Example:

green - grün - Begrünung ("planting with trees and grass") - Strassenbegrünung ("planting trees and grass along the street").

You may be able to use "greening" here, but at least AFAIK it is not common in English since it seems a bit strange to turn adjectives into nouns like that. In German I don't even think that anyone needed to explain that word - you immediately think of the older word "Bepflanzung" (planting) and notice that it's probably meant in this context. It's all about reusing known pre- and suffixes.

I guess to some extent the comparison is going to be subjective (and my German is so bad I can't really do so with confidence), but I think a big component in the discussion has to do with dialects. Were someone to say "street-greenin'" in my hometown, the phrase would be understood right away, and is entire grammatical in many American english dialect, but no in the standard dialect. Now if you walk on to a university campus and say that you are interested in neotransphilic interpersonalization most people will have little trouble getting at what you mean (though they might agree as to the specific meaning, and role there eyes at you if they study English). This is rather high brow, but these kind of fun and games with prefixes, suffixes, and a regimen of contractions are also common in 1337 and other dialects. But again, they are not part of the standard dialect.

I would be curious to see a comparison of difference in compound words across different German dialects.

Now, when it comes to the initial rules, they are common to all dialects, albeit with some variations (vowel / consonant shift etc.). So the "Be" in Begrünung would be universally understood as indicating a human activity in this context, rather than a passive process.

I think the equivalent in English would be "begreening." It looks weird written out, but I think your meaning would be clear if you said something like, "The city's begreening project will cost an estimated 1.5 million dollars."

In fact, you are able to use "greening" here. A google search for "greening" returns a great number of websites and articles about "greening" in exactly the sense you describe. There is nothing strange about it.

This google search also led me to another wonderful English compound word: "greenwashing" [0]. Undoubtedly, if this were instead a German compound ("Grünwaschen" oder so), we would fawn over the inventiveness of German and lament the inability of English to produce such compounds.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenwashing

I think an article on German compounds would have been worthwhile on its own. To develop interest in it, however, the author has found it necessary--as many others have--to write of one language's richness as a factor of another's lack. English is actually quite pithy on some of the concepts he claims "require a mouthful when translated" from the German: "that which is in the process of becoming" (das Werdende) is (with varying nuance) nascent, incipient, inchoate, germinal, budding, springing, arising, dawning, crepuscular, in embryo, in the bud, in the gristle, forming, fashioning, styling, or becoming. To give rise to a noun to describe that thing which is nascent, incipient, etc., does not require the ham-fisted (there's a good, playful compound!) stroke which Duncan has used: he's playing it up! If you want a single word for it, bud, germ, etc., have their figurative uses as well. And if he wanted a dictionary definition for das Werdende, he could have dropped the relative pronoun and two prepositions and written, "a nascent thing." (In actual writing, thing would usually be replaced by a more precise identifier, and the phrase would be the richer for it.) There are some rare words, like inchoant, which also do the trick, and whose inception (or kick-off, throw-off, lift-off) looks rather like that of das Werdende.

- exit: out - go - prospect: forward - look - decide: down - cut - alarm: to the weapons

Such etymologies might still be somewhat intuitive to native romance language speaker, although in most of the cases the brain just treats them as opaque units of meaning and sometimes even an obvious alarm (italian: allarme) -> all'arme (italian for "to the weapons") which shares the same pronunciation is not immediately obvious to a native speaker until you point it out; after that an a-ha moment follows.

Thus I'm curious to know how does it work in German where so many compound words are accessible without being hidden by arcane etymology and the general rule is still productive: does it require some effort to actually break a compound in smaller parts once it became so common to be de facto a new word of its own ?

No in general it's quite easy. You just have to pretend it's early latin before the innovation of spaces between words ;) And then there are semi-consistently applied rules about certain suffices (like -s, -er, -en + others) which somtimes go between the subwords to indicate that one of the in a declensional position. For example:

Volksempfänger = Empfänger (des) Volk(es) = "(radio) receiver of the people"

Forming compounds is a bit trickier; everyone "knows" the rules (for applying joining suffices) though they may not be able to articulate as to why -- the new compounds just pop out.

