My takeaway from a couple of years of linguistics is that you're completely correct. Both English and German form compound nouns in the same way. It's a typogra

My takeaway from a couple of years of linguistics is that you're completely correct. Both English and German form compound nouns in the same way. It's a typographic difference more so than anything else -- modern English defaults to separating compounds with a space, German typography just doesn't allow for that. As English compounds get more entrenched, they tend to be hyphenated -- which German also allows for, occasionally -- and then fused. Extremely long compound nouns are rare in both languages, mostly, I'd think, because they get conceptually unwieldy. It's easier (I would argue/guess) to understand a sentence talking about what the captain of the Danube steamship company did than a sentence about what the Danube steamship company captain did. Both utterances are noun phrases and have practically the same meaning. It's still possible that German and English speakers differ in the way they use compound nouns -- e.g. how often they use compounds instead of paraphrasing them or how spontaneously they form new, unfamiliar compounds.