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ndr42

I imagine that languages like german that create composites of nouns have less of a problem with this:

English: cream of mushroom soup

Spanisch: sopa cremosa de champiñones

German: Champignoncremesuppe

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I just checked, Champignoncremesuppe is not in my dictionary ;)

It has some compound words. But including too many of them would quickly get out of hand

You are right! So the situation for german is worse: Millions of words are missing... ;-)

Cremesuppe is in the first dictionary that I looked in. But including every kind of Cremesuppe would have been too much.

but can't you basically make anything a composite noun in German? That it's a single word doesn't really help you decided if it has enough presence unto itself to be defined in the dictionary.

Seems like they would have just as much of a problem since the issue is delineating when a "phrase" becomes a "word"

More to the point, how to German dictionaries handle this?

Is there a distinction between words that get enumerated and compound nouns that do not?

It does seem, though, that German speakers might be more comfortable with the fuzziness that apparently exists at the edges of what the word "word" means.

In general, transparent compounds, i.e. those whose meaning can be derived from the elements, are not in the dictionary. Mushroom soup is transparent; Krankenhaus, which means hospital, but is literally sick-people home, isn't.

not anything. As a German I see no way to compound "boiling water". It remains two words: "kochendes Wasser".

'Boiling' isn't a noun.

true, but you'd be wrong to assume that Germans only compound words if both parts are nouns, e.g. "Gehweg" (walk way) and "Springseil" (jump rope) use the base of a verb. We do actually have "Kochwasser" ("kochen" means "to cook", "kochend" means "boiling") but that's not boiling water ("kochendes Wasser") but for water used for cooking.

In Dutch we indeed happily do this even for English loanwords like "creditcard" or something more obscure like "lockpick". When in doubt, remove the space.

That happens often with domain names, but then you get expertsexchange.com, penisland.net, whorepresents.com, therapistfinder.com, a Dutch pre-match analysis site voorspel.nl, or a site about the game overspel.nl.

Peter Norvig - The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvDCzhbjYWs&t=1477s

Not to mention Tobias Fünke’s analyst + therapist web site, analrapist.com.

I'm such a simple man. Can't help but laugh out loud everytime I see these examples mentioned.

Added Dutch "creditcard" as another example. Thanks

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