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albirich t1_j2bvtu7 wrote

Just because you remove spaces from between multiple words doesn't mean it's a single word. This is a hill I'm willing to die on.

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KorgX3 t1_j2c8adk wrote

Narrator: And that's how World War III began.

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albirich t1_j2c8gmy wrote

You're not a grammatical genius your space bar is broken!

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NolanSyKinsley t1_j2cnjp5 wrote

It's german, they do that with descriptions of singular items. My favorite is a word they use to describe little fat kittens that still have their tails pointed straight up in the air: Autodromkatzerl, which translates to Bumper Car Kitten.

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Almost all of our english language is built upon building words with other words as well to form a singular concept describing a singular item, they just weren't english words, they were latin, greek, germanic, french, or any other number of languages we bastardized. Helicopter = Helix which means spiral and pteron meaning wing, helix becoms helic add a joining vowel, and shorten pteron to pter and tada! helicopter(although the word was initially coined in french), this goes for pterodactyl as well, pteron, meaning wing, and dactyl from daktulos meaning finger, through middle english became dactyl, you get pterodactyl, I.E. wing fingers because the wings are made up of what would trace to the hands of other species, it is literally flying by flapping its fingers and you can tell that just by the name!

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Indistinguishable, in = not, or opposite of, and distinguishable. Distinguishable is also made of two words, distinguish the verb, and able the adjective that modifies the word to show we are capable of performing the verb so we say "indistinguishable" instead of "I am not able to distinguish that". It's all words made up of more words man, you just don't know it!

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DesertCookie_ t1_j2cwhec wrote

There are generally three big types of languages. One type's major feature is making compound words like this. German probably only is the mist well-known example. There even are entire languages that build sentences using one word. Every sentence is a single word. Those languages are incredibly hard to learn and actually said to only be intelligle to those who've grown up with them.

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