Compounds
Revision as of 09:42, 10 June 2007 by Francis Tyers (talk | contribs)
Some languages (in Indo-European particularly Germanic languages) like to make long compound words with low frequency that are unlikely to be found in dictionaries.
- Afrikaans: footboodskaap, foot+boodskaap ("error message"), (cf. groeteboodskap, "greeting message")
- Dutch : "hulpagina" (help page), "woordbetekenis" (meaning of a word),
- German: Kontaktlinsenverträglichkeitstest, Kontakt+linsen+verträglichkeits+test ("contact-lens compatibility test")
Perhaps there could be some method of attempting to resolve unknown compound words into their constituent parts.
Further reading
- Koehn, P. and Knight, K. (2003) "Empirical Methods for Compound Splitting". 11th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, (EACL2003).