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Comment by lgessler | Hacker News Reader

It's ironic because English is just as compound friendly. Take a German compound like Sprachwissenschaft ("language-science", i.e. linguistics). Now consider an English compound like "Earth science". The only difference is that it is convention in English to put a space between the words in a compound, whereas in German they are written without spaces. Things only seem different because of the impressive length some single "words" can reach in German, but English is just as capable of crazy compounds. Take this example that was discussed in a linguistics paper: "gay clergy book row priest", i.e. the priest who was involved in a controversy about a book about gay clergy. Quite convoluted, but we're not as awed by it, just because it happens to be spelled with spaces in between each part.

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I think you're missing why people find German compound nouns interesting and notable. Does English have compound nouns and noun phrases? Certainly. But take your example: "gay clergy book row priest." The noun phrase literally represents the sum of its parts, i.e. a priest involved in a row over a gay clergy book. The phrase is complicated, but its meaning is straightforward. In German, however, it seems as if two unrelated nouns come together to form something unexpected. For instance the word for tortoise is "Schildkröte", translated literally as "shield toad." Is a tortoise a toad? Most native English speakers would say no. Does it have a shield? Again, most native English speakers would say no. So you have a case where there are two easily understood German words that come together to form something unexpected (to an English speaker). Perhaps a German would say that yes, a tortoise is a toad and yes, it has a shield. This is probably my own bias, but I don't think compound nouns in English form nouns in the same way as some German compound nouns do, or at least it feels to happen more often in German than in English.

Again, I don't think German is exceptional in this regard: we have English "catbird" (so called for its call), "bush baby" (for a small primate which is not a baby), "lady finger" (a regional name for okra), "buttercup" (a kind of flower), "kangaroo paw" (a kind of flower), etc.

I'd be pretty shocked if a German speaker thought a tortoise had a Schild or really was a Kroete, in the same way I'd be shocked if an English speaker said that a bush baby was an actual baby. Non-compositional noun compounds occur in both languages.

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