Last night, right before going to bed:
Me, to spouse, who knows some basic German and who also took linguistics classes in college: So, German is a compound-happy language, and also has grammatical gender. What is the gender of a compound noun made up of nouns that have different genders?
He didn’t know, so we had a speculative and silly conversation about it that I mostly don’t recall, and then I tried looking it up. Apparently the compound noun gets its gender from the noun closest to the end of the word. (Germans, please feel free to correct me, as my research was brief and shallow.)
After more silliness, I remarked that I was feeling punchy, then stopped and speculated that punchy is derived from punch-drunk (answer: yes, which is sobering), after which spouse remarked that individual body parts can be described as being asleep in English, but what other things can they be? (I’ll put some things I thought were interesting about this in the next post in this thread.)
More silliness ensued, and then I said:
Where do compound words come from? Well, when two morphemes love each other very much…
(A linguistics professor from my college said that English is almost as compound-happy as German, which isn’t surprising as it’s also a Germanic language. We mostly don’t recognize it and don’t spell most of them that way.)
1/2
