There are plenty of English compounds that don't fit that description: forthright, downright, forthcoming; wisecrack (but "wise woman"); blackboard, greenback, greengrocer, yellowbelly; drive-by, drive-in; tapout, all out, balls-out, blackout, checkout. A couple common vulgarities do exactly what Sitzpinkler and Sockenfalter do, though admittedly the English -er is no longer "male-specific." (It once was.)
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.
yes it's not so prevalent indeed. It's likely that the ancestor of modern english relied more on forging compounds before it started importing a vast part of it's vocabulary from latin through french. Worth noting that many of the words of latin or greek origin are in turn compounds in those languages. Just a few random examples:
- 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 ?
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.
> 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 ?
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 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.
