German compound nouns are just written without spaces. There’s no grammatical difference between “Schlafsack” (= Schlaf “sleep” + Sack “bag”) and “sleeping bag”, except the way they’re written down. In English we analyse a “word” as “a thing you write down with spaces on either side”, which is valid as a definition or as an analysis, but it’s not what we really think of when we talk about words, which we think of as something more fundamental.
If, tomorrow, we decided in English to write compound nouns without spaces, the language would have suddenly gained thousands and thousands of words, yet the only real difference would be a rule about writing things down. Spoken English would be exactly the same, so nothing fundamental about the actual bits of English would have changed.
One of my frustrations with English is that spaces in compound nouns are arbitrary. We have fishbowl but also fish tank.
German words don’t tend to be long and convoluted. That’s just a stereotype due to writing rules.
A sentence spelled without spaces isn’t a word.
Or as some would say, classic wortlängenbedingte Sprachwesensverfälschung*. See the space there inbetween ☝️?
*amtlich korrigiert
