Had a bit of a google, and apparently it’s only agglutination if it’s a small morpheme, mostly only a single sound, that’s added permanently to a word.
So for example, “an ewt” became “a newt” or “a eke-name” became “a nickname”.
What German does is compound words. Here whole words (not just small morphemes) are added ad-hoc (and not permanently).
You will not find a “Donaudampfschiffkapitänsmütze” in a dictionary. That’s not a “real” word. That’s just jumbling a bunch of words together ad-hoc to be used once and that’s it. Like when you string multiple words together in a sentence.
Sometimes specific words strung together are used so frequently that they become their own word with their own distinct meaning (z.B. Zeitgeist, which consists of Zeit+Geist (Time+Spirit), or Kindergarten, which consists of Kinder+Garten (Children+Garden)).
But initially, it’s just joining words.
This is what Wikipedia has to say about that:
As a member of the Germanic family of languages, English is unusual in that even simple compounds made since the 18th century tend to be written in separate parts. This would be an error in other Germanic languages such as Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, German, and Dutch. However, this is merely an orthographic convention: as in other Germanic languages, arbitrary noun phrases, for example “girl scout troop”, “city council member”, and “cellar door”, can be made up on the spot and used as compound nouns in English too.
For example, German Donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaftskapitän would be written in English as “Danube steamship transport company captain” and not as “Danubesteamshiptransportcompanycaptain”.
So for example, “an ewt” became “a newt” or “a eke-name” became “a nickname”.
I think you might be right about what agglutination is in your description, but not in this example. Examples I’m seeing are more like “-s” to make something plural, or “anti-” to say that something is against something else.
Analytic languages contain very little inflection, instead relying on features like word order and auxiliary words to convey meaning. Synthetic languages, ones that are not analytic, are divided into two categories: agglutinative and fusional languages.
So unlike what I thought previously, agglutination vs fusion is not what we care about here, synthetic vs analytic languages is. English’s practice of creating compound words like “cellar door” is analytic. A more purely analytic language would probably not say “two cellar doors” but merely “two cellar door”. And an antihistamine would be a “histamine opposer”. And German’s famous “words created by shunting other words together” is not really agglutination, but morphologically the same as what English does (seemingly called “inflection”, if I’m reading this right), just with different orthographic rules.
Which I guess brings us back to the question: what does Sending count as a word? My instinct is to say that the way English puts spaces is a good baseline to follow, not least because the creators of D&D are anglophones. What, then, would Donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaftskapitän be? Probably 5. But if you asked the average German speaker (non-linguist) “how many words is Donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaftskapitän?” what would they say?
My examples with “an ewt” and “a eke-name” are from the German Wikipedia.
Remember that modern English and early modern English (which is where my examples are from) are different languages that follow different rules.
Putting spaces into compound words seems to be a comparatively new thing according to Wikipedia:
As a member of the Germanic family of languages, English is unusual in that even simple compounds made since the 18th century tend to be written in separate parts.
Older single-word compounds still survive in modern English, but new ones are apparently quite rare. That’s why you have stuff like “steamboat”, but not “softwaredeveloper”.
Which I guess brings us back to the question: what does Sending count as a word? My instinct is to say that the way English puts spaces is a good baseline to follow, not least because the creators of D&D are anglophones. What, then, would Donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaftskapitän be? Probably 5. But if you asked the average German speaker (non-linguist) “how many words is Donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaftskapitän?” what would they say?
I tried looking it up, but I couldn’t find any errata or discussion to that. The text in the German rules also only mentions 25 words, nothing more.
I think it would come down to a DM’s ruling. As a DM my ruling would probably depend on the kind of game I am running. If it’s a fair, by-the-spirit-of-the-rules game, I’d probably go with something similar to English word counting rules. I’d count each word that would appear in a dictionary. So e.g. Donau Dampfschiff Fahrts Gesellschafts Kapitän or Donau Dampf Schifffahrts Gesellschafts Kapitän (Dampfschiff and Schifffahrt are both compound words, but they would both appear in a dictionary).
