Germans purge selves of indigestible 63-letter word A change in EU law has allowed the Germans to bin their longest word: the 63-letter monster Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz. According to the Telegraph, the monstrosity was spawned back in 1999 in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, and translates as "law delegating beef label monitoring", in bite- …
Any one who does some kind of text mashing should be aware of the corner cases. If you're writing any kind of dictionary manager/query you actually should be aware of this stuff.
Now if you know the longest word in English is <32 characters you could do a length count in 5 bits.
But if you want to be multi lingual the it's 6 bits.
Although English isn't an agglomerative language, it's dangerous to make assumptions about maximum word length because you can almost always add an affix. Before antidisestablishmentarianism* existed, there may have been people who practiced protoantidisestablishmentarianism .
*The crappy Firefox spellchecker has put a red line under "antidisestablishmentarianism" and "agglomerative". I guess it's only happy with a language level like "See John run. John runs to the shop."
Maybe with more CPU cycles, they could start analyzing words with prefixes and suffixes, and put a wiggly brown line under words that might be OK but aren't actually in its dictionary. (Ie, words that break down as common prefixes and suffixes and something that is a known word in the middle.)
"The crappy Firefox spellchecker has put a red line under 'antidisestablishmentarianism' and 'agglomerative'. I guess it's only happy with a language level like 'See John run. John runs to the shop.'"
"Basic English" - now redesignated "Firefox English"!
I just wanted to put you on notice, that the Registernachrichtentextrechtschreibprüfungsergebnissbewertungsnotenerfassung has been performed and the Nachrichtentextrechtschreibprüfungsergebnissbewertungsnotenerfassungsspeicherort is right here on the comment pages.
5.
The Dutch have their own way of creating massive words:
Hottentottensoldatententententoonstellingspersonenautoparkeerterrein
is one construct, but their tendency to create words with an uncomfortable number of consecutive consonants really stands out:
angstschreeuw
with 8 was long held to be the champion, but
slechtstschrijvend
might top that with 9 (jury still out on whether this word is OK. Trust the Welsh to come up with place names that (appear) to consist only of consonants:
Cwmtwrch, Bwlch and Mwnt were all places I have passed on my meanderings in Wales.
In these cases the 'w' is pronounced more or less like an "oo" as in food
Huh, I thought you had to go much further east to get crazy long consecutive consonant chains. Georgian and Armenian seem to contain rather less conveniently pronounceable words... "ɡvbrdɣvnis" (the super-useful "he's plucking us") and khghchmtank̕ ("conscience", apparently).
I think they have Dutch beaten on the number of phonemes they can wring out of a bunch of consonants, if nothing else.
'W' is a vowel in Welsh. What's more, Welsh is a transparent language (as linguists call it). This means that each letter in the language's written form is associated with a single sound (more or less) in the spoken language. The Welsh 'w' is therefore always pronounced much like the English 'oo'.
Exceptions to Welsh orthographical transparency would be:
* the letter 'Y' can have one of two sounds: 'ee' or 'uh'. There are clear rules as to which to use. (In Turkish, this difference is indicated by the lack of a dot over the 'i' for the dark ('uh') sound. The clear sound uses the familiar 'i' with a dot).
* vowels can be either long or short, so an 'i' can either be short as 'i' in 'pig' or long like the 'ee' in 'seed'. Where there is any doubt, a circumflex can be put over the vowel to indicate that it is long, such as the 'w' in 'dŵr'.
Otherwise, you pretty much pronounce Welsh words as you see them. You need to know the rules, though. The Welsh alphabet has a number of digraphs (ch, dd, ff, ng, ll, ph, rh, th) that figure in the alphabet as single letters and are sorted as single letters in dictionaries and indices for example.
Other languages use letters that in English are consonants to indicate vowels or semi-vowels. An 'r' in Czech, for example, can be a vowel as in 'Brno'. The same applies to the Czech 'l' as in 'Vltava'.
English is unusual in that its orthography makes pretty much no sense at all unless you're a specialist in language history. So applying English orthographical conventions to other languages often says more about English than it does about the language being commented upon.
I notice that somebody else has already commented on the use of spaces between words, so I'll not repeat it here.
Non-Dutch people speaking Dutch just doesnt work... You end up having to clear your throat after every second word because in English you only make those sound when your trying to bring up a very stubborn bit of flem!
Saying that , it's still easier to understand then Glaswegian...
