My examples with “an ewt” and “a eke-name” are from the German Wikipedia.
Remember that modern English and early modern English (which is where my examples are from) are different languages that follow different rules.
Putting spaces into compound words seems to be a comparatively new thing according to Wikipedia:
As a member of the Germanic family of languages, English is unusual in that even simple compounds made since the 18th century tend to be written in separate parts.
Older single-word compounds still survive in modern English, but new ones are apparently quite rare. That’s why you have stuff like “steamboat”, but not “softwaredeveloper”.
Which I guess brings us back to the question: what does Sending count as a word? My instinct is to say that the way English puts spaces is a good baseline to follow, not least because the creators of D&D are anglophones. What, then, would Donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaftskapitän be? Probably 5. But if you asked the average German speaker (non-linguist) “how many words is Donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaftskapitän?” what would they say?
I tried looking it up, but I couldn’t find any errata or discussion to that. The text in the German rules also only mentions 25 words, nothing more.
I think it would come down to a DM’s ruling. As a DM my ruling would probably depend on the kind of game I am running. If it’s a fair, by-the-spirit-of-the-rules game, I’d probably go with something similar to English word counting rules. I’d count each word that would appear in a dictionary. So e.g. Donau Dampfschiff Fahrts Gesellschafts Kapitän or Donau Dampf Schifffahrts Gesellschafts Kapitän (Dampfschiff and Schifffahrt are both compound words, but they would both appear in a dictionary).
If the game is a fun bend-the-rules-to-the-breaking-point game, I’d probably count the whole compound as a single word, because it could really be fun to watch the players trying to figure out how to squeeze as many compound words as possible into the 25 word limit.
In practice, I think it would probably not matter that much. Since there’s only a single message to be sent and a single answer to be received, so there’s no back and forth, I don’t think there’s a lot to be gained in terms of actual in-game advantages from squeezing a few more compounds in there.
My examples with “an ewt” and “a eke-name” are from the German Wikipedia.
Remember that modern English and early modern English (which is where my examples are from) are different languages that follow different rules.
Putting spaces into compound words seems to be a comparatively new thing according to Wikipedia:
Older single-word compounds still survive in modern English, but new ones are apparently quite rare. That’s why you have stuff like “steamboat”, but not “softwaredeveloper”.
I tried looking it up, but I couldn’t find any errata or discussion to that. The text in the German rules also only mentions 25 words, nothing more.
I think it would come down to a DM’s ruling. As a DM my ruling would probably depend on the kind of game I am running. If it’s a fair, by-the-spirit-of-the-rules game, I’d probably go with something similar to English word counting rules. I’d count each word that would appear in a dictionary. So e.g. Donau Dampfschiff Fahrts Gesellschafts Kapitän or Donau Dampf Schifffahrts Gesellschafts Kapitän (Dampfschiff and Schifffahrt are both compound words, but they would both appear in a dictionary).
If the game is a fun bend-the-rules-to-the-breaking-point game, I’d probably count the whole compound as a single word, because it could really be fun to watch the players trying to figure out how to squeeze as many compound words as possible into the 25 word limit.
In practice, I think it would probably not matter that much. Since there’s only a single message to be sent and a single answer to be received, so there’s no back and forth, I don’t think there’s a lot to be gained in terms of actual in-game advantages from squeezing a few more compounds in there.