>Instead of saying ‘I go to the shop four times a day’, you say ‘shop go four I’.

Now, how do I know from the second phrase that it means four times a day and not four times a month or even four times a year? And how do I know that it doesn't mean I go to four different shops?

Words are merely conventions that we have more or less agreed upon as representing a concept. "I" means myself and not you, because we have all agreed. If the statement ‘shop go four I’ is really a word, then it's because we've agreed to that status. I have to consider the phrase to be a shorthand sentence, rather than a single word.

German is famous for taking large concepts and distilling them into a single word, though I'll admit there probably isn't anything like turning a whole sentence into one word.


TEd