Talk:Neoclassical compound

Neat
I know many people think that this stuff is pretty neat, but surely it is nought but mindless cut'n'paste Greco-Latin? But words like 'ailurophobia' and 'lachrymose' are worthless.

Merge proposal
The articles Classical compound and Combining form talk about the same subject, and should therefore be merged. --Antonielly (talk) 22:23, 30 April 2008 (UTC)

If this suggestion is taken, make sure to include a cross-reference. Combining form appears in editing references, and some may search using that term.138.27.1.18 (talk) 16:59, 3 August 2010 (UTC)


 * Merged the article and redirected combining form here. AIR corn (talk) 09:58, 16 June 2011 (UTC)

Under "See also", there is now a link to the Combining Form article, but it just links back to the Classical Compound page. Someone should remove that link. 147.142.8.48 (talk) 11:14, 20 March 2012 (UTC)

"Western languages" notion
I think that the repeated use of "Western languages" (A large portion of the technical and scientific lexicon of English and other Western European languages <...>; <...> classical languages whose prestige is or was respected throughout the West European culture <...>) is inaccurate and openly ignores the fact that most Central and Eastern European languages and cultures do not differ at all from the Western European languages and cultures when it comes to the treatment of classical languages. Most scientific and technical vocabulary is built from Latin and Greek roots just as often in Russia, Poland, the Czech Republic, Latvia etc. as it is done in England, Germany or France.

So it would be best, in my opinion, to replace the weasel phrase "Western (European) languages" by simply "European languages" since most European countries are a part of the same civilization which originated with the Roman Empire and Ancient Greece. --RokasT (talk) 15:14, 15 January 2012 (UTC)

How about Chinese?
Would it be appropriate to include Chinese in the sources of classical compounds?Asoer (talk) 00:08, 29 December 2014 (UTC)

'Biography' alleged scientific/new-latin compound neologism/coining already attested in Greek (βιογραφία)
Βιογραφία is attested in Greek - per LSJ and OED; see also OeD - in Damascius' Vita Isidori (and later texts; including related words); it's not an international or New (Graeco-)Latin neologism/coining (see postscript). So this example has to be replaced by something else or the text needs to be rephrased. PS According to the OED, it seems that biographia is indeed New Latin though, albeit old New Latin, simply copied from (Medieval) Greek, not really recent and not attested in Medieval or Late Latin. Thanatos|talk|contributions 07:19, 21 June 2015 (UTC)

Requested move 25 October 2022

 * The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review after discussing it on the closer's talk page. No further edits should be made to this discussion. 

The result of the move request was: moved to neoclassical compound. per discussion consensus and WP:COMMONNAME (closed by non-admin page mover) — Shibboleth ink  (♔ ♕) 22:16, 10 November 2022 (UTC)

Classical compound → Neo-classical compound – Search in Google Books for "classical compounds" mostly finds "neo-classical compounds", so this seems to be the more expected term. Dan Polansky (talk) 12:16, 25 October 2022 (UTC) — Relisting. Extraordinary Writ (talk) 17:49, 1 November 2022 (UTC)
 * Oppose 'neo-classical compounds' has about half of the hits as 'classical compounds' in google books (1,480  and 2,730  respectively).  On g-scholar this difference is more pronounced with 'classical compounds' getting about four times more 1,350  to 'neo-classical compounds' 351 —blindlynx 14:10, 25 October 2022 (UTC)
 * These raw numbers are unfortunately almost useless: 1) the search for "classical compound" finds hits for "neo-classical compounds", as becomes apparent when one follows the links. 2) Many of the hits are not from linguistics, e.g. "Capacities of classical compound quantum wiretap"; some are from chemistry. The story is similar in Scholar. Much more manual approach is required.
 * A reasonable test seems to be the following: 1) search for "classical compound"; 2) check the actually found occurrences and count how many of them are for "neo-classical compound" and how many for "classical compound", including only those from linguistics. When I use this test, "neo-classical compound" wins. --Dan Polansky (talk) 17:55, 26 October 2022 (UTC)
 * You provided a single unrefined google search to support your initial argument!  Could you provide more evidence because I'm not seeing a clear 'win' for 'neo-classical compound' when looking at the stuff that comes up in either search—blindlynx 19:25, 26 October 2022 (UTC)
 * I know of no way to search for "classical compound" and at the same time exclude "neo-classical compound". The search that I provided allows the method I described. If you go through the first 20 items in that search for "classical compound", how many cases do you find for "classical compound" in linguistics? --Dan Polansky (talk) 11:16, 27 October 2022 (UTC)
 * looks like a lot of this hits for that ("classical compound" without "neo") aren't related to linguistics.  My concern is that all this shows is that the term 'classical compound' is used for several things and not that 'neo-classical compound' is the most used term title for this concept in linguistics.  Particularly given the low number of hits for "neo-classical compound" in g scholar —blindlynx 17:22, 31 October 2022 (UTC)
 * Including a an article in an exact-match search can help, though the methodology is not without it's own problems. FWIW, I found 63 hits for <"a neoclassical compound" word>, 34 for <"a neo-classical compound" word>, and 100 for <"a classical compound" word> on Google scholar. Even with word as an added search term, though, some of these seem to be about topics other than compound words. (I have no preference regarding this move discussion.) Cnilep (talk) 03:34, 2 November 2022 (UTC)
 * The medical ones tend to be about compound words just to make things more confusing—blindlynx 20:01, 3 November 2022 (UTC)


