On Compounds
Some German words are so long that they have a perspective […] These things are not words, they are alphabetical processions. And they are not rare; one can open a German newspaper at any time and see them marching majestically across the page, - and if he has any imagination he can see the banners and hear the music too. They impart a martial thrill to the meekest subject. I take a great interest in these curiosities. Whenever I come across a good one, I stuff it and put it in a museum.
The Awful German Language*, Mark Twain
I came across this word today:
Straßenverkehrsordnungsfwidrigkeitsverfahren
Something about traffic… its semantic dimension escaped me, as I was too busy trying to jot down all the letters in an intelligible sequence. Or so I’ve been told. I probably missed one anyway. I guess I could work out its meaning from scratch by separating all five components and reassembling again, but by the time I reach the fourth noun I’ve forgotten the three previous. I fall prey to morphological uncertainty and I’m no longer sure whether the noun consists of five parts or seven fish. German compounds stretch my short-term memory beyond the reasonable. I pity any goldfish wanting to take up this language. Although I’m sure that there are other sound reasons for this glaring lack of German among aquatic pets. Perhaps a tax on sandcastles…
Wo waren wir stehengeblieben? I seem to have lost the thread. Oh yes, compounds! Now, I do not have anything against this Teutonic penchant for soldering words together, but occasionally there must be a limit to this over-enthusiastic DIY coinage. If you’ve passed the three-noun threshold, you should perhaps consider pouring your thoughts into a “sentence” instead. You know, this universally-used structure with subject, verb and object - the daring might even add an indirect object to the mix (the Germans can’t get enough of indirect objects, because that gives them an excuse to wheel out the dative case and thus further perplex the unsuspecting Ausländer!). The humble sentence is a well-tested syntactically-sound platform that can support most human thoughts. You should give it a go! I’ve conducted many exhaustive - if not unwilling - tests and I’ve reached the conclusion that, by replacing these four-atom-word-compounds with sentences**, overall comprehension increases by 100% and compound induced migraines drop by 100%. We must put a halt to this compound malaise! If we don’t contain this promiscuous orgy of syllables soon, German will take over your Wernicke’s area and have a compound party! (Actually, that sounds like a riot.) German texts are already on average 30% longer than most of their counterparts; left unchecked they could easily double in size, and then there would no hope left for me or those poor goldfish.
* German speakers and Germanophiles, do not take umbrage. There is no need to get offended. I’m onto my fourth language and can assure you that all languages are equally awful. Otherwise they wouldn’t be worth learning.
** Should be used as part of a balanced syntactical diet. Anybody found replacing compounds by a myriad of never-ending subclauses in their writing will be repeatedly battered in the head with a copy of Noah Chomsky’s Syntactical Structures.
