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.

@BatElite @Felthry Important aside: I said "synthetic words only have one root word", and that's true of every Indo-european language. But Polysynthetic languages are special — they allow for multiple root words in a single synthetic word.

Distinguishing between compounds and synthetic words in polysynthetic languages is a more difficult task, but since English and Dutch and German aren't polysynthetic, I won't go into detail on that.

@lizardsquid @BatElite we have learned a lot about polysynthetic languages today!

@Felthry @BatElite

I think an important realisation for me was "polysynthetic languages are not the same as highly synthetic languages"

Turkish is highly synthetic, which means you can get words with lots of synthesis. For example, Avrupalılaştıramadık means "one that is unable to be Europeanised".

But it only has ONE root word, and every word in Turkish will only ever have one root word!

@lizardsquid @Felthry I suspect that you have just lost me now.

@BatElite @Felthry that's why I put it under a CW — explaining grammatical processes in languages you don't know is a bit difficult. It's ok if you don't get it!

@lizardsquid @Felthry I don't know what polysynthetic words are meant to look like.