> People are shockingly gullible about the fact that compound nouns in German are written without spaces while the grammatically identical compound nouns that a

> People are shockingly gullible about the fact that compound nouns in German are written without spaces while the grammatically identical compound nouns that are so common in English are written with them, as if spaces occurred in speech. Yeah. And distinctions that don't even occur in speech are arguably not suited to define the general concept of "word". You wouldn't know from speaking that "coalmine" has no space but "file name" has. I would count them both as single words, because they are single compound nouns. The "space theory of words" would mean that languages without a writing system don't have "words", or that people who can't read also can't distinguish "words", which is clearly nonsense.