English has plenty of these kinds of compound words: "shoebox", "lapdog", "underworld", "housewife", "footstool", "raincoat", etc. Other compounds like "thoughtexperiment", "cocktaildress" or "middleschool" are written with spaces, simply by convention. We could write them without spaces if we wanted to.
The author even says as much: "Both German and English can create compound words out of most parts of speech, not just nouns, and English sometimes hyphenates them or even writes them as one word".
So it seems like the answer to the initial question ("So what is it about the German language that allows for such constructions?") is "arbitrary spelling rules".
The author even says as much: "Both German and English can create compound words out of most parts of speech, not just nouns, and English sometimes hyphenates them or even writes them as one word".
So it seems like the answer to the initial question ("So what is it about the German language that allows for such constructions?") is "arbitrary spelling rules".