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Comment by 8n4vidtmkvmk

2 days ago

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...

  • English is the only language I know of that allows spaces in compound words at all. It's a very peculiar feature of English orthography.

    • Mandarin written in pinyin comes to mind as another example. Do you discount that because pinyin is not the primary writing system used for that language?

      1 reply →

This sort of thing comes up often for me. I use extended hyphenation to declare precedence: very-old--growth tree.