Does anybody remember that quiz presented by Paul Coia, in which stupidly long words were a common part? I see a Wiki contributor has also remembered:
"In 1988 Coia became the host of the BBC gameshow Catchword, memorable for the fact that seemingly every contestant endeavoured to employ the words floccinaucinihilipilification or pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis during their efforts. He has since presented a number of other quizzes on various satellite and cable channels."
Yes, absolutely awful code.
Written by a person who's native language was English.
Who's idea of a good variable name involves some of the worst hungarianesque notation (in an ide that will frigging tell you what type and what class a method belongs to) that I've ever seen.
I just road tested 'Armoured Fighting Vehicle' and 'Schutzengrabenvernichtungpanzerkraftwagen' on my (German) girlfriend. Even she agrees 'Armoured Fighting Vehicle' is easier to say, but reckons 'Schutzengrabenvernichtungpanzerkraftwagen' sounds like it has a more finely engineered feel to it and is probably the less pleasant to have pointed at you in anger, but might be useful in traffic jams.
German (and Turkish and others) basically don't put spaces in a noun phrase, so there's no real significance to the length of a "word" and you're free to invent your own. Worth noting that spaces are actually a relatively modern development in writing. Theancientsdidn'tusespacesatall.
"German (and Turkish and others) basically don't put spaces in a noun phrase"
Yes, but that does not make them agglutinative languages, which is a rather different thing. In an agglutinative language, if you separate the different morphemes, they do not really make sense just standing there by themselves.
Get one that supports the dieresis then.
Or learn about input methods. Mac OS has them. Linux and Unix have them. Windows has this silly one where you press <Alt> and a three digit number; as if anyone wants to memorize a bunch of three digit codes. <Alt>129 is the magic code for ü.
I agree with learning about input methods (and Windows <Alt> codes if you really must use Windows). Personally, though, if I'm typing in a language other than my default, I simply change to a more appropriate keyboard layout. Both Linux, which I use, and Windows (which I occasionally have to support) allow you to do it easily - with a select list in the taskbar or equivalent.
Of course you need to be familiar with the layout of the keyboard in question if you're going to do this. I use French (which is really easy), Spanish (which is not quite so easy) and English (default as the laptop was bought in Britain) keyboard layouts. Being a touch-typist helps.
« Of course you need to be familiar with the layout of the keyboard in question if you're going to do this. I use French (which is really easy), Spanish (which is not quite so easy) and English (default as the laptop was bought in Britain) keyboard layouts. »
By French you mean AZERTY? That has to be the most evil keyboard layout to have ever seen the light of day. You cannot even type bloody *French* properly on the damned thing! (Try writing "Ça ! C'est ça que disais. À plus.") Good luck getting a capital "ç" and capital accented letters.
I actually use the Spanish layout for writing French--at least you can write properly, and has the bonus of not having to hit SHIFT every time you want to type a comma or a period.
I do find the Linux (KDE at any rate) input methods quite handy. E.g., I can type slavic languages (Latin script) without having to change from my default British layout, although I grant you that it is much slower than using the relevant layout due to extensive use of dead keys.
"Windows has this silly one where you press <Alt>"
Ahem, I use it all the time it's very useful, I have to type characters in peoples' names from all over Scandinavia and Spanish speaking countries. Plus the maths functions × and ÷ are also quite neat to use in sums in emails.
Here's my StickyNotes list of ones I use commnly:
® 0174 ± 0177
™ 0153 Å 0197
ã 0227 † 0134
½ 0189 × 0215
€ 0128 ÷ 0247
å 134 • 0149
§ 0167 ¾ 0190
Ø 0216 ¼ 0188
Actually we used to have weird laws on when to have 2 and 3 fs.
For example if you combined Schiff and Fahrt, you used to get Schiffahrt, now with the recent reform you get Schifffahrt.
However if you combined Sauerstoff and Flasche (oxygen and bottle) you got Sauerstoffflasche under both laws.
My fiancee's parents were German and she loves German advertising for its directness and simplicity. She says all the ads basically say "Buy this, it's really good". Ritter chocolate is a great example: Quadratisch. Praktisch. Gut. (Square. Practical. Good.)
I was about to say 'no it isn't', but you might be right. Does anyone know what exactly would be the difference between an establishmentarianism and an antidisestablishmentarianism?
Put another way, if you're at a meeting to discuss how to preserve the link between the Church of England and the monarchy, and someone walks in saying "Hi, I'm an establishmentarianism", why would you throw him out?
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