• crossmr@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      They don’t… it’s just the way that german words are constructed. In English we’d call it a phrase, but in german they don’t need the spaces, so everyone just calls it a ‘word’. When these kinds of things used to be posted on TIL all the time before we banned them, at least half of them would get a flood of germans all chiming in to say ‘While it is grammatically correct, no one ever uses that word’.

      • Swiggles@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        1 year ago

        Compound words are for the most parts just regular words. This is actually an example of a well known word which has a (slightly) different meaning than the individual words.

        Same as many English compound words, e.g. grandparents, airport…

        It is not just a quirk in the German language as you can see, although it probably originates from there. While it is possible to construct words, most used compound words are well agreed on (same as in English) and not as made up, as you make it seem.