935: Long Words, and Compounding Jul 1, 2017

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When most or all of a languages' syntax is derived from affixation, individual words tend to get longer, which is why Mandarin words, which structurally posses little built-in syntactic meaning individually tend to be shorter than others like in Hungarian. Not all word-length can be attributed to grammar though, as compounding affects this too. While in English we say 'bus-stop', this is more typical of Germanic languages than Romance ones, so in French people say 'arrêt de bus' (stop of [the] bus). Likewise in Estonian—a language related to Finnish and Hungarian—not only is it agglutinative such that syntactic meaning is built-in with many affixes, but is is common to form words from compounds rather than creating a new word, making them even longer. For example, 'ebajumalakummardamine' is the Estonian word for 'idol-worshiping'—which is also a compound in English, to be fair—literally meaning 'non-God-worshiping'.

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