Wednesday, August 28, 2024

German words hyphenated at the end of lines of print: “bein- / halten” and “Isotopenana- / lysen"

In the early 1990s, while working on my dissertation in Comparative Literature ("Observing Women: Doris Lessing, Christa Wolf, Marguerite Duras", University of Pennsylvania, 1995), I found a German word hyphenated at the end of a line of prose: "bein- / halten". I thought this had something to do with "holding" ("halten") a "leg" ("bein"), but that made no sense in context. Only after I looked it up did I see that the word combined the prefix "be-" and "inhalten" and recognize it as a verb meaning "comprise" or "contain". I remembered this just now when it took me several seconds to decipher "Isotopenana- / lysen" as "Isotopen-analysen" or analysis of isotopes. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 28 August 2024)

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