Germans calling gloves "hand-shoes" will never not be funny to me. Similarly, they have so many literal names for things. Suicide is self-muder, airplane is fly-thing, gums are tooth-meat.
German's my second language, and just the other day I heard a new term while playing a game that was so literal I didn't need a dictionary. I wish I could remember what it was.
In English the singular is used when modifying another noun like that. For example, a trainer of dogs is a dog trainer, opener of cans is a can opener, a podiatrist a foot doctor, a ball you kick with your feet is a football, etc.
The real question is why does english persist with so many different ways to make plural words
animal and plant names are terrible in any language, but it's soooo much worse when you're trying to remember them in two languages at once...
i kinda know what a pocok is, but what the fuck is that in english? what's a stoat in hungarian? what about a beech? i probably know its name in hungarian, but i cant connect it to the english names...
Literally everything should be like this, fuck naming stuff after a person. Most of the time it's just the first white dude who wrote about the thing anyway. Animals, theories, buildings, rename all of it