Word pairings that take off in usage gradually migrate from separated by spaces to separated by hyphens to compounded. E.g.

    data base
    data-base
    database

It seems to work much better in german, when they are joined and feel much more like a new word. As for English allowing the same thing though with spaces, isn't concatenating words to join their meaning a feature of pretty much every language?

> isn't concatenating words to join their meaning a feature of pretty much every language?

No, and that's the point.

The fact that the grammar of the language allows strings of nouns to form compound nouns (e.g. a "River Steamboat Captain" feels natural to me) is unique and interesting, and shared by English. In Spanish, for example, you'd need prepositions/conjunctions to express that concept.

The fact that if you were to write this down, you'd leave out the spaces, is just a weird quirk of the written system, and independent of the language itself.

My favorite example of English's willingness to do noun-noun compounding and Spanish's corresponding unwillingness is on the Boston subway:

Passenger emergency intercom unit at end of car

Sistema de intercomunicación para pasajeros en caso de emergencia situado al extremo del tren

There are several things going on there that make the Spanish longer than the English, but one is the obligatory use of explicit prepositions relating the nouns to one another in Spanish. In English terms, the Spanish says

System of intercommunication for passengers in case of emergency situated at the end of the train

See also this list written up by John Cowan of some languages that do noun-noun compounding and what the implicit meanings of such compounds can be:

http://recycledknowledge.blogspot.com/2009/12/noun-noun-comp...

Notice that not all types of compounds are understood in every language, even for languages that sometimes allow this!

Thanks, that was a great example.

Hyphen concatenation is also allowed in German, and widely used.