There are at least two classes of verbs based on transitivity, with complex word building patterns to express tense, aspect, mood, and to derive other verbs and nominal forms.
Deaf students of biology, for example, do not have a single widely accepted sign language for scientific terms and often spell out, letter by letter, complex words like photosynthesis.
And although they can be really useful at deducing the meaning of complex words, they give little in the way of clues as to how one should pronounce them.
Because they possess a greater number of free morphemes, compositionally polysynthetic languages are much more prone than affixally polysynthetic ones to evolve into simpler languages with less complex words.
Although opinion varies on its accuracy as compared to the syllable/word and complex word indices, characters are more readily and accurately counted by computer programs than are syllables.