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54-466: Freischütz is a German compound word , consisting of frei ( ' free ' ) and Schütz ( ' shooter ' or ' rifleman ' ). There are several theories that try to explain why the word frei is used. One is that it has a military origin, perhaps from terms like Freikorps (independent ' free- corps ' regiments), or the French franc-archer ( ' free-archer ' ). Another suggests

108-475: A chimney into a hare . However, whoever uses these bullets is shunned, and cannot enter churches. They generally meet an unpleasant end, sometimes with a bullet turned on them by the devil, and risk returning as a ghost cursed to hunt for eternity. According to Otto von Graben zum Stein 's Unterredung Von dem Reiche der Geister ( ' Conversations from the Spirit-World ' ) (1731), court records from

162-522: A synthetic language , the relationship between the elements of a compound may be marked with a case or other morpheme . For example, the German compound Kapitänspatent consists of the lexemes Kapitän (sea captain) and Patent (license) joined by an -s- (originally a genitive case suffix); and similarly, the Latin lexeme paterfamilias contains the archaic genitive form familias of

216-420: A cavern, where Wilhelm sees many skeletons, one of which is that of Catherine. Catherine's skeleton waltzes with Wilhelm back to a forest clearing, and other skeletons join the dance until daybreak. The following morning Wilhelm is found dead with white rose leaves strewn around him, and his horse nearby being eaten by wolves. Similar tales are also known from Slavic mythology , where the marksman, named Lampret,

270-407: A church, poured through the eyes of the skull of a woman who died during childbirth, or using powders made from unpleasant recipes. This often happens on St. Abdon's day (30 July) or Midsummer's Day . The bullets can not only be guided at will, but can hit a named target miles away, even the devil himself. Some stories attribute other powers to the bullets, such as in one case transforming a cat in

324-447: A compound noun such as place name begins as spaced in most attestations and then becomes hyphenated as place-name and eventually solid as placename , or the spaced compound noun file name directly becomes solid as filename without being hyphenated. German, a fellow West Germanic language , has a somewhat different orthography , whereby compound nouns are virtually always required to be solid or at least hyphenated; even

378-454: A compound noun, resulting in a pleonasm . One example is the English word pathway . In Arabic , there are two distinct criteria unique to Arabic, or potentially Semitic languages in general. The initial criterion involves whether the possessive marker li-/la ‘for/of’ appears or is absent when the first element is definite. The second criterion deals with the appearance/absence of

432-427: A copy of Unterredung Von dem Reiche der Geister (1731), and Johann Georg Theodor Grässe theorised that he brought the story of Georg Schmid to the attention of Apel. In Apel's version of the story, a forester, Bertram, is the last male descendant of the hunter Kuno. He wants his daughter, Käthchen, to marry a hunter and continue his line. Käthchen loves a clerk called Wilhelm, who convinces Bertram of his skill as

486-426: A formal head, and its meaning often cannot be transparently guessed from its constituent parts. For example, the English compound white-collar is neither a kind of collar nor a white thing. In an exocentric compound, the word class is determined lexically, disregarding the class of the constituents. For example, a must-have is not a verb but a noun. The meaning of this type of compound can be glossed as "(one) whose B

540-418: A gamekeeper who claims to have a feud with " Freischützen " (sometimes translated as ' devil's marksmen ' ), who he says often try to kill him but are unable to due to his faith. When the gamekeeper's apprentice, Franz, fails to shoot what he thinks is the devil (actually the wild Capuchin friar Medardus), a rumour begins that the devil had approached Franz and offered him magic bullets. Apel's tale formed

594-517: A gradual scale (such as a mix of colours). Appositional compounds are lexemes that have two (contrary or simultaneous) attributes that classify the compound. All natural languages have compound nouns. The positioning of the words (i.e. the most common order of constituents in phrases where nouns are modified by adjectives, by possessors, by other nouns, etc.) varies according to the language. While Germanic languages, for example, are left-branching when it comes to noun phrases (the modifiers come before

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648-402: A huntsman; the couple get engaged and Wilhelm prepares for his test to become a forester. However, from the day of their engagement, Wilhelm is cursed, and begins to miss almost every shot. Wilhelm meets an old soldier with a wooden leg, who gives him a handful of magic bullets that always hit, but when the bullets run out, Wilhelm cannot find the old soldier to get more. After hearing Bertram tell

