To clarify, I'm not saying that compound words are difficult to parse due to a lack of spaces. I'm saying that without any spaces in a sentence at all, it's har

To clarify, I'm not saying that compound words are difficult to parse due to a lack of spaces. I'm saying that without any spaces in a sentence at all, it's harder to differentiate between compound and non-compound words. blueberry vs. blue berry stand up vs. standup online vs. on line (northeast US term for queueing) cartwheel vs. cart wheel Stick compound words in a sentence that doesn't have any spaces at all, and you either have to pause to grok context, or context won't even help you (blue berry vs blueberry). At least German capitalizes all of its nouns, which would certainly help. Compare this with Chinese, Korean, Japanese or other similar languages that don't use spaces at all (except perhaps after punctuation).