If you think that "Fussbodenschleifmaschinenverleih" is huge, try "Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz" with not a hyphen in sight, except if the word is split across two lines. And we can't even compound the word 'meat pie'!
Perhaps there's a good reason why we don't write 'meatpie' or 'polopony', the latter looking like a misspelt 'polyphony' but simply meaning 'polo pony'. Like the ancient Romans who wrote without spaces between words in a style called scriptio continua (continuous script) to save expensive writing materials, Germans to this day write compound words without spaces or hyphens, even though today writing materials are considerably cheaper than they were in ancient Roman times.
The hyphen leads a double life: it is used not just to break words into syllables but to tie two or more words together, in the formation of compounds. Here are three compounds: school bus, bus driver, school-bus driver. This is one of the simpler uses of the hyphen turning compound nouns into adjectives. Ice cream is two words as a noun but hyphenated as an adjective in ice-cream cone. Ice cream itself remains non-hyphenated - this last word, ironically, being hyphenated.
As for word breaks, consider the word 'cashier': 'cash-ier', as a noun, seems obvious, as it means 'one that has charge of money', but 'ca-shier' is a transitive verb, meaning 'to dismiss from service'. It happens again with the word 'bumper': who doesn't know that it breaks after the 'bump'? But divided into 'bum-per', it becomes an adjective meaning 'unusually large', as in ' bumber crop'.
By way of this long weekend's entertainment, I have just read Edward N. Teall's "Meet Mr. Hyphen (And Put Him in his Place). It may be the only full-length work on hyphens ever published in the English language.
As an enthusiastic reader of all of W. Somerset Maugham's novels and short stories, I keep coming across his spelling of 'to-day' with a hyphen. His writing was of a different time, and language changes as do its rules, and I am comforted by Teal's final, reassuring paragraph:
There should be a German book on the use of hyphens as well. I mean, Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz would be so much easier to read with at least three hyphens judiciously inserted, even for someone like me who served his articles with the much hyphenated Hamburg-Bremer Feuer-Versicherungs-Gesellschaft.