702-409: A longer word or sign. Consequently, a compound is a unit composed of more than one stem, forming words or signs. If the joining of the words or signs is orthographically represented with a hyphen, the result is a hyphenated compound (e.g., must-have , hunter-gatherer) . If they are joined without an intervening space, it is a closed compound (e.g., footpath , blackbird ). If they are joined with

756-472: A space (e.g. school bus, high school, lowest common denominator ), then the result – at least in English – may be an open compound . The meaning of the compound may be similar to or different from the meaning of its components in isolation. The component stems of a compound may be of the same part of speech —as in the case of the English word footpath , composed of the two nouns foot and path —or they may belong to different parts of speech, as in

810-439: A supernatural element, with frei having a sense of magic or enchantment, or that the bullet is destined by fate or the devil. It could even mean the acquisition of secret knowledge or skill, similarly to masters of other "free mathematical arts", such as stonemasons, painters, carvers, goldsmiths, and architects. The Freischütz folktales can be traced back to similar stories of magical arrows. The first known historical account

864-456: A town in Bohemia in 1710 tell the story of Georg Schmid. Schmid, a young clerk who enjoyed target shooting, asked a hunter for advice. The hunter convinced Schmid to join him in casting bullets on the night of St. Abdon's day, sixty of which would always hit their target, but three, indistinguishable from the rest, would always miss. On the evening of St. Abdon's day, they went to a crossroads;

918-489: Is A", where B is the second element of the compound and A the first. A bahuvrihi compound is one whose nature is expressed by neither of the words: thus a white-collar person is neither white nor a collar (the collar's colour is a metonym for socioeconomic status). Other English examples include barefoot . Copulative compounds ( dvandva in the Sanskrit tradition) are compounds with two semantic heads, for example in

972-665: Is actually morphological derivation . Some languages easily form compounds from what in other languages would be a multi-word expression. This can result in unusually long words, a phenomenon known in German (which is one such language) as Bandwurmwörter ("tapeworm words"). Compounding extends beyond spoken languages to include Sign languages as well, where compounds are also created by combining two or more sign stems. So-called " classical compounds " are compounds derived from classical Latin or ancient Greek roots . Compound formation rules vary widely across language types. In

1026-405: Is another type of verb–noun (or noun–verb) compound, in which an argument of the verb is incorporated into the verb, which is then usually turned into a gerund , such as breastfeeding , finger-pointing , etc. The noun is often an instrumental complement. From these gerunds new verbs can be made: (a mother) breastfeeds (a child) and from them new compounds mother-child breastfeeding , etc. In

1080-539: Is found in Heinrich Kramer 's Malleus Maleficarum (1487), of an archer found standing paralysed near Hohenzollern Castle at a bleeding wayside crucifix , which he had shot with the belief that he would get four arrows, three of which he could guide at will. In 1529, Landsknecht Melchior Hauser is said to have found a monk in Hungary who used three or four such arrows each day. The earliest known use of

1134-773: Is merely an orthographic convention: as in other Germanic languages, arbitrary noun phrases , for example "girl scout troop", "city council member", and "cellar door", can be made up on the spot and used as compound nouns in English too. For example, German Donau­dampfschifffahrts­gesellschafts­kapitän would be written in English as "Danube steamship transport company captain" and not as "Danube­steamship­transportcompany­captain". The meaning of compounds may not always be transparent from their components, necessitating familiarity with usage and context. The addition of affix morphemes to words (such as suffixes or prefixes , as in employ → employment ) should not be confused with nominal composition, as this

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1188-580: Is sometimes called čarostřelec ( ' warlock marksman ' ). Leo Perutz ' debut novel Die dritte Kugel ( ' The Third Bullet ' ) (1915) revolves around a variation of the Freischütz motif in which all of the supernatural bullets serve the devil's revenge: The German Duke Grumbach, who has been forced into Mexican exile during the European wars of religion , is drawn into the Spanish conquest of

1242-594: Is the longest word in Finnish, but evidence of its actual use is scant and anecdotal at best. Compounds can be rather long when translating technical documents from English to some other language, since the lengths of the words are theoretically unlimited, especially in chemical terminology. For example, when translating an English technical document to Swedish, the term "Motion estimation search range settings" can be directly translated to rörelse­uppskattnings­sökintervalls­inställningar , though in reality,

