[bloppe]

Some giant portion of English vocabulary actually are compound words. English loves using compound words but only if the roots are sourced from Latin or Greek: words like electrocardiogram ("electronic heart picture", sourced from Greek), agriculture ("field nurturing", from Latin), and telecommunication ("far sharing", a hybrid of Latin and Greek roots). Probably the overwhelming majority of the words in an English dictionary will be compound words, and people regularly coin neologisms ("new words") using this formula.

An English speaker might be willing to accept componoma ("names placed together", Latin) or synthetonoma (also "names placed together", Greek) without breaking stride.

[thaumasiotes]

> English loves using compound words but only if the roots are sourced from Latin or Greek: words like electrocardiogram

This is false; English loves using compound words. One example of such a compound word is "fire department", which has identical syntax to the German compound "Feuerwehr". Whether a compound word is spelled with or without internal spaces is not a fact about the language, it's a fact about the spelling.

[bloppe]

You'd call it a noun phrase, not a compound word. Definitely splitting hairs at this point, but hey that's what gets me off.

[aitchnyu]

A couple of ape cubs who learned sign language saw a duck and invented "waterbird". We have to know two dead languages to know if aquaplaning or hydroplaning is the right word.

[jleyank]

Language while involved in that water related process is probably drawn from Anglo-Saxon or possibly Old Norse. No refined Mediterranean stuff.

[seanhunter]

I wasn’t saying there are no compound nouns in English at all. If you count portmanteau words like “Brexit” and jargon there are a massive abundance of them. All I was saying is the approach would count certain concepts as untranslatable when they clearly aren’t, simply because in one language you have a compound word and in the other language you use several words to express the same concept. It’s definitely not untranslatable but the translation function isn’t one to one.

[bloppe]

I think your point basically asks the question "what counts as a word" because clearly German has infinitely more "words" than would ever appear individually in a dictionary. I'm saying that English does, too.

[swsieber]

What sticks out to me is that the first word in these ends with a vowel so they don't sound like compound words.