WI: You Could Make Arbitrarily Long Compound Words In English?

From its proto-form and early Roman influence, to the Norman conquests, to its transformation into a global lingua franca and contender for having most words, the English language has cultivated a vast and particularly fascinating vocabulary.

It combines both a diverse array of foreign and borrowed words, and compound words (i.e. today, maybe, etc.) that have become essential to everyday speech. Yet the latter feature is quite inconsistent. Terms like alongside are considered one word, but others, such as gold standard, are not.

But what if English, for all of its inconsistencies, avoided one less OTL annoyance and, like its German cousin, allowed speakers to create arbitrarily long compound words (i.e. UnitedstatesofAmerica)?

Thank you in advance,
Zyobot
 
My guess would be fewer recent loan words (recent meaning since ~1600) cause it would be easier to create analogues to foreign words by just adding descriptors. For example, the German suffix "-chen" or the Spanish suffix "-ito" both indicate a smaller version of whatever noun it modifies, but English has no such suffixes. This would probably result in a much larger vocabulary, but a much less unique vocabulary, like German or Hungarian (the poster children of languages with absurdly long compound words)
 
Compound adjectives can be as long as you wish so long as you're okay with the resulting ambiguity in what you actually mean.
 
My guess would be fewer recent loan words (recent meaning since ~1600) cause it would be easier to create analogues to foreign words by just adding descriptors. For example, the German suffix "-chen" or the Spanish suffix "-ito" both indicate a smaller version of whatever noun it modifies, but English has no such suffixes. This would probably result in a much larger vocabulary, but a much less unique vocabulary, like German or Hungarian (the poster children of languages with absurdly long compound words)

Emphasis mine: "-kin" says hi. FWIW I'd question that having compounding native vocabulary would inherently shrink any word borrowing (and even if so, would that even be so bad?).

Anyway, I will echo the idea that less Norman-ness would help with retaining this pattern of complex compound words (although IIRC neither Old English nor most of the Scandinavian languages were ever as prolific in this practice as Dutch or German). Of course, even if Norman influence remains, you could alternatively have a different English Renaissance that seeks to revive their "Saxon-ness" while also incorporating Classical philosophy, with linguistic innovations/developments like in the OP tagging along.
 
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AFAIK the anglosaxonpeople weren't particularly noted as compoundwordusers, so I'm not sure that a decreasednormanness would be either sufficient or necessary. Maybe just have people decide that compoundingwords is a desirablepractice independently of the germandevelopment -- a case of linguisticparallelevolution, if you will.
 
It's possible to create arbitrarily long words in English, provided you want the result to be the name of a chemical compound. (Chemical nomenclature arose largely from German.) You can start with the name of a dipeptide (two amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, joined together): phenylalanylserine. Then add another amino acid: lysylphenylalanylserine. This can be continued ad infinitum.
 
It's possible to create arbitrarily long words in English, provided you want the result to be the name of a chemical compound. (Chemical nomenclature arose largely from German.) You can start with the name of a dipeptide (two amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, joined together): phenylalanylserine. Then add another amino acid: lysylphenylalanylserine. This can be continued ad infinitum.

Or you could catch Pseudopseudohypoparathyroidism whilst travelling to a conference on antidisestablishmentarianism in Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch.
 
I still get cold shudders remembering the Technical German I did at Uni.
With multiple compound words longer than a line, a main sentence the length of the page and all its verbs at the end, we joked that translating an organic synthesis could take longer than doing it.
Would have helped if they used hyphens...
 
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