Noncompositional

Geoff Pullum’s newspaper headline noun compound interpretation difficulty post earlier today reminded me of Japanese. Why? Because sometimes the Japanese love really long noun compounds. In fact, it may be that nothing strikes more fear into the heart of a learner of Japanese than seeing those huge Chinese-character compounds. (okay, maybe the million or so pronunciations of a single character ranks up there too). I found that the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare is one of the, shall we say, best, users of noun compounds:

非加熱血液凝固因子製剤納入先医療機関名

[pre un-heated blood congealment factor production delivery] medical-treatment organization name

…I think. I’m not sure about the 先 ‘pre’. And that’s not splitting up the N-N compounds like “blood” = “blood liquid” and “congealment” = “congeal lumpify”

I’ve heard some Japanese speakers look at such compounds and say that it’s like it’s Chinese. Which is true to a certain extent: certainly Chinese text only has Chinese characters (maybe some numerals here and there), making it daunting to a reader of Japanese who is used to some kana every now and then to demarcate major phrasal boundaries. But these long compounds are not like normal Chinese texts, because they are just huge compounds, not clauses. The trained (or native) reader of Chinese, I assume, has no trouble sighting the relevant “grammatical” words just as a reader of Japanese reader would. But I will say that, at least for me, reading mostly Japanese over a period of time and then switching to Chinese requires a bit of a transition period before I can get used to seeing nothing but one script.