 * Oppose per WP:COMMONNAME based on the Google Ngrams. Rreagan007 (talk) 17:38, 25 October 2022 (UTC)
 * GNV counts "neo-classical compound" as part of "classical compound" so the above tells us very little; furthermore, many of the uses of "classical compound" are not from linguistics. See my response above. --Dan Polansky (talk) 17:55, 26 October 2022 (UTC)
 * About GNV, pooling "neo-classical" and "neoclassical" together gives us a more favorable picture. "classical compound" still wins, probably because it captures all "neo-classical" and also because it covers non-linguistic uses as well. I can't think of better raw GNV searches at the moment; perhaps someone will figure out something better. In the meantime, can anyone find 7 independent sources using the term "classical compound" in linguistics? That should be really easy if the term is so common, shouldn't it? --Dan Polansky (talk) 11:42, 29 October 2022 (UTC)


 * Note: WikiProject Linguistics has been notified of this discussion. Extraordinary Writ (talk) 17:49, 1 November 2022 (UTC)


 * Support as 'neoclassical' without a hyphen Google and Ngram searches are indeed useless in a case like this, so the 'oppose' votes above are not supported by anything. The phrase doesn't appear in either Bussmann's or Crystal's linguistic dictionaries, but does occur in the two linguistic encyclopedias I checked. Malmkjær's Linguistics Encyclopedia uses "neoclassical compounds":
 * Adams (1973: chapter 10) adds acronyms to clippings, and both Adams (1973) and Bauer (1983) separate off the class of ‘neoclassical compounds’ [quotation marks in original] (items such as television and astronaut), whereas Marchand (1969) subsumes many of the initial morphs of neoclassical formations under the general heading of prefixes.
 * The type of compounds referred to as neoclassical compounds [bold in original] take elements, usually from Greek or Latin ...
 * She does not use "classical compound" at all.
 * Brown's 14-volume Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, in the article 'Compound' by L Bauer of Victoria University of Wellington, says:
 * Neoclassical compounds, also dealt with separately here (see Neoclassical Compounding), have many of the features of compounds, but are compounded according to borrowed patterns rather than native ones.
 * The article 'Morphology: Overview', by the same authors, says:
 * This view of morphology is reflected in the articles in this encyclopedia on affixation, back-formation, neoclassical compounding, conversion, incorporation, internal modification, morphotactics, and reduplication.
 * The article 'Neoclassical Compounding' is written by A Lüdeling of the Institut für deutsche Sprache und Linguistik at Humboldt University. She never uses the word "classical", and say things like:
 * in general we have the ‘bound stems’ described earlier that combine with each other [examples]. This is sometimes called neoclassical compounding. Neoclassical compounds and neoclassical elements also sometimes combine with neoclassical affixes [examples].
 * She cites Bauer L (1998). ‘Is there a class of neoclassical compounds in English and is it productive?’ Linguistics 36, 403–422.
 * The phrase "classical compound" does not occur once in the entire 12,000-page encyclopedia. — kwami (talk) 19:54, 1 November 2022 (UTC)


 * Yes, neoclassical without a hyphen is probably better, also per GNV. --Dan Polansky (talk) 10:51, 4 November 2022 (UTC)
 * About Google Scholar hits: "neoclassical compounds" (plural, without hyphen) finds 709 hits, not a bad number. The hyphenated search adds 352 hits. The Scholar search for "classical compounds" finds 1,350 results, many of which are either for "neo-classical" or for use outside of linguistics. Scholar search for "a classical compound" finds articles outside of linguistics, often chemistry.
 * My proposal again: find any 7 sources that use the term "classical compound" in linguistics; the bar of 7 is really low. --Dan Polansky (talk) 11:04, 4 November 2022 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Formation, spelling and pronunciation
The content of this section concerns Latin words in general, and not specifically compound words. Therefore in my opinion it does not belong in this article. Speminallium (talk) 11:07, 29 October 2022 (UTC)