Does that really help that much? I can see it working with certain things like "doghouse" but a lot of the time the compound words are still pretty arbitrary, like dreamcatcher or butterfly. If I saw those without knowing what they meant, I'd still have to look them up.
Are compound words more intuitive in other languages? The only one I know of is the German word for bat being something like "flapleather". This makes sense if you're pointing at a bat as you say it, but if I'm just encountering the word on its own I have no idea what it means.
And honestly, looking things up doesn't bother me at all. It's so easy nowadays with smartphones.
Well, imagine reading a text about a disease or something to do with the body. In English, all of the terms for body stuff will be in Latin, and I'll have no idea what anything means without constantly looking it up. In Swedish, it's all about the stomachbag and the forearmbone and the twelvefingergut and so on. You immediately grasp the context of the new word because of the words it is made from. And yeah, it's not about compounding words in itself as it is about using your language to create new words and concepts rather than adopting words directly from other languages. Whether you would make it "wordword" or "word word" is completely irrelevant.
Are compound words more intuitive in other languages? The only one I know of is the German word for bat being something like "flapleather". This makes sense if you're pointing at a bat as you say it, but if I'm just encountering the word on its own I have no idea what it means.
It depends. Of course it's intuitive because to a native speaker that is just how the language works, so you never think about it much. Some German compound words are pretty intuitive because they just specify things by describing them more precisely by adding words. Others not so much, like your example "Fledermaus" (actually "flittermouse", that's an English word too), since "Fleder-" has no other meaning or the original meaning is lost, it's not intuitive, it's just a name.
It's "fladdermus" in Swedish too. And while "fleder" might have fallen out of use in German, it's still very alive in both Swedish and English (flitter/flutter). A "flittermouse" or "fluttermouse" would be understood as a mouse that flies around, which is pretty much what it is.
Actually how English forms new terms isn't that different from how German does, it's just that they don't become one word, so "machine gun fire" instead of "Maschinengewehrfeuer". Some English words are compound words exactly like in German though, like drawbridge ("Zugbrücke") or nightmare ("Nachtmahr", an antiquated word, where just like in English the last part has lost it's original meaning).
I am not saying English don't do it at all under any circumstances. I am saying it does it less, particularly the closer to modern times we get.
I just realized that the Estonian word "nahkhiir" ('leathermouse') may be a mistaken loan translation from German. It's a pretty intuitive word for a bat, though – I've always liked it.
Another Swedish word for bat is "leather patch". It could be a mash up of two different names.
fakedit: damn ninjas...
Why is it called a nightmare anyhow. I mean, it's called the same in Dutch (nachtmerrie) so you'd think those damn mares have something to do with it.
It's ultimately derived from a superstition concerning sleep paralysis:
The original definition of sleep paralysis was codified by Samuel Johnson in his A Dictionary of the English Language as nightmare, a term that evolved into our modern definition. Such sleep paralysis was widely considered the work of demons, and more specifically incubi, which were thought to sit on the chests of sleepers. In Old English the name for these beings was mare or mære (from a proto-Germanic *marōn, cf. Old Norse mara), hence comes the mare part in nightmare. The word might be etymologically cognate to Greek Marōn (in the Odyssey) and Sanskrit Māra.
In Swedish the "sleep demon" has a different name from the "female horse" ("Mara" respectively "märr"), but the demon/troll/fey is still closely linked to horses and riding in it's concept: To be under the hold of such a creature was called "to be ridden by the mare", for example.
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