Why does English hypenate compounds, while German just mashes them together?

Since starting to learn German, I find myself wanting to use a non-hyphenated word in English, but I always end up adding the hyphen because otherwise it just seems wrong in English. Why is this? Is it merely convention?

First of all, note that the problem is a little bit more complex. English can separate parts of a compound with a space (orange juice), nothing (football), or sometimes a letter (bridesmaid). German can use nothing (Fußball), a letter (Orangensaft, not Orangesaft), or, rarely a hyphen (Drucker-Zeugnis) to avoid confusion.

That being said, this is primarily a spelling convention. There is no grammatical or pronunciation difference between an English compound like mathematics book and the German analogue Mathematikbuch. However, there are some reasons why the English conventions would not work well for German:

• German uses joins compounds with interfixes (Fugenlaute) far more often than English. As these interfixes do not belong to either part of the compound, splitting the compound in writing would pose a consistency and aesthetics problem. When English uses these, it is either without hyphen or space (bridesmaid) or a double hyphen (annoy-o-tron).

• English has a comparably rigid word order for sentences which allows to identify compounds in writing by their position and without relying on the help from the orthography. (In spoken language this is not so much of a problem thanks to pauses, stress, etc.)

• Since the German orthography capitalises all nouns, proper nouns are not as easy to identify and you could easily confuse a compound with a proper noun plus apposition. For example der Flughafenwahn (compound noun) means the airport craze, but der Flughafen Wahn (proper noun plus apposition) is Wahn airport.

Now, if English orthography had these issues, it might employ the approach of only omitting the space when it would be causing confusion – which it indeed does to some extent, it indeed does, e.g., in bridesmaid. However, German orthography champions consistency considerably more than the English one.

There are plenty of unhyphenated compound words in English (teaspoon, greenhouse, laptop...). Gyles Brandreth in Have you eaten, Grandma says that hyphenated words are becoming less common. Even co-operate, which you would think needed the hyphen to stop you from pronouncing the first syllable coop, is now often written without one. There are no hard and fast rules (though occasionally the presence of a hyphen changes the meaning, as in the words recover and re-cover).

I can't see English speakers ever accepting those long strings of unhyphenated words that you get in German, though!