Ŋʒädär: Compound Parsing (and Formation)

Ŋʒädär uses compounding rather productively. It uses it for a very great deal of quite different meanings. In addition to this, the compounding system is closely governed by a more detailed hierarchy than the animacy hierarchy.

Reduplication also appears as a compounding strategy (there's two ways reduplication is used with nouns: [(reduced) root]-[inflected noun] vs. [absolutive]-[inflected noun]; the first approach is not per se a compounding strategy, and does thus not appear in this post.) We can see an example of such compound reduplication below:

name-name : things to identify a person, i.e. home village, profession, close relatives

 Sometimes, compounds form somewhat abstract meanings:

arm-hand : strength
work-arm : strength
hand-finger: grip;
hands-fingers: sequence of grips, 'methods' for doing things, sequence of hand moves (in board games), knot tying sequences,

heart-breath : life, in the sense of the biological state of being alive, rather than when speaking of the contents of someone's life - in which case one would rather combine birth-burial.

back-head : stature, uprightness

knife-hide-(dir)-(nom) : treachery, plotting, conspiracy

Noun-verb compounds' meaning depends on where in the hierarchy the noun is. Sometimes, it's X-who-is-verbed, sometimes it's X-who-verbs. Obtaining the opposite meaning requires using the inverse morpheme; the cutoff line is at the dative subject spot. However, dative subjects themselves do not exist for this formation, but the noun component is parsed as though the verb had regular subjects/objects.

Adjective-verb compounds give verbs for either making something have the property designated by the adjective or doing things to things designated by the adjective. Oftentimes, these are further nominalized: cold-fearer. Here, the inverse marker also serves as a participle marker for some verbs, giving things like 'feared by X' as X-fear-(inv)-(inf) or X-fear-(dir)-(inf).

Noun-noun compounds of the same rank are parsed as dvandva compounds:

Noun₁Noun₂ → Noun₁ and Noun₂

Same rank is somewhat subjective, and seems to be rather flexible; the exact parameters of the ranking seems to vary greatly from village to village.

For nouns of different rank, 

Noun₁Noun₂ → Noun₁'s Noun₂, if N1 > N2
Noun₁Noun₂ → Noun₂, associated in some way with Noun₁, if N2 > N1

The latter can include, for instance, a person from a village, a person who works with something, etc.