[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.