On January 1st, I found myself about to text the following phrase in Turkish when I realized its potential to explain hyphenation to Turkish–English bilinguals (and other English speakers).

The phrase was konser hazırlığı telaşı sonrası temizliği. To keep things a little simpler (in terms of the Turkish grammar), I’ll switch it to this old-fashioned version here: konser hazırlığı telaşı akabi temizliği.

Here are the root versions of the five nouns [1] that make up this compound noun: konser, hazırlık, telaş, akab, temizlik.

Here are the English equivalents of the Turkish words:

• konser: concert
• hazırlık: preparation
• telaş: tizzy, bustle, panic, rush
• akab: after, later, subsequent, following
• temizlik: cleaning

If we simply string the root nouns along in English, as too many people seem to think it’s okay to do, we get “concert preparation bustle aftermath cleaning” (which, technically, has no meaning in English—it’s just a string of nouns, much like ‘argues strawberry pivot the of’ [2]).

Because English has no written way of indicating relationships of modification among nouns [3], the correctly written [4] English expression (a noun made of five nouns) is built up as follows.

1. concert
2. concert preparation
3. concert-preparation bustle
4. concert-preparation-bustle aftermath
5. concert-preparation-bustle-aftermath cleaning

All five of these are valid and correct English expressions.

• Number 2 is a noun string wherein concert modifies (acts as the adjective for) preparation. It identifies the type of (reason for) preparation.
• Number 3 is a noun string in which the now-combined unitary (indivisible) concept of “concert preparation” modifies ‘bustle’ to indicate what kind of bustle was involved.
• Number 4 may frustrate those with mathematical minds. I have not noticed any way around this. In this case, ‘concert-preparation-bustle’ is a single indivisible concept (a noun) and it acts as the decriptor (adjective) that tells us the type of cleaning, which, again, is the reason for the cleaning.

Let’s identify the suffixes that make things so unambiguous in Turkish (and play the written role of the gestures and inflection we need to do the same in English):

hazırlık → hazırlığı (suffix -ı)

telaş → telaşı (suffix -ı)

akab → akabi (suffix -i)

temizlik → temizliği (suffix -i)

These suffixes change how the words sound. Thus, the relationships between the words are not hidden from the listener. This is why hyphens for compound modifiers are not necessary in Turkish and why they are necessary in English, which does not have grammatical cases that alter words.

Erroneous Hyphenation

There are plenty of situations in English in which modifiers are telling us about a noun independently of each other. For example, a tiny cute yellow house.

This is a house, regardless of its being tiny or yellow and independent of whether it is perceived by someone as cute.

It’s also a tiny house, independent of what color it’s been painted and so forth.

It also is apparently a cute house according to somebody. While that may be due to its size and color, we don’t know for sure. Maybe this person finds it cute for other reasons.

You get the idea… There are no hyphens because a “cute-yellow house” is not the same thing. In this new case, the yellow that the house was painted is identified as a cute shade of yellow.

If we cared to differentiate between [1] a cute house that happens to be yellow (or a yellow house that’s also cute, but not because of the inherent cuteness of the shade of yellow) and [2] a house that’s not necessarily cute overall but is painted a particularly cute yellow, we would use “cute yellow house” for the former and “cute-yellow house” for the latter… except that no one actually does this, which takes me to a more important point.

It’s better to avoid setting up situations of hyphen-related ambiguity in the first place. Instead say something like “That ugly house nevertheless is painted a cute yellow.” [5]

As I learned in undergraduate physics and found reinforced while teaching probability, circuit analysis, logic (digital and philosophical), and other topics, many (though definitely not all) aspects of life can be better understood through two-by-two tables. [6]

Table 1: Two-by-two table of house paint vs. house cuteness, to get things started

	not cute	cute
not painted yellow	house that’s neither cute nor yellow	cute house that’s not yellow
painted yellow	yellow house that’s not cute	cute house in cute yellow paint

Table 2: Two-by-two table of house vs. housepaint cuteness, with entries in today’s impatient MO, with hyphens [7] to avoid ambiguity

	not cute	cute
painted an uncute yellow	uncute yellow house	cute yellow house
painted a cute yellow	uncute cute-yellow house	cute cute-yellow house

I know these sound awkward, but they are definitely unambiguous.

Exceptions to Hyphenation

• standing phrases
• adverbs

The first standing phrase I became aware of was ‘snow leopard’.

Although some editors will treat this as a regular compound modifier in cases like ‘snow-leopard image’, professionals in conservation, I was told, treat “snow leopard” as if it were one word (or as if it were permanently hyphenated with an invisisble hyphen, though they did not say it that way).

So, “snow leopard image” is correct. It is either as good as or preferable to the hyphenated version because ‘snow leopard’ is a standing phrase [8].

By the way, we can’t get around this choice by dropping the ‘snow’ part because, it turns out, a snow leopard is not a leopard. So this standing-phrase business is particularly important here, scientifically speaking.

As for adverbs, in English they only ever point to the word immediately following them (as far as I know). This is in contrast to adjectives, which can act several words away; hence the potential for ambiguity. For example, if we were to say “a truly beautiful old yellow house,” the adverb ‘truly’ applies to the adjective ‘beautiful’. If it were meant to apply to old, we might have said something like “a beautiful and truly old yellow house.”

Appendix: The Original Turkish Version

For a more modern version (that adds a complication but is better reflective of current language, consider this version (which is what I was actually about to text):

konser hazırlığı telaşı sonrası temizliği

konser hazırlık  telaş  sonra   temizlik

All that I said above is true for this, except that ‘sonrası’ has been established as a commonly used noun, so we don’t add the suffix to it (again): We don’t say ‘sonrasısı’:

• sonra: after, later
• sonrası: aftermath (not necessarily bad) [9]

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[1] A noun is a name for a thing, event, action, phenomenon, or idea. (I’m only saying this here because I’ve had adult native sepakers tell me they had no idea what ‘noun’, ‘verb’, etc. meant.)

[2] a bag of words

[3] There are excellent ways to do so with inflection or gestures, which is why, I tihnk, this issue goes unnoticed by most people.

[4] This is correct without a hyphen. It’s not supposed to be “correctly-written” because adverbs do not get hyphens, because they don’t need them: adverbs in English can only point at the immediately following word, something too many native speakers of English wrongly assume about other compound modifiers).

[5] Yes, I know; that’s far too many words for anyone to use in the 21^st century. I wish my middle-school English teachers ruled the world, by which I mean ruthlessly oversaw the development of the Internet and all software.

[6] false positives, true positives, etc.; two-terminal passive devices; modus ponens, modus tollens, and fallacies;  US politics (abortion vs. the death penalty); and much more—just about everything, really.

[7] unless it’s one of the exceptions I talk about below

[8] evidently, even when the snow leopard is lying down

[9] any subsequent period