1296-651: The Year Without a Summer , inspiring them to write their own ghost stories, including " The Vampyre " (1819), and Frankenstein (1823), which went on to shape the Gothic horror genre. " Die Bilder der Ahnen " (translated by Sarah Elizabeth Utterson in Tales of the Dead (1813) as "The Family Portraits") especially influenced Mary Shelley, who described it in her introduction to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein : There

1350-821: The Australian Aboriginal language Jingulu , a Pama–Nyungan language , it is claimed that all verbs are V+N compounds, such as "do a sleep", or "run a dive", and the language has only three basic verbs: do , make , and run . A special kind of compounding is incorporation , of which noun incorporation into a verbal root (as in English backstabbing , breastfeed , etc.) is most prevalent (see below). Verb–verb compounds are sequences of more than one verb acting together to determine clause structure. They have two types: trɔ turn dzo leave trɔ dzo turn leave "turn and leave" जाकर jā-kar go- CONJ . PTCP Johann August Apel Johann August Apel (17 September 1771 – 9 August 1816)

1404-593: The Aztec Empire and, siding with Moctezuma II against the cruel Hernán Cortés , out of desparation makes a deal with the devil to win an Arquebus in a game of dice from a Spanish soldier because the Aztec side is unable to compete with the Spanish firearms. However, the gun's former owner curses its remaining three bullets when facing execution for losing it: one is to hit Grumbach's king, one to hit his lover, and

1458-525: The Danube Steam Shipping"), but there is no evidence that this association ever actually existed. In Finnish, although there is theoretically no limit to the length of compound words, words consisting of more than three components are rare. Internet folklore sometimes suggests that lentokone­suihkuturbiinimoottori­apumekaanikko­aliupseerioppilas (airplane jet turbine engine auxiliary mechanic non-commissioned officer student)

1512-521: The English compound doghouse , where house is the head and dog is the modifier, is understood as a house intended for a dog. Endocentric compounds tend to be of the same part of speech (word class) as their head, as in the case of doghouse . An exocentric compound ( bahuvrihi in the Sanskrit tradition) is a hyponym of some unexpressed semantic category (such as a person, plant, or animal): none (neither) of its components can be perceived as

1566-700: The better known title of Apel's tale. Two of his other short stories: " Die Bilder der Ahnen " ( ' The Paintings of the Ancestors ' ) and " Die schwarze Kammer " ( ' The Black Chamber ' ) were included in Jean-Baptiste Benoît Eyriès ' Fantasmagoriana (1812), which was read by Lord Byron , Mary Shelley , Percy Bysshe Shelley , John William Polidori and Claire Clairmont at the Villa Diodati in Cologny , Switzerland during

1620-478: The bullet, which kills Kaspar instead. The prince threatens to banish Max, until the hermit intercedes, and Max is granted a probationary year, after which he will be allowed to remain and marry Agathe. " Le Spectre Fiancé " in Jean-Baptiste Pitois ' Contes nocturnes (1846), attributed to E. T. A. Hoffmann , begins with a translation of Apel's " Der Freischütz ", but continues the story after

1674-456: The bullets. The hunter refused, so the rider threw something onto the fire, which caused a stench that made them lose consciousness. When the hunter recovered, he took the bullets, went to the nearest village and told them Schmid was at the crossroads, then left for the Salzburg mountains. Schmid was found and carried to the nearest town, where he was interrogated. He made a full confession, and

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1728-549: The case of the English word blackbird , composed of the adjective black and the noun bird . With very few exceptions, English compound words are stressed on their first component stem. As a member of the Germanic family of languages, English is unusual in that even simple compounds made since the 18th century tend to be written in separate parts. This would be an error in other Germanic languages such as Norwegian , Swedish , Danish , German , and Dutch . However, this

1782-409: The compound are marked, e.g. ʕabd-u servant- NOM l-lāh-i DEF -god- GEN ʕabd-u l-lāh-i servant-NOM DEF-god-GEN "servant of-the-god: the servant of God" Agglutinative languages tend to create very long words with derivational morphemes. Compounds may or may not require the use of derivational morphemes also. In German , extremely extendable compound words can be found in

