The main difference between German and English in that regard is that German compounds words while English puts a space in between.
There’s that famous example of the Donaudampfschiffkapitänsmütze, which in English would be danube steamboat captain’s hat.
Using English rules that word would be Donau Dampf Schiff Kapitäns Mütze, and using German rules it would be danubesteamboatcaptainshat.
That’s really all the difference. English does use compound words (e.g. steamboat) but in a much more limited fashion.
Neither does German have much more specific terms, nor are the words really much longer than in English. The only real difference is that German drops the spaces between some words.
I’m not a linguist so I could be wrong, but I think that they would tell you that there is a difference between agglutination (what German does) and adding adjectives as separate words (what English does), even in spoken language. But I also know that even defining “word” in a strict linguistic sense is difficult, so 🤷♂️
Had a bit of a google, and apparently it’s only agglutination if it’s a small morpheme, mostly only a single sound, that’s added permanently to a word.
So for example, “an ewt” became “a newt” or “a eke-name” became “a nickname”.
What German does is compound words. Here whole words (not just small morphemes) are added ad-hoc (and not permanently).
You will not find a “Donaudampfschiffkapitänsmütze” in a dictionary. That’s not a “real” word. That’s just jumbling a bunch of words together ad-hoc to be used once and that’s it. Like when you string multiple words together in a sentence.
Sometimes specific words strung together are used so frequently that they become their own word with their own distinct meaning (z.B. Zeitgeist, which consists of Zeit+Geist (Time+Spirit), or Kindergarten, which consists of Kinder+Garten (Children+Garden)).
But initially, it’s just joining words.
This is what Wikipedia has to say about that:
As a member of the Germanic family of languages, English is unusual in that even simple compounds made since the 18th century tend to be written in separate parts. This would be an error in other Germanic languages such as Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, German, and Dutch. However, this is merely an orthographic convention: as in other Germanic languages, arbitrary noun phrases, for example “girl scout troop”, “city council member”, and “cellar door”, can be made up on the spot and used as compound nouns in English too.
For example, German Donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaftskapitän would be written in English as “Danube steamship transport company captain” and not as “Danubesteamshiptransportcompanycaptain”.
So for example, “an ewt” became “a newt” or “a eke-name” became “a nickname”.
I think you might be right about what agglutination is in your description, but not in this example. Examples I’m seeing are more like “-s” to make something plural, or “anti-” to say that something is against something else.
Analytic languages contain very little inflection, instead relying on features like word order and auxiliary words to convey meaning. Synthetic languages, ones that are not analytic, are divided into two categories: agglutinative and fusional languages.
So unlike what I thought previously, agglutination vs fusion is not what we care about here, synthetic vs analytic languages is. English’s practice of creating compound words like “cellar door” is analytic. A more purely analytic language would probably not say “two cellar doors” but merely “two cellar door”. And an antihistamine would be a “histamine opposer”. And German’s famous “words created by shunting other words together” is not really agglutination, but morphologically the same as what English does (seemingly called “inflection”, if I’m reading this right), just with different orthographic rules.
Which I guess brings us back to the question: what does Sending count as a word? My instinct is to say that the way English puts spaces is a good baseline to follow, not least because the creators of D&D are anglophones. What, then, would Donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaftskapitän be? Probably 5. But if you asked the average German speaker (non-linguist) “how many words is Donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaftskapitän?” what would they say?
I could see this being 5 words in german.
Same number of syllables though.
The main difference between German and English in that regard is that German compounds words while English puts a space in between.
There’s that famous example of the Donaudampfschiffkapitänsmütze, which in English would be danube steamboat captain’s hat.
Using English rules that word would be Donau Dampf Schiff Kapitäns Mütze, and using German rules it would be danubesteamboatcaptainshat.
That’s really all the difference. English does use compound words (e.g. steamboat) but in a much more limited fashion.
Neither does German have much more specific terms, nor are the words really much longer than in English. The only real difference is that German drops the spaces between some words.
I’m not a linguist so I could be wrong, but I think that they would tell you that there is a difference between agglutination (what German does) and adding adjectives as separate words (what English does), even in spoken language. But I also know that even defining “word” in a strict linguistic sense is difficult, so 🤷♂️
Had a bit of a google, and apparently it’s only agglutination if it’s a small morpheme, mostly only a single sound, that’s added permanently to a word.
So for example, “an ewt” became “a newt” or “a eke-name” became “a nickname”.
What German does is compound words. Here whole words (not just small morphemes) are added ad-hoc (and not permanently).
You will not find a “Donaudampfschiffkapitänsmütze” in a dictionary. That’s not a “real” word. That’s just jumbling a bunch of words together ad-hoc to be used once and that’s it. Like when you string multiple words together in a sentence.
Sometimes specific words strung together are used so frequently that they become their own word with their own distinct meaning (z.B. Zeitgeist, which consists of Zeit+Geist (Time+Spirit), or Kindergarten, which consists of Kinder+Garten (Children+Garden)).
But initially, it’s just joining words.
This is what Wikipedia has to say about that:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compound_(linguistics)
I think you might be right about what agglutination is in your description, but not in this example. Examples I’m seeing are more like “-s” to make something plural, or “anti-” to say that something is against something else.
Some Wikipedia:
So unlike what I thought previously, agglutination vs fusion is not what we care about here, synthetic vs analytic languages is. English’s practice of creating compound words like “cellar door” is analytic. A more purely analytic language would probably not say “two cellar doors” but merely “two cellar door”. And an antihistamine would be a “histamine opposer”. And German’s famous “words created by shunting other words together” is not really agglutination, but morphologically the same as what English does (seemingly called “inflection”, if I’m reading this right), just with different orthographic rules.
Which I guess brings us back to the question: what does Sending count as a word? My instinct is to say that the way English puts spaces is a good baseline to follow, not least because the creators of D&D are anglophones. What, then, would Donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaftskapitän be? Probably 5. But if you asked the average German speaker (non-linguist) “how many words is Donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaftskapitän?” what would they say?
Yes but that’s not part of the limits, is it?