Lizardsquid, maker of noises @lizardsquid@computerfairi.es

@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.

@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 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 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)

@Felthry @BatElite (I realise my original post was full of ambiguity, sorry)

@Felthry @BatElite it isn't, no!

but compared to most indo-european langauges, it has a slightly lower word count on average

@Felthry @BatElite sentences in Basque generally have slightly less words in them than most Indo-European languages

@chao hi sweeterie!!!!!!!

@Felthry ::D

I've been away from fedi for a bit, but now I'm here!

@efi *pets you and whispers lovely things to you*

@softgoat good luck!!!