Creating long and exact words is something we Germans are pretty good at.<br><br>my favorite example is the english word tank. The official German translation would be "Panzerkraftfahrzeug" or armoured engine powered vehicle" <br><br>Of cause noone says it and we just say "Panzer" for short, but well. The long version pretty much describes itself even if you have no idea what a Tank is.,(reply>), @fishyc150 <br>In the order given, it’s “glove-snowball-thrower”.,(reply>), @Melody Fussell  snowball throwing glove???,(reply>), Handschuhschneeballwerfer,(reply>), Emmey Creating a long and exact word - like Germans do - doesn’t make a language synthetic or polysynthetic. Because it’s not how you form a word that makes the difference, it’s how you make a separate SENTENCE and whether or not you CHANGE the words to combine them in this sentence. Actually, long German nouns are a very analytic thing. Just like in Chinese you can form a new word using hieroglyphs with THEIR OWN separate meanings, you pile nouns/roots (which also have their own separate meanings) in German on top of each other.<br>And in a synthetic language different morphemes compiled together might not all have independent meanings. You cannot separate them and expect the sentence to be understood and correct.<br>What makes German more synthetic than English is how you change the endings (a morpheme) of the verbs and nouns to make a sentence. In English it’s “to work, work, works, worked, working”, that’s all. And in German it’s a whole bunch of endings: arbeiten, arbeite, arbeitest, arbeitet, arbeitete, gearbeitet, arbeitend, +all those variants with wurde/habe...,(reply>), Emmey a pfp, 5/10