Fun fact: did you know we have a language phenomenon in Dutch called the English disease? It has everything to do with the way we use compound words. This is the story of why they’re so awkward, even for Dutchies, and how we ended up blaming English speakers for our mistakes.
Compound words
As a general rule, in Dutch, when two words (often nouns) are combined, they are written together without adding a space. We call these compound words samengestelde woorden (Eng: put-together words) or samenstellingen (Eng: put-togetherings, I suppose?).
In English, you could easily grab your chess board, and put your chess pieces on it. In Dutch, at least by rules of grammar, you would have to use your schaakbord and your schaakstukken. This is the case for pretty much all Dutch compound words: it doesn’t matter how many components there are, or how long the new words end up being, the rule remains the same.
For speakers of, for example, German, this is not at all unfamiliar. In fact, many languages around the world keep their compound words tucked neatly together. For English speakers, however, this might get a bit awkward.
Important note: this is only the case for compound words. When we use adjectives or adverbs to describe something about the properties of something else, we do use a space, just like you would in English.
The long one
There is a famous – or should I say: notorious – Dutch compound word that really isn’t used in daily life, but it shows the rule in action perfectly:
vrachtwagenwielventieldopjesfabriekwerknemerssalarisverhoging
The different components are as follows:
vrachtwagen wiel ventiel dopjes fabriek werknemers salaris verhoging
(Technically, “vrachtwagen” and “werknemer” already are compound words, but let’s not make this any more difficult than it already is).
Translated directly into English:
truck wheel valve caps factory employees salary raise
Which would be a raise of the salary for workers at a company that manufactures caps for the valves of wheels of trucks. Notice how it’s read backwards now? Also notice how English has to use a lot of words like at, for and of, as well as verbs, to explain the relation between the nouns. Simply putting them in a single line like we did above technically works in English, but it’s very awkward and not at all easy to read (not that this Dutch one is easy to read, but that’s not necessarily the point here).
While Dutch does try to stay away from the awkwardly long ones too, you’ll often find compound words that consist of two, three, or even more components, and still make all the sense in the world.
Example
Something that’s not very commonly found in kitchens around the world, but is in a Dutch one, is a cheese slicer. It would look very awkward to write that as a single word – cheeseslicer. The Dutch, though, have no problems with that, even though kaasschaaf seems just as awkward, if not much more so, to pronounce.
If you were a somewhat decadent Dutch person, and you had a separate drawer for all your fancy cheese slicers, it would be a kaasschaaflade, and if you were to put a lock on that, it would be a kaasschaafladeslot, although even Dutchies would probably bail out at that point and go for slot voor de kaasschaaflade, the equivalent of lock for the cheese slicer drawer.
While in English, it’s sometimes just a matter of opinion whether to combine the components into a single word or not (would you say chat bot or chatbot?), in Dutch, it is not. The rule is very simple: if the components add up to a single meaning that differs from the meaning of the separate components, it should be a single word. A kaasschaaflade is very different from a kaasschaaf (naturally), and much more specific than you average all-purpose lade. Therefore, the new word should be one single word.
This is not to say that all of these options find their way into our dictionaries – that bit actually is a bit ambiguous. Still, they’re perfectly fine words to use, and in fact, this is the only way to write them down correctly without changing the order altogether – although spell checkers don’t seem to realize this is the case.
Fun fact: the longest official Dutch word in the Van Dale dictionary, our version of the OED, is meervoudigepersoonlijkheidsstoornis. It means multiple personality disorder. It has 35 letters, which is a lot less than the longest word in the OED, pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis – who’s being silly now?
Dots and dashes
That’s not the end of the story, though. Just like in English, one has the option to add a hyphen (–) in order to make the word easier to comprehend. In the example above, if I really wanted to stick with the full compound word, I would probably go for kaasschaaflade-slot to make it a bit more obvious that it’s about a lock for the cheese slicer drawer, rather than a drawer lock for a single cheese slicer. In this case, the hyphen is purely optional, and serves no grammatical purpose whatsoever.
Things are different when pronunciation and the division between the different components comes into play. The word zee-egel (Eng: sea urchin) would get awfully awkward if no hyphen was used: where the one word stops and the other begins is impossible to tell when it’s written like zeeegel. Another famous Dutch example is bommelding (Eng: bomb threat / bomb scare), which should be separated as bom-melding, but could be mistakenly read as bommel-ding (ding meaning thing, and even though bommel doesn’t have any meaning in Dutch, it kind of looks like it could).
Zee-egel in the example above used to be written zeeëgel, in which the two dots are used to tell the reader that’s where the new syllable begins. In modern spelling, we simply use zee-egel, although we still use the two dots in plurals that end in three es (tweeën / twos/2s) or verbs or derivatives of those that end up with triple vowels (gevreeën / made love). You can read more about this in the post about diacritical marks.
Hyphens can be used in compound words in English as well, not just for clarity, but also to show the difference in meaning (re-sign vs. resign, for example). I can’t think of any of these in Dutch from the top of my head, but who knows, they might exist here, too.
The triple consonant
Stock Dutch doesn’t feature words that end in two consonants that are the same letter. English, however, does feature these, and some of them have made it into Dutch as a loan word. When you go and make compound words using these words, and the second part of the compound starts with the same consonant, you’ll end up with three in a row, which looks quite silly, but due to the nature of Dutch compound words, they are actually correct.
This doesn’t happen a whole lot, but since compound words can be made up of pretty much every combination of nouns out there, they do occasionally occur:
jazzzangeres (Eng: [female] jazz singer)
stresssymptoom (Eng: stress symptom)
It’s perfectly accepted to add a hyphen to get rid of this strange triple consonant, but it’s never actually necessary.
The English disease
Having said all this: it’s more and more common for Dutch people to, although still very much wrong, use spaces to separate compound words. In fact, because it’s mainly due to the ever-growing influence of English on our gorgeous little language, it’s literally called the English disease.
Another reason is that a lot of spell checkers, especially the one in Google Docs, as I’ve found, often wrongfully correct perfectly fine compound words into separate words. I’ll leave it up to you to decide how important this is, but as a language enthusiast, I’m not overly fond of it.
Long blogstory short
Compound words in Dutch are written as a single word, rather than separate words, as is often the case in English. While hyphens may be used to clarify meaning or pronunciation, separating the different compounds with a space is a no-no, even when there are more than two components involved, with no technical limit to it.
Dutchies seem to forget about this rather simple rule more and more often, aided by the fact that English is much more prominent now than it was back in the days and the easy access to social media, but the rule hasn’t changed with it – not yet, at least. Until it does, just swallow your pride, and leave your spaces out of your compound words – or, if you want to interpret compound as a noun in this instance: compoundwords.
