“subtemplate” or “sub-template” ?

without any other context I say the second one.

My probably-wrong rule of thumb is: if it doesn’t appear in the dictionary, use the dash. (because you’re composing two words yourself, and it’s not an existing word, and you can’t add one yourself)

That’s a good rule. Mine reduces to "does that look (or sound) good or bad. :smile:

(for certain values of good)

when you’re a non-native speaker, “looks/sounds good” doesn’t bear any meaning, so you have to come up with some rules to guide you :wink:

Like one I ‘discovered’ way too late: In English, on most occasions, when a vowel is followed by two vocal consonants, it’s not a diphthong. Also, when there’s no vowel afterwards. There are many cases where this doesn’t work though, but I still find it helpful.

I used to favor hyphens, but then I read that English tends to evolve towards dropping the hyphen (“e-mail” => “email”), so now I leave out a hyphen unless it seems completely necessary. The “sub” prefix is a good example: 20 years ago, I would have written “sub-template,” and now I’d write “subtemplate.” (As you may guess, I can’t remember how many years/decades it has been since I read about the hyphen-dropping trend.)

Rule of thumb #2: Just follow the last advice you received from a native speaker :smile:

hah

The best thing about speaking english is there are absolutely no contradictions.

Now, why is “non-native” the one word among nearby entries with a hyphen according to https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/non-native ? I have no idea, but “non-native” does have twice as many google hits as “nonnative”.

my guess: it’s the double-n

Doesn’t work: it’s surrounded by nonnatural, nonnational :wink:

(see Matthew’s link)

hah I didn’t look (clearly)

Must be the “v” then :stuck_out_tongue: (not even, there’s nonnarrative)

If I thought those needed to be one word I would hyphenate all of them. They just look odd.

To paraphrase one of my high school English teachers: “In English, for any rule about words there are at least as many exceptions to the rule as there are words which obey it.”