If the game is a fun bend-the-rules-to-the-breaking-point game, I’d probably count the whole compound as a single word, because it could really be fun to watch the players trying to figure out how to squeeze as many compound words as possible into the 25 word limit.
In practice, I think it would probably not matter that much. Since there’s only a single message to be sent and a single answer to be received, so there’s no back and forth, I don’t think there’s a lot to be gained in terms of actual in-game advantages from squeezing a few more compounds in there.
Had a bit of a google, and apparently it’s only agglutination if it’s a small morpheme, mostly only a single sound, that’s added permanently to a word.
So for example, “an ewt” became “a newt” or “a eke-name” became “a nickname”.
What German does is compound words. Here whole words (not just small morphemes) are added ad-hoc (and not permanently).
You will not find a “Donaudampfschiffkapitänsmütze” in a dictionary. That’s not a “real” word. That’s just jumbling a bunch of words together ad-hoc to be used once and that’s it. Like when you string multiple words together in a sentence.
Sometimes specific words strung together are used so frequently that they become their own word with their own distinct meaning (z.B. Zeitgeist, which consists of Zeit+Geist (Time+Spirit), or Kindergarten, which consists of Kinder+Garten (Children+Garden)).
But initially, it’s just joining words.
This is what Wikipedia has to say about that:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compound_(linguistics)
I think you might be right about what agglutination is in your description, but not in this example. Examples I’m seeing are more like “-s” to make something plural, or “anti-” to say that something is against something else.
Some Wikipedia:
So unlike what I thought previously, agglutination vs fusion is not what we care about here, synthetic vs analytic languages is. English’s practice of creating compound words like “cellar door” is analytic. A more purely analytic language would probably not say “two cellar doors” but merely “two cellar door”. And an antihistamine would be a “histamine opposer”. And German’s famous “words created by shunting other words together” is not really agglutination, but morphologically the same as what English does (seemingly called “inflection”, if I’m reading this right), just with different orthographic rules.
Which I guess brings us back to the question: what does Sending count as a word? My instinct is to say that the way English puts spaces is a good baseline to follow, not least because the creators of D&D are anglophones. What, then, would Donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaftskapitän be? Probably 5. But if you asked the average German speaker (non-linguist) “how many words is Donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaftskapitän?” what would they say?
I feel like multilingual sending would have to work like Twitter and the limit is the character count.
Perhaps an Asian written language would be the optimisation (especially if sending doesn’t need two bytes to encode each of those characters)
My examples with “an ewt” and “a eke-name” are from the German Wikipedia.
Remember that modern English and early modern English (which is where my examples are from) are different languages that follow different rules.
Putting spaces into compound words seems to be a comparatively new thing according to Wikipedia:
Older single-word compounds still survive in modern English, but new ones are apparently quite rare. That’s why you have stuff like “steamboat”, but not “softwaredeveloper”.
I tried looking it up, but I couldn’t find any errata or discussion to that. The text in the German rules also only mentions 25 words, nothing more.
I think it would come down to a DM’s ruling. As a DM my ruling would probably depend on the kind of game I am running. If it’s a fair, by-the-spirit-of-the-rules game, I’d probably go with something similar to English word counting rules. I’d count each word that would appear in a dictionary. So e.g. Donau Dampfschiff Fahrts Gesellschafts Kapitän or Donau Dampf Schifffahrts Gesellschafts Kapitän (Dampfschiff and Schifffahrt are both compound words, but they would both appear in a dictionary).
If the game is a fun bend-the-rules-to-the-breaking-point game, I’d probably count the whole compound as a single word, because it could really be fun to watch the players trying to figure out how to squeeze as many compound words as possible into the 25 word limit.
In practice, I think it would probably not matter that much. Since there’s only a single message to be sent and a single answer to be received, so there’s no back and forth, I don’t think there’s a lot to be gained in terms of actual in-game advantages from squeezing a few more compounds in there.