ABSTRACT
Many languages extend their lexicon by combining two or more words or stems to form a new word, or stem. This procedure, which is known as compo sition, is often extremely fruitful and may account for a large part of the actual lexicon, especially in those languages which allow free recursion of composition, such as English or German. Especially German is noted for its long compounds. The length of acceptable compounds seems to vary among the languages of the world. Sanskrit, for example, has much longer compounds than ancient Greek. Consider the compound dvara-karmaka-pidhana-kriyasamsarga-paratvam, which is glossed in Hartmann (1955: 157) as "Tiirobjektige-Schliess-handlung-Beziehungs-Intention", an example, I should add, which is by no means exceptional in the Sanskrit nominal style, used in philosophical texts.
