More Language: This Time with [unrelated] pictures (Day 52)

It snowed here everyday for a week

Snow by the Marx Engles Forum

Anyway our task today is to talk more about things that are wonderful (possibly) about the German language....

Ranking in somewhere in the top ten has to be the length of its words. Let me tell you folks, what we do in a sentence, they do in a word......a word as long as a sentence that is.

To begin, Mark Twain is famously quoted as saying that "German words are so long that they have their own perspective." This is because German is what is known as an "agglutinative" tongue, that is you can stick various words together to make new compound words. This is kind of like how we stick "quick" and "silver" together to make a compound word like "quicksilver." Its a totally different word made of two totally independent words with separate meanings, kinda cool right?

German does this too, only all the time, and without the hyphens we usually use. For example:

"Flug" [flight] + "Zeug" [thing] = "Flugzeug" [Airplane or lit. "Flying thing"]

"Früh" [early] + "stück" [piece, often food] = "Frühstück" [Breakfast or lit. "Early food"]
Interesting note........think about Breakfast for a second........

"Taschen" [purse] + "dieb" [thief] = "Taschendieb" [Pick-pocket or lit. "cut-purse"]

This is generally simple but it gets a little more complicated. One can tack on adjectives, sometimes verbs, more than one noun, and generally anything else you want to the words. Also, they don't always make sense at first......

"Hubschrauber" = "Hub" [vertical lift] + "schrauber" [screw / bolt] = Helicopter

"Glühbirne" = "Glüh" [glowing] + "birne" [pear] = Lightbulb

Also the words get longer.....

Bezirksschornsteinfegermeister = Head district chimney sweep
(30 letters)

Farbenfernseherapparatekaufhäuserleiter = The manager of a store selling color TVs.
(40 letters)

And longer.....

Betäubungsmittelverschreibungsverordnung = Regulation requiring a perscription for an anesthetic
(41 letters)

Ok so...whatever you say....English has long words too......What about manichean (9 letters)? ..... What about Honorificabilitudinitatibus (the longest words Shakespeare used which weighs in at a whopping 27 letter).......what about the big Kahuna.........

Antidisestablishmentarianism

Nope, only 28 letter .... although for those wondering it actually corresponds to a political position (mainly from 19th century England) opposing the disestablishment of the Anglican church as the official Church of England, so odds are if you've ever used it in ia sentence before, you've used it wrong.

In fact the longest nontechnical word (Floccinaucinihilipilification: or the habit of estimating something as useless) is only some 29 letters long. Its claim to fame is having been created out of four seperate latin roots meaning "I don't care" by a bored student at Eton, and in turn for actually making it to print.

Fine.....what about science.....

Here we get the longest word in English! A mighty 45 letters:

Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosos, unfortunately this term, which describes the inflammation of the lungs after being exposed to a fine silica dust, was coined explicitly for the purpose of length and so the prize is better off going to the inherited disease "pseudopseudohypoparathyroidism," which despite having two "pseudos" only comes in at thirty letters.

German however is only just beginning to flex its muscles.

First off numbers are always written as single words, so the longer the number the longer the word, effectively removing the limit on how long a German word can be. For instance a small number like 7,254 is written with almost forty letter as "siebentausendzweihundertvierundfünfzig."

But the true heavy weights are things like:

Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungs-
aufgabenübertragungsgesetz (69 letters)
the "beef labeling & relegation of supervision law (voted the German "Word of the Year" in '99)" which is abreviated with as: ReÜAÜG. Your guess to the pronounciation of that is a good as mine. Thats right, the abbreviation has four vowels in a row, two of which have umlauts.

And the result of the classic German childrens game of "add things to a word until you can't" and currently out the lexicon:

Donaudampfschifffahrtselektrizitäten-hauptbetriebswerkbauunterbeamtengesellschaft

Notable for picking up a letter (one of the three f's in a row) in the most recent German language reforms this colossus features a full 80 characters, making it practically twice the length of English's champion.

And for those that are wondering it means, its the name of a prewar Viennese club: the association of subordinate officials of the head office management of the Danube steamboat electrical services.

Watch where you drop that particular word, you might end up breaking someone's foot.

Winter Comes to Alex
Alexanderplatz Berlin