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Comment by eru | Hacker News Reader

Turkish and Finnish have whole sentences that fit in single words. German is rather short-worded by comparison.

The main difference between German and English here is one of spelling: Germans like to write their compounds together, English speakers like to put spaces in between.

Writing compounds together like that wasn't always the norm in German spelling, either. Especially before the printing press rules were more fluid.

English would still be the same language, if you wrote supremecourt or summerolympics without a space. German would still be the same language, if you wrote Bahn Hof or Sommer Nachts Traum.

(And of course both languages also have hyphens.)

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>German would still be the same language, if you wrote Bahn Hof or Sommer Nachts Traum.

You would probably write "Sommer Nacht Traum" instead. The fugen-S of "Nachtstraum" only makes sense, when you connect "Nacht" and "Traum".

(English has no fugen-S, as far as I'm aware)

Thanks for bringing this up.

I am purely talking about changing the spelling. The Fugen-S is something you actually pronounce, so if you want to keep the language intact and spelling phonetical, you would keep the Fugen-s.

Yes, it might be a bit weird to you. But it's no weirder than other changes we make to words in German because of grammar. Like 'kleiner Hund' vs 'kleine Katze'. Adding an 's' on the previous word is no worse than adding an 'r'.

It's actually not always clear. There are "Einkommensteuer" und "Einkommenssteuer" and you could write and pronounce them either way. Same for "Bahnhofstraße" and "Bahnhofsstraße". But yeah, I guess these are some rules that developed around the practice of writing words together.

It's also interesting when you split up the words. For instance "gebrandmarkt" results in "brand gemarkt". So you extract the "brand" from "ge-...markt".

Your corner cases are mostly about compounds where the next word starts with an s or sch sound. There's also selbständig vs selbstständig, where both variants exist with speakers of the language, and 'official' German picked first one and later the other variant as the 'official' one.

> It's also interesting when you split up the words. For instance "gebrandmarkt" results in "brand gemarkt". So you extract the "brand" from "ge-...markt".

English has a similar mechanic:

"Let's upcycle this trash!"

"I boot up my computer."

"We spruce this place up."

I'm no linguist but I wonder if 'draughtsman' and 'marksman' might be examples of a fugen-S in English?

https://www.etymonline.com/word/marksman suggests it's just a genitive?

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