Older, well established compounds often deviate a bit from their original meaning over time, those are as opaque as allarme. "Creative" insults (where English also demonstrates a rich pool of compounds) for example will quickly erode from their literal meaning to "generic insult", only the rough position in the universal coordinate system for expletives (general magnitude, position in the spectrum between evil and stupid) remains.

For unknown compounds, there are some that follow standard patterns of known compounds ("Studentenvereinigung" - student union) and new ones can be read as fluently as an expression with blanks ("Studierendenvereinigung" - also student union, but properly gender neutral or "gegendert", "Crowdfundinggründervereinigung" - union of founders who are using crowd funding, hypothetical but would be easy to parse for anyone who has ever heard of kickstarter)

Other compounds however can be rarely used, yet still very much unparsable for much of the population. Take for example the "Backpfeifengesicht" that is cited here a lot, the sub-compound "Backpfeife" (a slap in the face) is strictly regional dialect (or even just local slang, and to make it worse from a time long past) and has been shortened from "Backenpfeife" which would still only make sense if you know what it is. I suspect that it was originally coined as an insider slang term deliberately misleading to outsiders. For those cases, you learn to quickly give up on extracting meaning when it does not work and learn it like any other new word, a meaningless GUID that could be anything, slowly narrowed down any time you encounter it in context. Some parsing may still happen, in the case of the Backpfeifengesicht one might for example infer/suspect that it is not about the face but about a person/type of person, because ending with "-gesicht" is also used in other compounds. For example the "Freibiergesicht", someone who will only grace you with his company when there is free beer (regional, typically used as a very low magnitude friendly provocation)

I have no idea how to parse this.

exit ~ ex-it = out + go

prospect ~ pro-spect = forward + look

decide ~ de-cide = down + cut

alarm ~ a-(l)-arm = to the weapons

I think what he's basically saying is that when English became a fusional language, forged by the collision of two alien languages -- one Germanic, one Latin; each with its own morphological building system -- everything just turned into a big jumble, and people forgot all these (once) nuanced rules for compounding / deriving words -- leaving us with the comparatively limited ruleset we have now.

At least that's my basic interpretation of the coldly functional, atonal clusterfuck that is modern English.

Why does english make a difference between housewive and middle school?

For instance a "blackboard" isn't a "black board": it is not simply any old board that is black. I.e. the semantics of the composition is not the composition of the semantics.

Some compound words in English have a history which starts as two separate words, then later joined with a hyphen, an finally conjoined without a hyphen. This roughly follows their evolution into a non-compositional noun.

"Newspaper" was once "news-paper" for instance.

Words like "high school" are the unfortunate exceptions; a high school isn't a school which is high, yet it's written as if it were two words. It's certainly not spoken that way; there is a difference between "high class", "high seas", "high concept" and "high school". The "school" is uttered without the slightest pause in front of it, and de-emphasized. Exactly like "board" in "blackboard", or "wife" in "housewife".

For what it's worth, at least English orthography doesn't string together long runs of words into an undelimited string.

High school is high. It's higher than middle or primary school. It's not 'geographically elevated', but that's not the only common meaning of high.

"My son is in /'haisku:l/."

"3800 feet up in the mountains? That sure is a /'ha:i/ /'sku:l/!"

In some languages, the word for word translation for high school refers to something else. E.g. the Slovak phrase "vysoká škola" literally means "high school" if taken word for word, but actually it refers to some post secondary higher education. This corresponds corresponds to the German word Hoschschule which looks like a cognate for "high school", but meaning-wise isn't. High school is called "stredná škola" which literally means "middle school"! (And the university-prep variety of such a school is also called "gymnázium", the cognate of which denotes a sports or exercise hall in English.)

So the "high" in "high school" is simply not directly informative; you only know what kind of school that refers to from your cultural knowledge and context.

Maybe it's a cultural thing, but I pronounce both high class and high school without a pause, and with emphasis on both the high and the class / school.

Not as good as CamelCase, but easier to pronounce.

(You would think there was basically no other kind of wife until well into the Industrial Revolution.)

In German, there are the “Fugenlaute”, sounds that are inserted between the words that a compound is made of. And it is not always clear, what these sounds should be.

