Abbreviated compounds

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linguoboy
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Abbreviated compounds

Postby linguoboy » 2016-08-31, 19:22

A colleague of mine (who catalogs musical scores) brought to my attention the behaviour of a word he sees a lot, versenymű. This full (extended?) form only seems to be used on its own, e.g. versenyművek orgonára és zenekarra. When the word is modified or acts as the second element in a compound, it is shortened to (remains?) verseny, e.g. Brandenburgi versenyek. This is true even when it introduces ambiguity, e.g. zongoraverseny is both "piano concerto" and "piano competition".

So what's going on here? First of all, do we have the usage correct or are there examples of versenymű being used in compounds? Second, is this common in contemporary Hungarian? I haven't studied the language much, but I can't think of any other alternations like this. (By contrast, they're all over Standard Mandarin, where there's a strong preference for bisyllabic words.)
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Levike
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Re: Abbreviated compounds

Postby Levike » 2016-09-02, 15:03

I googled zongoraverseny and the first sentence on Wikipedia was:

A zongoraverseny egy olyan versenyműtípus.

Sorry, my knowledge about music related terms in null. :(

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Re: Abbreviated compounds

Postby linguoboy » 2016-09-02, 15:19

Levike wrote:I googled zongoraverseny and the first sentence on Wikipedia was:

A zongoraverseny egy olyan versenyműtípus.

Sorry, my knowledge about music related terms in null. :(

It's more a general question about morphology. This answers the question about whether versenymű forms compounds at all, but we still haven't found any examples where it's the second element.

Can you think of any other (non-musical) terms which show a similar kind of alternation?
"Richmond is a real scholar; Owen just learns languages because he can't bear not to know what other people are saying."--Margaret Lattimore on her two sons

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Re: Abbreviated compounds

Postby Levike » 2016-09-02, 20:05

Nope. :nope:


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