Yes, good point. One of my brothers speaks Dutch and German and I have learned a bit about it through conversations with him. Compounding is a pretty cool thing about German that also allows precision through long and specific words in combining a lot of root words. I like that.
Some of them are a little weird to me though. Like:
- Lebensmittelgeschäft: literally “life-means-shop,” meaning grocery store.
Still, that function of their language does allow it to encapsulate extensive concepts into a single word with greater clarity, in some cases more so than English equivalents.
German benefits from a more systematic approach, while English excels in flexibility and adaptivity, but might require more words than German in many cases, and English compound words are typically more simple and limited related to nuanced meanings. And to be fair, we English speakers are often ruining our semantics over time more than most languages. Take the word “Literally” for example…it used to have a clear meaning and now it’s been destroyed. It more often gets used to mean the exact OPPOSITE from it’s original meaning. People usually either mean “Figuratively” or use it as a way to exaggerate or intensify a statement (in place of "really, extremely, very). Literally very rarely means literally anymore (actually, truly).
There is certainly a strong case to make for German being better for technical and scientific effectiveness due to the their systematic compounding advantage, which can arguably make it more precise and clear than even English when it comes to technical or scientific areas. Though to me, some of their grammar and word order is unnecessarily rigid, but the language structure has contributed to a culture that is more direct than others, which I like in some ways.