that's pretty interesting, & a positive step I think. I've been using
unhyphenated compounds in my writing for a long time, mostly because I
think that aesthetically & often rhythmically it works to glue the
word down as part of the same little party (I get where these
typographers are coming from), but also because finnish as a language
is crazy about compound words. words can be compounded absolutely at
will, and hyphens only exist where the same vowel would occur twice in
a row (e.g. ala-arvoinen, which means 'inferior' but literally means
'sub-valued' or 'under-worthed'). I actually had a brain hiccup with
this in a poem a month or two ago, where I wasn't sure if I wanted
'appletree' or 'apple-tree' or 'apple tree'. I went with the first
option, but I may change it yet. compounds where the first word ends
with a vowel & the second starts with a consonant are tricky (note
that all the now-non-hyphenated [haha] compound words have their two
constituents first ending with & then beginning with a consonant).
(shit my general linguistics course is getting to me)

thanks for the interesting info Andruu

KS

On 22/09/2007, andrew burke <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Thousands of hyphens perish as English marches on
> Fri Sep 21, 2007 10:57 AM ET
>
>
>
> By Simon Rabinovitch
>
> LONDON (Reuters) - About 16,000 words have succumbed to pressures of
> the Internet age and lost their hyphens in a new edition of the
> Shorter Oxford English Dictionary.
>
> Bumble-bee is now bumblebee, ice-cream is ice cream and pot-belly is pot belly.
>
> And if you've got a problem, don't be such a crybaby (formerly cry-baby).
>
> The hyphen has been squeezed as informal ways of communicating, honed
> in text messages and emails, spread on Web sites and seep into
> newspapers and books.
>
> "People are not confident about using hyphens anymore, they're not
> really sure what they are for," said Angus Stevenson, editor of the
> Shorter OED, the sixth edition of which was published this week.
>
> Another factor in the hyphen's demise is designers' distaste for its
> ungainly horizontal bulk between words.
>
> "Printed writing is very much design-led these days in adverts and Web
> sites, and people feel that hyphens mess up the look of a nice bit of
> typography," he said. "The hyphen is seen as messy looking and
> old-fashioned."
>
> The team that compiled the Shorter OED, a two-volume tome despite its
> name, only committed the grammatical amputations after exhaustive
> research.
>
> "The whole process of changing the spelling of words in the dictionary
> is all based on our analysis of evidence of language, it's not just
> what we think looks better," Stevenson said.
>
> Researchers examined a corpus of more than 2 billion words, consisting
> of full sentences that appeared in newspapers, books, Web sites and
> blogs from 2000 onwards.
>
> For the most part, the dictionary dropped hyphens from compound nouns,
> which were unified in a single word (e.g. pigeonhole) or split into
> two (e.g. test tube).
>
> But hyphens have not lost their place altogether. The Shorter OED
> editor commended their first-rate service rendered to English in the
> form of compound adjectives, much like the one in the middle of this
> sentence.
>
> "There are places where a hyphen is necessary," Stevenson said.
> "Because you can certainly start to get real ambiguity."
>
> Twenty-odd people came to the party, he said. Or was it twenty odd people?
>
> Some of the 16,000 hyphenation changes in the Shorter Oxford English
> Dictionary, sixth edition:
>
> Formerly hyphenated words split in two:
>
> fig leaf
>
> hobby horse
>
> ice cream
>
> pin money
>
> pot belly
>
> test tube
>
> water bed
>
> Formerly hyphenated words unified in one:
>
> bumblebee
>
> chickpea
>
> crybaby
>
> leapfrog
>
> logjam
>
> lowlife
>
> pigeonhole
>
> touchline
>
> waterborne
>
>
> --
> Andrew
> http://hispirits.blogspot.com/
> http://www.inblogs.net/hispirits
> http://www.flickr.com/photos/aburke/
>