkar-hezur ‘backbone,’ has been very much alive throughout the history of the language. On the other hand, Basque itself has contributed but little vocabulary to the Spanish, Occitan, French, and English languages. Nonetheless, family and place-names…

…archaic type of derivation by compounding, inherited from Indo-European, was particularly productive in Church Slavonic under the stimulus of Greek. Compounding remains one of the methods of creating new terms, especially technical terms (e.g., Russian vodokhranilishche ‘reservoir’ from voda ‘water’ and khranilishche ‘depository’), but is far less important than affixation.…

…of forming new words is compounding—e.g., nâa-taa ‘countenance’ (literally, ‘face-eye’), kèp-kìaw ‘to harvest’ (literally, ‘gather-cut with a sickle’). Reduplication, the repetition of a word or part of it, is also quite common—e.g., díi-dii ‘very good’ from dii ‘good.’ Partial reduplication is also found, such as sanùk-sanǎan ‘to enjoy oneself’ from…

Classical Chinese, with its relatively rich inventory of consonants, was strictly monosyllabic, with the syntactic word and the phonological syllable virtually coextensive; the same was undoubtedly true for PTB. In phonologically eroded modern languages such as Mandarin and Lahu, however, many…

The formation of nouns in Proto-Uralic included compounding (adding two or more words together) as well as derivation by the use of suffixes (word endings). In noun + noun constructions, including titles of address, the qualifying noun came first; compare Hungarian házhely ‘house site,’…