I don't have any references for you, but I can think of a few off the top of my head. As an example, a lot of technological words are compounds containing the 电 (diàn) character, meaning "electricity":
电视 (diàn shì), "electricity-to look at", television
电影 (diàn yǐng), "electricity-shadow", movie
电脑 (diàn nǎo), "electricity-brain", computer
Those make it pretty easy to remember if you know the component words. But my personal favourite compound word has to be:
火车 (huǒ chē), "fire-car", train
Because "fire-car" brings to mind all sorts of badass imagery.
The literalness of these words may look strange to native English speakers, but they're not too different from their own language, or from other highly literal languages.
"Television" to borrow from the list above is a literal word in English ... if you happen to know Latin, as it's comprised of the words for "far" or "distant" and "seeing". The German (one of those pesky literal languages I had in mind) is "Ferhnsehen", combining the words for "distant" and "seeing". I remember hearing the word "Mehrheit" in a German broadcast, not knowing it, but thinking "Hrm.... 'moreness' -- that probably means "majority" or something like that. It does.
"Movie" is a shortening of "moving picture". Earlier in the technology development path were shadow lanterns and similar slide or silhouette projectors.
"Computers" (a term transferred from those who computed to the machines they used" are also know as "electronic brains" or "thinking machines".
Trains were often called "iron horses", a term sometimes applied to motorcycles (motor + bicycle -> two wheels) today.
The literalness of English is obscured by the many different language roots and influences from which its words are derived: Old German, Celtic, Norse, French, Latin, Greek....
Another example which I found fascinating was the contribution of Arabic to Spanish. The Alhambra comes from the Arabic "Al Hambra", or "the red", for the read clay of the region. From a time when the Arabic Moors controlled much of present-day Spain.
Another fascinating bit of linguistic lore I only learned recently: the Basque language, unrelated to any others in Europe, may be a relic of the Cro-Magnon people. This was an earlier race of humans who occupied parts of Europe and North Africa ~40,000 years ago. Further linguistic analysis (and genetics) have shown relationships with language fragments in North Africa:
Generally, modern Cro-Magnon people can be found in certain parts of Western Europe, North Africa and some of the Atlantic Islands today. Physical anthropologists agree that Cro-Magnon is represented in modern times by the Berber and Tuareg peoples of North Africa, the all but extinct Guanches of the Canary Isles, the Basques of northern Spain, the Aquitanians living in the Dordogne Valley and the Bretons of Brittany; and until lately, those living on the Isle d'Oleron. (Howells, 1967; Lundman, 1977; Hiernaux, 1975, et al.)—this indicated by obviously Cro-Magnoid skulls.
There are other cases of language showing the dispersal and/or subjugation of tribes elsewhere: Jared Diamond includes linguistic evidence showing the sweep of tribes through Africa, and later of words introduced via colonization. Pre-Han populations in China and Taiwan leave traces through language, as do the Roma people, who migrated from present-day India to southeaster Europe.
Yes, I agree. The comparison I like to use as an example is to the word "airport"—it's a port for things in the air, even if you don't think of it that way. It's the kind of thing that language learners and non-native speakers pick up on easier than native speakers, I think, since native speakers are so much more used to these words.
You'll also often find that a regional port authority is responsible for both seaports and airports in a given region.
And while the structure of an airport terminal isn't quite the same as a set of finger quays for a port, there's a certain similarity between the two structures. Both are interfaces, designed for craft to approach closely and transfer cargos to/from the port. They're characterized by a highly crenelated boundary to allow for maximal surface area and transfer region.
Oh, I know they use such compounds, but I meant more like the history of the idea forming in the 19th/20th century, and China moving towards the Japanese model of doing so as the commenter claimed.
I'm a Chinese. According to my knowledge, most modern compound words are directly taken from Japanese (since we share lots of characters), who borrowed those words from classical Chinese. Many words like 选举 政治 数学 etc. are actually from classical Chinese articles.
Another important thing that this article did not mention is that every Chinese character has its own meaning. In classical Chinese, characters are treated like words. However, since there is only very limited space to put things into one character, Chinese quickly turned to using compound words.
Here is my theory: In ancient Chinese, strokes are like characters in English, and characters are like words. However, because we limited ourselves to write each character into a square space, we quickly run out of space for single characters --- like in English, no one likes long words. To solve this problem, Chinese used those meaningful characters to construct compound words. This practice is actually common in English esp. in tech world --- words like TCP/IP, PC, BSD, etc. are kind of compound words to me.
That sounds about right. We abbreviate whatever we can if ideas become awkward.
For example, in the US military, there are a lot of concepts that are clumsy to say - for example, it's pretty silly to refer to the Naval Air Training and Operating Procedures Standardization Program seventy times when you're talking about why you need to change a safety protocol, so you just refer to it as the NATOPS. All of these concepts get abbreviated - Physical Fitness Test becomes PFT, Non-Judicial Punishment becomes NJP, Then people turn these into verbs, (Bill got NJP'd yesterday) and those get abbreviated as well, and pretty soon you end up with a totally new language that no one else can understand. I told this story to my girlfriend without even knowing that I was doing it:
"[Name] got caught pencil-whipping a PM on the radar. Top wanted to fix him with "EMI," but the OIC wanted him to burn, so it went to the CO for NJP. The CO is a pilot, so he maxed him out - took his pay, 45/45, reduction to PFC. Then, the SMaj told him he looked fat, so he got sent over to the S3 to weigh in. He's over, and he didn't tape out, so now he's on BCP, too! He's gonna get adsep'd if he keeps going the way he is."
My girlfriend started laughing at me, told me to repeat it, and laughed again. I realized that I was basically speaking another language, and then quickly realized that a bunch of the things I was talking about were alien to her anyway! This 90-second story became a thirty-minute discussion of what exactly "taping out" is, why Extra Military Instruction is a sarcastic term for "told to weed the desert for twelve hours," and what's so bad about the Body Composition Program. All of these concepts have been put into my brain from years of living with them, and describing them to someone else is often really difficult.
The tech world does the exact same thing. So does medicine, laboratory science, theater, band... We all have our own languages, created by common experiences and a need to communicate them to other people.
Exactly! Imagine to put those military people on an island and let them evolve more than 4000 years, then their vocabulary will be very different from nowadays American English.
Compound words in Chinese is something like that. But the good news is: each character in Chinese has its own meaning. So you can sort of guess what's the meaning of words if you know the meaning(s) of the characters.
However, except those compound words, there are lot of common expressions, which we call them 成语, which uses historical stories, poetries and you may never know what people are talking about if they use such expressions (people use them a lot and it is considered as a sign of higher education if they can use those expressions correctly and frequently.)
电视 (diàn shì), "electricity-to look at", television
电影 (diàn yǐng), "electricity-shadow", movie
电脑 (diàn nǎo), "electricity-brain", computer
Those make it pretty easy to remember if you know the component words. But my personal favourite compound word has to be:
火车 (huǒ chē), "fire-car", train
Because "fire-car" brings to mind all sorts of badass imagery.