How do words that are so long develop? I mean, how many people can really say a 26 letter word? I don't mean scientific words (those are at least understandable related to protein and molecular sequencing), but like names or those sort of things. **************************************************************** 07-06-02, 01:38 AM anguilla Some countries have the custom of giving each individual a distinct name. (No 325 "Bill Smiths".)
As far as words (not names), I suspect that many of them are derived from German words. In that language, several words are often strung together to create a new word, with a new meaning.
07-06-02, 06:05 AM Monsterquizzer The longest real word in English - as opposed to scientific/medical string-words or jokes such as the 'floccinauci...' or '...expialodocious' ones - is probably 'antidisestablishmentarianism'. Obviously, the basis of the word is 'establish' and all the rest of it is simply a sequence of prefixes and suffixes. The same applies to most other long words.
07-06-02, 06:51 AM Kati99 It's not just German. They have that in Dutch and the Scandinavian languages, too. But those words are not really hard to say, because they are made up from shorter words that have been joined. You write long terms with gaps (and sometimes even prepositions) in between them, and we just make one word out of it. I can say 'antidisestablishmentarianism' without any problems, while I do sometimes have problems with pronouncing some short English words or combinations of words (give me a sentence with too many "th" and "s", and I'll mess it up completely!).
07-06-02, 11:32 AM dogspit Several sites list anticonstitutionnellement as the longest official word in French.
07-06-02, 01:10 PM maiku If it is proposed that antidisestablishmentarianism is the longest English word, then I beg leave to point out that, by productive morphological processes that operate in English, I can easily produce another, based on this one, which is even longer: to wit, if you're a devoted antidisestablishmentarianist, then your arguments in favo(u)r of your position could be quite correctly characterized as antidisestablishmentarianistic. And if you utter this kind of sentiment often enough, you could quite properly be said to often speak antidisestablishmentarianistically. Anyone who knows English and knows what the original form means will immediately be able to tell what these regulary derived forms will mean.
If it is objected that these longer forms are not in the dictionary, I would like to point out that dictionaries never list all the forms which are derivable from a given entry.
It is true that German outstrips English in its tolerance for compounds. But the ability of speakers to form them holds for both: indeed, it is a salient feature of the morphological processes available in all Germanic languages.
Because the morphological processes involved in these long words is semantically transparent to native speakers, the longer forms do not have to be cited as separate entries. This is a commonplace of lexicography in English no less than in German.
For my part, I'm more concerned with little words which are widely misused because they are borrowed and their etymology is not transparent in this way. A good example is the term per se. In German, this would be für sich, which is quite true to the original meaning in Latin, which is "intrinsically." It does not mean really. Really.
[This message was edited by maiku on 07-06-02 at 01:22 PM.]
07-06-02, 04:34 PM coldfuse Click here to be amazed, amused or confused by what may be the world's longest word, the term for the formula C1289H2051N343O375S8.
This may be your next R&R destination if you wish to memorize it!
07-07-02, 12:52 AM Sagus I don't think Sher and I want to vacation there.. but thanks for the thought.
07-07-02, 10:00 AM bedstor Follow this link for the 3 longest placenames in the world. Strangely when translated they all have a story to tell.The Welsh one I can say near enouch word perfect,The New Zealand name can be heard on a single called the "Lone Ranger" (spot the songs Obvious mistake !) eek Can someone tell us again what the longest placename in the US is? Something to do with a lake?(Native American) confused
07-07-02, 10:41 AM DorianGreyed I think it's in Maine, and, while I don't know its name, I know the general English translation: You fish on your side of the lake, we'll fish on ours, and nobody fishes in the middle. (If only agreements today were that easy to understand.)
07-07-02, 12:26 PM Monsterquizzer Of course one can go on adding prefixes and suffixes to some words virtually endlessly. In my earlier answer, however, I referred to 'real' words. My point was that - in almost two thirds of a century of avid reading - I have actually, several times, come across the word 'antidisestablishmentarianism' in print. I have never - ever - come across any of the suggested modifications of it. I, therefore, query whether they are truly 'real' rather than just academic hypotheticals. In the same way, if one speaks of something in such a manner as to disparage it, might one be described as speaking 'floccinaucinihilipilificationally'?
07-07-02, 12:48 PM babthrower ...words people ever used were the ones found in the dictionary, people would be speechless, because people were invented long before the dictionary. It works the other way around. A kindly old curmudgeon named Dr. Samuel Johnson decided (no doubt after an afternoon in a coffee shop in which most of the discussion centered around the use of a particular word) to compile, alphabetically, all the words in English, listing his source i.e. the first person to use the term. His only tools were his pen, some paper and ink, and his brain, which had been soundly educated in Latin and Greek. He didn't know you need a computer to do the task, so like a fool he started without one. Ten years later he had the first edition. Then all his friends in the coffee shop would talk about is, "Sam, you got it wrong, you forgot 'cuttles', which is what my old aunt calls meat trimmings for soup", or "Sam, you got it wrong, 'anth' is derived from the Greek a, 'without', and 'nth', whatever that is. So whatever it means, it means something WITHOUT something." So poor old Johnson wished he hadn't bothered, because except for the money, which was lovely, he started more arguments than he had settled. In case you're wondering, my point is that you may coin words. They may 'catch on', if they fill a need. Then you might get a credit in a dictionary some day. But please don't coin a word simply to create a longer word than 'anti...ism'. If you do that you will go to hell.
My point is that lexical items, documentable or not, which result from perfectly regular morphological processes are in fact perfectly "real." They are part of the language in the only interesting sense in which we can talk about the total lexicon of a given language. For this total lexicon is always, in principle, extendable. Owing to the "creativity" inherent in all natural languages, there is simply no way in which the number of lexical items can be recorded in advance.
Moreover, I'd like to point out that the extended forms in question are, at this point, documentable. If no one else has ever used them in public before, then I, at least, did so in my previous message, and I used them in understandable English sentences, too.
I'm at pains to try to make this point clear for the sake of the original question, which was why words in English can get so long. They do so precisely because of the potential for compounding and for derivation that is built into the language.
07-08-02, 12:39 AM decal It's Lake Webster's other name:
Chargoggagoggmanchauggauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg
and it's on the border of Connecticut and Massachusetts.
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