[Gormo]

If you want to make an adjective out of an English noun, just add a 'y' directly to the end of it, e.g. 'morphy'.

The hyphen is erroneous here: 'morph-y' would be pronounced like 'morph why', and has the structure of a compound modifier without making any sense as one.

[wk_end]

I'm a native English (Canadian) speaker and, given this context, would never pronounce "morph-y" as "morph why" (if that pronunciation was intended I'd capitalize the Y and probably not hyphenate it, "Morph Y").

Indeed, sometimes I'll use the -y construction when I'm inventing an adjective from a noun like this, especially if omitting it looks "wrong" to me because it's an invented word (not sure if I would've for "morphy" but whatever).

I don't know if you're a native speaker and there's some kind of cultural or generational gap here where some of us are more/less particular about this than others or if you're a non-native speaker trying to be helpful but underestimating the flexibility of casual written English.

[Gormo]

> I'm a native English (Canadian) speaker and, given this context, would never pronounce "morph-y" as "morph why" (if that pronunciation was intended I'd capitalize the Y and probably not hyphenate it, "Morph Y").

Words conjoined with hyphens are always pronounced separately in normal usage -- the only exception I can think of is the special use case of hyphens representing continuations of a single word across a line break.

> Indeed, sometimes I'll use the -y construction when I'm inventing an adjective from a noun like this, especially if omitting it looks "wrong" to me because it's an invented word (not sure if I would've for "morphy" but whatever).

It's an "invented word" with or without the hyphen. But the standard way of "inventing" word forms in English is to apply suffixes directly to the root word without hyphens.

Using an interstitial hyphen as metadata to indicate one's own squeamishness about using a novel word form seems very strange to me. (The typical convention for this is to enclose the novel word in quotation marks, calling attention to the word itself in addition to invoking its meaning.)

> I don't know if you're a native speaker and there's some kind of cultural or generational gap here where some of us are more/less particular about this than others or if you're a non-native speaker trying to be helpful but underestimating the flexibility of casual written English.

I am very much a native speaker, and it's precisely for that reason that I find this nonstandard use of hyphenation jarring and disruptive of reading comprehension.

[wk_end]

So, this morning I happened to be reading a crossword blog - written by an English professor - and, reflecting on this conversation, thought, "Jeez, I'll bet Rex Parker uses the -y construct." So I scrolled back a few pages in his archives, and sure enough, earlier this month he described something as "bro-y" [0].

In case you still feel like you're more of an authority on whether this is acceptable in colloquial English than me (a Canadian native Engish speaker), OP (who - I peeked at their profile - appears to be a British native English speaker), or an American professor of English:

I also noticed, while scrolling through Rex's archives, that the Times itself had used the "-y" in the crossword. See the cited clue on 36A on June 18 [1], which describes something as "sting-y" - not to be confused with "stingy". Good enough for The Gray Lady, good enough for me.

At this point, I think - if it's still causing you to struggle with reading comprehension - you need to accept that it's a construct in common usage and spend some time practicing until you start to feel comfortable with it. Sorry, I know it's inconsistent; English is known for having quite a few quirks that you just need to get used to.

[0] https://rexwordpuzzle.blogspot.com/2024/06/strong-as-ox-in-s...

[1] https://rexwordpuzzle.blogspot.com/2024/06/extremely-damaged...

[Gormo]

As I mentioned in another comment, I think using the hyphen to eliminate ambiguity where it would otherwise create a word form that's easily confused with, or sounds like, another word entirely is perfectly reasonable. The "sting-y" and "bro-y" examples seem consistent with this, but "morph-y" doesn't quite.

[voidUpdate]

That doesn't always work in a way that's clear, though. If I said a microcontroller felt pretty army, that's different to saying it feels arm-y, since army is already a word. I wasn't trying to say that it was like chess player Paul Morphy, I was trying to indicate it was an adjective derived from "morph". Language is meant to convey meaning, and you understood the meaning I was trying to convey, so what's the issue?

[Gormo]

> If I said a microcontroller felt pretty army, that's different to saying it feels arm-y, since army is already a word.

I'm assuming that you don't mean that the microcontroller reminds you of an upper body appendage, and are instead referring to a well-known instruction set architecture. If that's the case, I'd recommend 'ARMy'. But you're correct about the ambiguity where the word form you want to use collides with another pre-existing word. In that situation, you'll naturally need a different solution.

> Language is meant to convey meaning, and you understood the meaning I was trying to convey, so what's the issue?

That's precisely it. Language is meant to convey meaning: and the more complex and abstract the meaning we mean to convey, the more precise we need to be in our use of language. Deviating too much from well-established conventions makes ambiguity or miscommunication more likely. Conversely, to your point, blindly adhering to conventions where that would increase ambiguity also impedes communication.

In this case, the erroneous hyphen didn't completely erase your intended meeting, but it did make the sentence slower to parse.

[Hizonner]

Actually you're meant to write "morphey". But the original is clear enough.