So for example, “an ewt” became “a newt” or “a eke-name” became “a nickname”.
I think you might be right about what agglutination is in your description, but not in this example. Examples I’m seeing are more like “-s” to make something plural, or “anti-” to say that something is against something else.
Analytic languages contain very little inflection, instead relying on features like word order and auxiliary words to convey meaning. Synthetic languages, ones that are not analytic, are divided into two categories: agglutinative and fusional languages.
So unlike what I thought previously, agglutination vs fusion is not what we care about here, synthetic vs analytic languages is. English’s practice of creating compound words like “cellar door” is analytic. A more purely analytic language would probably not say “two cellar doors” but merely “two cellar door”. And an antihistamine would be a “histamine opposer”. And German’s famous “words created by shunting other words together” is not really agglutination, but morphologically the same as what English does (seemingly called “inflection”, if I’m reading this right), just with different orthographic rules.
Which I guess brings us back to the question: what does Sending count as a word? My instinct is to say that the way English puts spaces is a good baseline to follow, not least because the creators of D&D are anglophones. What, then, would Donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaftskapitän be? Probably 5. But if you asked the average German speaker (non-linguist) “how many words is Donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaftskapitän?” what would they say?
I think you might be right about what agglutination is in your description, but not in this example. Examples I’m seeing are more like “-s” to make something plural, or “anti-” to say that something is against something else.
Some Wikipedia:
So unlike what I thought previously, agglutination vs fusion is not what we care about here, synthetic vs analytic languages is. English’s practice of creating compound words like “cellar door” is analytic. A more purely analytic language would probably not say “two cellar doors” but merely “two cellar door”. And an antihistamine would be a “histamine opposer”. And German’s famous “words created by shunting other words together” is not really agglutination, but morphologically the same as what English does (seemingly called “inflection”, if I’m reading this right), just with different orthographic rules.
Which I guess brings us back to the question: what does Sending count as a word? My instinct is to say that the way English puts spaces is a good baseline to follow, not least because the creators of D&D are anglophones. What, then, would Donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaftskapitän be? Probably 5. But if you asked the average German speaker (non-linguist) “how many words is Donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaftskapitän?” what would they say?