1836-453: The death of Wilhelm's fiancée Catherine. Wilhelm marries another woman the following year, despite having sworn an oath to remain unmarried for the rest of his life. Driven by remorse, Wilhelm takes a solitary excursion through hills, dales, plains, and forests. As he rides, he hears the wild huntsman , his pack, and wild beasts chasing after him, and lightning strikes Wilhelm's horse. A mysterious voice commands Wilhelm to follow and leads him to

1890-591: The discussion of a regulation on tendering of Danube steamboat shipping company captain hats") etc. According to several editions of the Guinness Book of World Records , the longest published German word has 79 letters and is Donau­dampfschiffahrts­elektrizitäten­hauptbetriebswerkbau­unterbeamten­gesellschaft ("Association for Subordinate Officials of the Main Electric[ity] Maintenance Building of

1944-494: The head), the Romance languages are usually right-branching. English compound nouns can be spaced, hyphenated, or solid, and they sometimes change orthographically in that direction over time, reflecting a semantic identity that evolves from a mere collocation to something stronger in its solidification. This theme has been summarized in usage guides under the aphorism that "compound nouns tend to solidify as they age"; thus

1998-482: The hunter drew a circle with strange characters around the edge using his Weide-Messer , and told Schmid to remove his clothes and deny God and the Trinity . They began to cast the bullets at eleven o'clock, and had to complete the task by midnight, or their souls would belong to the devil . During this time, many phantoms tried to distract them, but when they finished, a rider on a black horse appeared and demanded

2052-574: The hyphenated styling is used less now than it was in centuries past. In French , compound nouns are often formed by left-hand heads with prepositional components inserted before the modifier, as in chemin-de-fer 'railway', lit. 'road of iron', and moulin à vent 'windmill', lit. 'mill (that works)-by-means-of wind'. In Turkish , one way of forming compound nouns is as follows: yeldeğirmeni 'windmill' ( yel : wind, değirmen-i : mill-possessive); demiryolu 'railway' ( demir : iron, yol-u : road-possessive). Occasionally, two synonymous nouns can form

2106-774: The language of chemical compounds, where, in the cases of biochemistry and polymers, they can be practically unlimited in length, mostly because the German rule suggests combining all noun adjuncts with the noun as the last stem. German examples include Farb­fernsehgerät (color television set), Funk­fernbedienung (radio remote control), and the often quoted jocular word Donau­dampfschifffahrts­gesellschafts­kapitänsmütze (originally only two Fs, Danube-Steamboat-Shipping Company captain['s] hat), which can of course be made even longer and even more absurd, e.g. Donau­dampfschifffahrts­gesellschafts­kapitänsmützen­reinigungs­ausschreibungs­verordnungs­diskussionsanfang ("beginning of

2160-408: The last to hit Grumbach himself. The curse comes true when Grumbach uses the first bullet to shoot Moctezuman in order to enrage the Aztec to kill the Spanish in a mass uprising, and when his servant Melchior accidentally shoots Grumbach's lover Dalila with the second bullet during an attempt to assassinate Cortés' right hand man. The fate of the third bullet remains unclear: The first person narrator of

2214-566: The lexeme familia (family). Conversely, in the Hebrew language compound, the word בֵּית סֵפֶר bet sefer (school), it is the head that is modified: the compound literally means "house-of book", with בַּיִת bayit (house) having entered the construct state to become בֵּית bet (house-of). This latter pattern is common throughout the Semitic languages , though in some it is combined with an explicit genitive case, so that both parts of

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2268-437: The novel shifts to its main body, the actual story of Grumbach as narrated by the Spanish rider until the point of Grumbach chasing Cortés to shoot him with the last bullet. At this moment the rider is apparently interrupted by Melchior, who kills him. The novel shifts back into its frame narrative, whose narrator has realized he is Grumbach, but his memory quickly fades and he sinks back into forgetfulness because Melchior has shot

2322-522: The novel's Frame story appears to be an old, mentally unwell Grumbach, still accompagnied by the now-mute Melchior, serving his former enemies back in Germany as a mercenary and apparently suffering from amnesia due to the traumatic events of which he can only grasp fleeting memories. During the novel's prelude, he comes across an old Spanish rider telling the story of Grumbach and his legendary three cursed bullets, and remembers his identity. At this moment,

2376-513: The plural (but in many cases they have been reanalyzed as plural forms, and a singular form has appeared). French and Italian have these same compounds with the noun in the singular form: Italian grattacielo 'skyscraper', French grille-pain 'toaster' (lit. 'toast bread'). This construction exists in English, generally with the verb and noun both in uninflected form: examples are spoilsport , killjoy , breakfast , cutthroat , pickpocket , dreadnought , and know-nothing . Also common in English

