Shoutbox

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Originally posted by NagamasaAzai

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Originally posted by Time
You should also disallow agglutinative construction, which is what creates "antidisestablishmentarianism". Why? Because via this construct I could make "great...grandfather" and claim it as a word.

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Its great-.... not greatgreat. Therefore, ice-cream is 2 words. And you word is actually a lot of words.

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Actually if you cared to read Time's post, you should see that he assumed agglutinative construction was not disallowed.

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Originally posted by wiki
English is a language which permits the legitimate extension of existing words to serve new purposes by the addition of prefixes and suffixes. This is sometimes referred to as agglutinative construction. This process can create arbitrarily long words: for example, the prefixes pseudo- (false, spurious) and anti- (against, opposed to) can be added as many times as desired. A word like anti-aircraft (pertaining to the defense against aircraft) is easily extended to anti-anti-aircraft (pertaining to counteracting the defense against aircraft, a legitimate concept) and can from there be prefixed with an endless stream of "anti-"s, each time creating a new level of counteraction. More familiarily, the addition of numerous "great"s to a relative, e.g. great-great-great-grandfather, can produce words of arbitrary length.

"Antidisestablishmentarianism" is the longest common example of a word formed by agglutinative construction, as follows:

establish
    to set up, put in place, or institute (originally from the Latin stare [special a edited out], to stand)
dis-establish
    ending the established status of a body, in particular a church, given such status by law, such as the Church of England
disestablish-ment
    the separation of church and state (specifically in this context it is the political movement of the 1860s in Britain)
anti-disestablishment
    opposition to disestablishment
antidisestablishment-arian
    an advocate of opposition to disestablishment (alternatively, but less likely and quite similar in meaning, "opposed to disestablishmentarians", depending on what "anti-" is taken to belong to)
antidisestablishmentarian-ism
    the movement or ideology of advocates of opposition to disestablishment; the movement or ideology that opposes disestablishment

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