@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
@lizardsquid @BatElite Basque isn't indo-european, right?
@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
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 from a psychological point of view: compound words are mentally processed as one unit of meaning:
you either know what a cat is, or you don't.
you either know what an automobile is, or you don't.
you either know what a strawberry is, or you don't.
But synthetic words are mentally processed as a single word with *multiple* units of meaning.
"inconveivable" consists of three units of meaning: in-, conceive, -able
"unwholesomeness" is: un-, wholesome, -ness