2430-697: The possessive marker li-/la ‘for/of’ when the first element is preceded by a cardinal number . A type of compound that is fairly common in the Indo-European languages is formed of a verb and its object, and in effect transforms a simple verbal clause into a noun. In Spanish , for example, such compounds consist of a verb conjugated for the second person singular imperative followed by a noun (singular or plural): e.g., rascacielos (modelled on "skyscraper", lit. 'scratch skies'), sacacorchos 'corkscrew' (lit. 'pull corks'), guardarropa 'wardrobe' (lit. 'store clothes'). These compounds are formally invariable in

2484-497: The rider with what is suggested to have been the third bullet before he was able to finish Grumbach's story, which would have fully restored Grumbach's memory. Compound word In linguistics , a compound is a lexeme (less precisely, a word or sign ) that consists of more than one stem . Compounding , composition or nominal composition is the process of word formation that creates compound lexemes. Compounding occurs when two or more words or signs are joined to make

2538-516: The story of Georg Schmid, Wilhelm casts his own magic bullets on the night before the test, sixty of which will always hit, and three that belong to the devil. Wilhelm passes the test flawlessly, except for the final shot, which hits Käthchen, killing her, and driving Wilhelm insane. Apel's version was translated into English by Thomas De Quincey (1823), Mary Diana Dods (1825), George Godfrey Cunningham (1829), and anonymously (1833). E. T. A. Hoffmann 's The Devil's Elixirs (1815–1816) includes

2592-407: The subject of Weber's opera Der Freischütz (1821), the libretto of which was written by Johann Friedrich Kind , who had suggested Apel's story as an excellent theme for the composer. In this version, an assistant forester, Max, fears failing a shooting trial which would allow him to marry the forester Kuno's daughter Agathe, and become the new forester. Kaspar, another assistant forester, who

2646-473: The term Freischütz is from the 1586 trial at Rostock of Hans Cröpelin and Cersten Sasse, two hunters accused of attempting to forge Freikugeln bullets by arcane means. In early accounts, Freikugeln are generally either made by shooting at a holy target (such as a crucifix , an image of Christ , or the Host ), or casting the bullets at night, often at a crossroads , sometimes using lead stolen from

2700-465: The word would most likely be divided in two: sökintervalls­inställningar för rörelse­uppskattning – "search range settings for motion estimation". A common semantic classification of compounds yields four types: An endocentric compound ( tatpuruṣa in the Sanskrit tradition) consists of a head , i.e. the categorical part that contains the basic meaning of the whole compound, and modifiers, which restrict this meaning. For example,

2754-655: Was a German writer and jurist . Apel was born and died in Leipzig . " Der Freischütz " was Apel's version of the Freischütz folktale, and it was published as the first story of the first volume of his and Friedrich Laun 's Gespensterbuch horror anthology (1810). Friedrich Kind and Carl Maria von Weber drew on this version as the main source for the story of their opera Der Freischütz (1821). On recommendation of Carl von Brühl they abandoned their working title Die Jägerbraut ( ' The Hunter's Bride ' ) to

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2808-402: Was rejected by Agathe, seeks revenge by convincing Max to join him in casting seven magic bullets – six of which will always hit, with the seventh guided by the devil. Max completes the trial, using all except one of his bullets, but when the sovereign prince, who is overseeing the trial, commands Max to shoot at a dove, the bullet instead hits Agathe. However, a wreath blessed by a hermit deflects

2862-524: Was sentenced to death by sword, then burning, but as he was only about eighteen years old this was commuted to six years' imprisonment with hard labour . The Freischütz tale became widely circulated in 1810 when Johann August Apel included it as the first tale in the first volume of the Gespensterbuch ( ' Book of Ghosts ' ). Friedrich Laun , co-author of the Gespensterbuch , owned

2916-452: Was the tale of the sinful founder of his race, whose miserable doom it was to bestow the kiss of death on all the younger sons of his fated house, just when they reached the age of promise. His gigantic, shadowy form, clothed like the ghost in Hamlet, in complete armour, but with the beaver up, was seen at midnight, by the moon's fitful beams, to advance slowly along the gloomy avenue. The shape

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