4 ms·

That is really a bad example, but in general this is true for long German words. Often there's a similar combination of words in English, the only difference be

• thaumasiotes 6y ago
  > the only difference being that in German everything concatenates to one word and in English there are spaces between the words which describe the same concept Sure, but that's a purely orthographical difference, not a difference in the grammar of the languages. It's like saying that German is fundamentally different from English because in German, all nouns are capitalized, whereas in English, some nouns aren't capitalized.
  • pvorb 6y ago
    Yes, I tried to say that the difference is really minor. There's a tendency to combine words out of existing fragments in German. Verschlimmbessern might be an example for this. In English I see this less often and there are many more words that come from Latin or Greek.
• Delk 6y ago
  Finnish also has lots of compound words. German might be different, but in Finnish words might sometimes have a slightly different meaning if the words are written separately (with a space) or as a compound. (Often that other meaning is rarely used, and there would almost never be any actual potential for confusion, but technically there may still be a difference.) Some of the compounds may be written as compounds because that's just how you're supposed to write them, but sometimes there might be some kind of actual semantics behind it. Could there be something similar going on in German, or is it really that German-speakers just concatenate things that English-speakers would write separately?
  • pvorb 6y ago
    Yes, this is also the case for German. If you use the individual components separately, that will often mean sometimes slightly differen, but most of the times using separate words won't make any sense at all.