> A thing that's often noted about German and Dutch is how you can string words together without spaces (kindercarnavalsoptochtvoorbereidingswerkzaamhedenplan).

> A thing that's often noted about German and Dutch is how you can string words together without spaces (kindercarnavalsoptochtvoorbereidingswerkzaamhedenplan). You can do that in English, it's just that we choose not to and introduce spaces between the unbound morphemes. Imagine: kinder carnavals optocht voorbereidings werkzaamheden plan If Dutch were written more like English, that's what that word would look like. The dutch 'g' isn't really all that strange. What's strange is how prevalent the sound is in the language. English has phonological abominations like 'strengths', so can't really complain about complex consonant clusters. :-) 'de' and 'het' is just a historical thing: gender is just as difficult in other languages that have it, and it just happens that in the Romance languages, the sound changes have mostly conspired to leave pretty decent markers as to the grammatical genders in a lot of cases. Your 'separable verb' example isn't: Dutch is a V2 language, meaning that there has to be a finite verb in the second slot in a sentence. 'wil' in this case is a finite (auxiliary) verb, where as 'gaan' is an infinitive, and thus goes at the end of the word. This whole thing is a consequence of the Germanic languages once having been verb final, but later the finite verb moved up to where it presently is in most of the Germanic languages. English is now a notable example of a Germanic language (mostly) without this, but you still get remnants of V2 word order here and there. The term 'separable verb' is more apt for the likes of 'aankomen'. English has these too, it's just that the separable bit is typically written afterwards as separate word rather than prefixed as in most other Germanic languages.