> One of my favourite is "Donaudampfschiffahrtsgesellschaftskapitän" - the semi-literal translation is, sort of, a "marine" captain on the danube river, as part of an incorporation/company. See that wikipedia article, but don't buy it 100%, since nobody is really using that word anyway; it is just a demo of what monstrous word combinations may exist in german

People keep saying that sort of thing but we have a similar thing in Norwegian where we are allowed to combine words to make a new “word”. But people who use other languages that don’t do this sort of combining of words misunderstand the (in)significance of combined words.

Take for example menneskerettighetserklæringen. This is the name we use in Norwegian for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Menneskerettighetserklæringen, wow what a long and strange word right? No. It is formed from three words in sequence, “menneske” (human), “rettighet” (right), “erklæring” (declaration).

It’s just a quirk of Norwegian and German and other languages that do the same, that we consider that we should removing spaces between words like this. But there is no actual meaningful difference between a Norwegian saying hey guys we came up with this thing and we’re gonna call it “menneskerettighetserklæringen”, and an English speaker saying the same thing about the “Universal Declaration of Human Rights”. Only that we remove the spaces and you don’t.

The named thing gets its dedicated Wikipedia article in both languages all the same:

https://no.wikipedia.org/wiki/Menneskerettighetserkl%C3%A6ri...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Declaration_of_Human...