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On phoenix.de it reads:

Adams lernt schnell Japanisch, baut für den Shogun Hochsee taugliche Schiffe, avanciert zum außenpolitischen Berater und wird später engster Vertrauter Ieyasus.

Is the bolded part correct? Or would you have to concatenate „Hochsee“ and „tauglich“?

  • „Hochsee-tauglich“?
  • „hochsee-tauglich“?

If they have to be concatenated, is the hyphen optional? If so, would „Hochseetauglich“ and/or „hochseetauglich“ be correct?

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Besides, this kind of fault is called "Deppenleerzeichen" or Leerzeichen in Komposita (lit. spaces in composites), as it is quite widely used. de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leerzeichen_in_Komposita –  Matthias Meid Oct 29 '12 at 19:31
Actually the sentence as written is correct, assuming the Shogun is named "Hochsee", and Adams builds "taugliche Schiffe" for him. :-) –  celtschk Oct 31 '12 at 13:52
@celtschk: Hehe, that's true ☺ –  unor Oct 31 '12 at 21:02

3 Answers 3

The correct spelling is hochseetauglich. Actually, when using the hyphen to stress something, it should be *Hochsee-tauglich because the capitalization of the noun would shine through - and that is horrible, please avoid it (cf. these discussions about Ball-tauglich and Marx-freundlich).

Of course a different formulation might be "Das Schiff ist für die Hochsee tauglich".

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It is a compositum:


Since it is an adjectiv (not a noun) its first letter is lower case (if it is not the first word of a sentence)

The hyphen is optional, but the word is short enough (for a german word) to avoid the hyphen.

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The hyphen is optional - use it when you want to amplify the meaning. For instance when there are „nicht-hochsee-taugliche“ ships as well. Anyway „hochseetauglich“ would be the most common way to write it.

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I'd use "nicht-hochseetaugliche Schiffe" in that case, because "nicht-hochsee-tauglich" sounds to me as if the ships were fit for the non-open sea, instead of not being fit for the open sea, what clearly is meant here. Although, thinking again about it, I'd actually write "nicht hochseetaugliche Schiffe" without hyphen. –  celtschk Oct 31 '12 at 13:47

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