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Nine times out of ten, the example they point to is something having to do with municipal government. The tenth time it's schadenfreude, in which case, joke's on them - the English word for schadenfreude is, indeed, schadenfreude.
But those other nine times are wrong too, because English does that too. It's just that when we write these long lexical units down we tend to prefer to keep the spaces, but as the definition of "word" is not "something surrounded by spaces when written down", same diff.
My usual example is "coffee table book", but I recently came across a more classic, "municipal thingy" version on a sign.
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We know this is a single lexical unit instead of five discrete words because it was written with every initial letter capitalized, despite being smack in the middle of a sentence. Yes, I'm using orthography here when previously I was strenuously arguing against orthography, but we also know it's a lexical unit all its own because you can't understand what it means just by looking at the component morphemes. You have to have the context. (In this case, all my context is "it's some sort of municipal thingy". Don't ask me.)
But those other nine times are wrong too, because English does that too. It's just that when we write these long lexical units down we tend to prefer to keep the spaces, but as the definition of "word" is not "something surrounded by spaces when written down", same diff.
My usual example is "coffee table book", but I recently came across a more classic, "municipal thingy" version on a sign.
Temporary Site Safety Training Card
We know this is a single lexical unit instead of five discrete words because it was written with every initial letter capitalized, despite being smack in the middle of a sentence. Yes, I'm using orthography here when previously I was strenuously arguing against orthography, but we also know it's a lexical unit all its own because you can't understand what it means just by looking at the component morphemes. You have to have the context. (In this case, all my context is "it's some sort of municipal thingy". Don't ask me.)
