1317: Gaps in Germanic Compounding Jul 19, 2018

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Germanic languages are often praised for their proclivity to allow the creation of new terms through nominal, or occasionally verbal compounding, and whether or not this is fair, compared to other language families like the Romantic ones. This reduces the total number of elements necessary, and so is easier to memorize, but means that individual words become shorter. This can be seen with the German calque ‘Treppenwitz’ compared to the original French ‘l'esprit d'escalier’, or with the German for gloves as ‘Handschuh’, literally ‘hand-shoe’. There are exceptions to this however, such as with the Yiddish for ‘toe’ which is usually ‘finger’, but is in fact short for ‘finger fun fos’ (פֿינגער פֿון פֿאָס) or ‘finger of the foot’. This could have been something like ‘fosfinger’ but neither that, nor something similar to the German ‘Zahn’ for ‘toe’ as a unique word exists. This is all from luck and convention though, not grammar.

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