Some examples:

* “Schaden(s)ersatz” (compensation for damages) – some put an “s” between “Schaden” (damage) and “ersatz” (substitute), some don’t. * In the German constitution the word “verfassungsgebend” appears, but some would call it “verfassunggebend”.

There are even words that have a different meaning depending on the “Fugenlaute”:

* “Landsmann” / “Landmann” (Land = country / land; Mann = man): “Landsmann” is a man from the same country; a “Landmann” is a peasant or farmer.

There really aren’t “rules” that apply.

There is a lengthy article in the German Wikipedia about this topic: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fugenlaut

That’s a Genitiv.

For most cases, Fugenlaute are completely meaningless, and both spellings accepted.

“Feeling that the end of the world is near”, “kite flying festival”, “commemorative coin with Maria Theresa’s face on it”, “ship from the Hanseatic League”, and “cemetary for homeless, nameless people”.

These are on a whole different scale from “shoebox” or “raincoat”.

(Personally I suspect that the textbook authors were just trolling everyone.)

In Japanese (or Chinese), do you consider that mixing kanji together to form a more complicated word is something unusual ? It's very much the same concept as what Germans do.

Nothing new, really.

Any verb can be, by adding a prefix, converted into a noun meaning "he/she/it who does".

And you can similarly convert nouns into verbs.

What a great word. Endzeit being composed of the nouns Ende (end) and Zeit (time) which form the word Endzeit, wich is the time when the world ends. And then composed with Stimmung (feeling).

While that happens very often, surprisingly all the words you said are actual German words, and Endzeitstimmung, Drachenflugfestival (oder Drachenfestival, if you want to make it shorter) and Hanseschiff are quite common German words anyone would understand.

Fun fact: In German, except for a grammatical weirdness, Dragon and Kite are the same word. The word is also the same as Deltoid.

> https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rindfleischetikettierungs%C3%B...

I'll add hyphens to ease the understanding of this word and also put the s that are epenthesis and thus not important into square brackets.

Rind-fleisch-etikettierung[s]-überwachung[s]-aufgaben-übertragung[s]-gesetz

The first thing to note is that adding an "ung" to the stem of a verb usually means "the abstract process of doing what the verb describes". Even this simply property makes it quite easy to express rather abstract concepts that are quite clumsy in English.

Now we'll decode this word:

Rind: agricultural term for "cow" ("Kuh") fleisch: meat

So Rindlfleisch = "meat of cows" (beef)

"Etikettierung": The German word "Etikette" means "label" (it also has other meanings, but they are not important here). Form this we can derive the word "etikettieren" (to put a label on something). From this verb, as I explained above, you can derive "Etikettierung" - the abstract process of labeling something. What is the something here? Of course the beef.

"Überwachung": The verb "überwachen" means "to supervise" or "to monitor". You know the rules to find out what "Überwachung" means (the abstract process ...). Just one remark for those who are interested: "überwachen" consists of the prefix "über" and the verb "wachen" (to wake, to keep watch).

"Aufgaben": Could be simply translated with "tasks", but this, in my opinion distorts the meaning a little bit. I'll rather divide it into "auf" + "Gabe". "Gabe" is a slightly old-fashinoned word meaning "Something that was given to you by someone else" (derived from the past "gab" of "geben" (to give)). So "Aufgabe" is more correctly translated with "something that was given to you by someone else to do". "Aufgaben" is simply the plural of "Aufgabe".

"Übertragung": The verb "transfer" expresses in my opinion quite the same meaning as "übertragen", since the Latin prexix "trans" corresponds quite well to the prefix "über" as it's used here and the Latin verb "ferre" from which the "fer" in "transfer" is derived means "to carry" (in German: "tragen"). So (you know the rules) "Übertragung" is the abstract process of transfering something. What do we transfer: The answer is clear: The "Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgaben".

Gesetz: We could simply use the English word "law", but "Gesetz" is derived from the verb "setzen" (to set). Thus "Gesetz" carries the slight connotation of "something that was set into force by some authority".

Exercise ;-) : How should "Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz" be translated into English?

Edit: Bonus exercise: What about "Grundstücks­verkehrs­genehmigungs­zuständigkeits­übertragungs­verordnung"? I'm ducking away ;-)