A colleague was making a presentation, and the spell check indicated that workaround is written as one word. I don't understand why, as I understood that English does not merge words like Dutch (my native language)
Can anyone explain this?
Learn English – Why is ‘workaround’ written as one word
compound-nounsspelling
Related Solutions
The best way to explain why the same letter patterns are pronounced differently in different words is just to explain the actual historical reasons for it. You'll have to choose the timing and the amount of detail to suit your students, but here are the main facts:
The Latin alphabet had about 23 letters but Anglo-Saxon and Middle English had about 45 phonemes. This meant that the same letters had to stand for multiple sounds. This especially causes ambiguity with vowels, which is why 'ou' and 'au' are particularly troublesome. Latin had no 'aw', short 'o͝o', or short 'ă' sound, and no letters for them. The two-letter combinations 'sh', 'ch', 'th', and 'dg' represent consonants not found in Latin. Anglo-Saxon writers represented hard and soft 'th' by two runic letters, 'þ' and 'ð', but not very consistently, and they fell out of use shortly after printing began. There's lots more, but you get the idea: too many phonemes and not enough letters due to imposing the Latin alphabet onto English.
Most silent letters stand for sounds that have entirely dropped out of modern English. For example, knight was pronounced /kniçt/. Modern English no longer has /ç/ (like German Ich), and in Modern English, /kn/ can't start a syllable. (A few dialects still retain these sounds, though.) This is why 'gh' is particularly ambiguous: sometimes it was dropped, and sometimes it shifted to /f/.
The use of 'o' to represent short 'ŭ' before 'v', 'n', and 'm', as in oven, ton, and come, developed when 'u' and 'v' were both the same letter. 'vv' and 'vn' were written as four short, vertical strokes—just like 'nn' or 'nu'. 'vm' was five vertical strokes, just like 'mv'. Writing the 'ŭ' as 'o' in these circumstances clarified the writing at the expense of complicating the spelling rules.
Anglo-Saxon and Middle English pronunciation varied a great deal from region to region, so there was no way to make a single spelling for all the regional pronunciations. Indeed there was no standardization of spelling in Middle English. Standard spellings didn't take root until dictionaries started coming out in the 1600s, and not really until Samuel Johnson's dictionary of 1755. Standardization tended to favor the London pronunciation, but occasionally froze one region's pronunciation with another region's spelling; bury is the most famous example.
Silent 'e' was pronounced in Middle English. It's silent in Modern English but still retains two roles in spelling: softening preceding 'c' and 'g', and making the previous vowel long if both stressed and separated from the 'e' by only one consonant. The latter is due to a rule of Anglo-Saxon pronunciation that a stressed vowel is long before one consonant and another vowel, and short before two consonants and another vowel. This is why we have a lot of doubled letters in words of Anglo-Saxon origin: to indicate that the preceding vowel should not go long; for example, ban becomes banned.
The business with soft and hard 'c' and 'g' comes from changes in the pronunciation of Latin that occurred in Europe somewhere around 200–600 A.D. This convention came to English with the Norman invasion of 1066. The Norman invasion also brought English the great majority of its modern vocabulary, and its basically French spellings for all the new words. French had nothing like the aforementioned rule of doubled consonants and short vowels. This is why we write liberty and lateral (French-style spelling) rather than libberty and latteral (Anglo-Saxon-style spelling).
Johnson's dictionary cemented the convention of spelling words to reflect their etymology. Hence the "three spelling systems" in my first attempt at an answer. Johnson goofed on a lot of his etymologies and introduced a number of inadvertent inconsistencies, some of which have stuck and some of which are forgotten. There hasn't been much standardization for spelling words that come from languages other than Anglo-Saxon, Latin, and Greek. Competing standards for Hebrew, for example, result in Chanukah as well as Hanukkah; the situation with Arabic is a catastrophe. But overall, Johnson's approach is the modern approach: choosing spellings to distinguish roots with different meanings while trying to respect old precedents, making reasonable compromises between many competing concerns.
Noah Webster's dictionaries of 1806–41 got rid of a number of irregularities and simplified a number of French-style spellings, resulting in the divide between American and British spelling. Webster adhered to the principle of etymological spelling, following it more consistently than before. For example, he changed the the British/French -ise suffix to the more etymologically faithful -ize.
To summarize: English spelling arose first from a Procrustean fit to an alphabet without enough letters, and accumulated lots of tweaks and compromises to adapt to problems like invaders with a new language and changes in pronunciation. Eventually, a mostly etymology-based spelling system emerged which turned the "more phonemes than letters" problem into a virtue: using the different ways of spelling the same sound to represent morphemes rather than phonemes consistently (except for all those aforementioned irregularities).
Hopefully, as each quirk of spelling comes up, you can provide just enough history so that students can at least understand the reason for it. They might find some reasons disappointing, as in the case of slaughter, and they might find others enlightening, like why improvise doesn't have a 'z'. Either way, understanding the reasons for English spelling makes it a whole lot easier to learn and remember. It should at least clear the feeling of hopelessness that descends when it starts looking like English spelling is nothing but exceptions.
Such words are rare but do exist.
For example, consider whatsoever or longshoreman, or if you prefer other forms of transportation, aircraftman or highwayman.
The first is listed as a pronoun, but that seems likely to count as a noun for this question.
There are also adjectives such as workmanlike, adverbs such as hereinafter, etc.
See also this EL&U question I found after writing this answer.
Best Answer
English uses compound words all the time, but it works differently than Dutch.
There is no consistent rule in where compounds are together or separated.
They come in many flavours:
Noun adjunct + another noun:
Adjective + noun:
Preposition + noun:
Preposition + verb:
Meanwhile:
Also, there are terms that can be either separated or not:
This process is unpredictable. Although if a compound does manage to be made into one word, and becomes the predominant form, the one-word form will often stay the predominant form.