Comment by MagnumOpus
2 days ago
((Old growth) tree), not (old (growth tree)).
Old growth trees are trees or forests that are centuries old and not recently cultures.
2 days ago
((Old growth) tree), not (old (growth tree)).
Old growth trees are trees or forests that are centuries old and not recently cultures.
That should have been hyphenated then. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old-growth_forest
It does not have to be. The English language has a process where phrases become hyphenated compounds which then become single words. It's permissible to be partway along that path, and for people to disagree where something is on that path.
Pick any point in the past few centuries, and there's going to be something, possibly nowadays always a single word, but not necessarily so even now, that was in a state of flux at the time. The same goes for today.
“Old growth forest” is incorrect in any formulation of English grammar that I'm familiar with. It's not about fixed phrases. It's about using an adjective+noun pair (in this case, old+growth) as an adjective modifying another noun (in this case, forest). This is a general rule that applies across the board, not an isolated phrase example.
The poster was correct in asking what a “growth forest” is, because without the hyphen, the phrase parses as an adjective (old) modifying a compound noun.
And "nowadays" is an example of that process https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=nowadays,%20no...
Have a nice week-end! I fondly recall the days of my youth as a teen-ager.
Though I still lament the loss of the subjunctive form. And diaeresis.
Hyphenation is useful in phrasal adjectives, like "heavy-metal shield" (to distinguish it from a shield that is of metal and is heavy, but is not or a for example Pb) or in something like "four-day trips" (the trips last four days; they are not necessarily four in number).
1 reply →
Tangential, how do you hyphenate (((very old) growth) tree)?
In English, we're making a compound adjective so it would be very-old-growth tree.
It's one step short of the German compound noun, and we make it easier to find the fragments...
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ancient-growth tree
This sort of thing comes up often for me. I use extended hyphenation to declare precedence: very-old--growth tree.