title_body: Why are compound words in Volapuk hard to parse while compound words in Esperanto are not?
upvoted_answer: Esperanto phonotactics was never as restrictive as Volapük's. Its prefixes (including prepositional prefixes) are mostly not CV but CCV or VC, and its stems often enough begin or end with consonant clusters. So morphological boundaries are often easy to tell. 
  
  Moreover Esperanto initially avoided stem endings for multisyllabic stems that might be ambiguous with suffixes. Hence banquet becomes bankedo, not banketo, for fear of ambiguity with bank-eto "little bank".
  
  Esperanto initially did pursue agglutinativity aggressively, and I'm not sure that it was less enthusiastic about doing so than Volapük. But malsanulejo is indeed exceptional for Esperanto.