Which language has the longest single natural word ever penned? Not English. (“What about Titin?” “Welsh??” * )
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Some languages have really, REALLY long words. But they’re not just full of random letters. There’s a pattern to the grammar of letter-filled words that won’t quit. It’s called “compounding”. It’s a word-building strategy used in Greek, German and even Polynesian languages like Hawai’ian.
It was my jarring run-in with really long words in that third language that brings me to this story. Come with me, and learn a bit about how Hawaiian words are built. And why when you flip open a Hawaiian dictionary, the words all seem so short, but when you see it in practice, you’ll sometimes run into a real monster or two.
So, does that mean Hawaiian has the longest words ever?
Not tellin’. You’ll have to watch.
* The chemical name for Titin? Welsh? [Insert-long-word-here]?
I went with the decision by Guiness World Records. They ruled out artificial words like chemical nomenclature and words created to test long word limits. Place names are often considered separately, but I mention them here. The Welsh name mentioned in multiple comments isn’t as long as the Maori hill on the books for longest single-word place name. The longest place name (not constructed as a single word) may be the poetic/sung Thai name for Bangkok.
Though it wasn’t the point of the video (the compounding strategy was), it’s a conversation starter: what are the criteria for longest word? Many comments just disagree; essentially, “what about [my_word]?!?” I’d be interested to see even more good discussion on the decision-making process.
* AVERAGE WORD LENGTH (asterisked in the video)
Preliminary data from my homemade script that parsed limited samples in several languages. My sample text came from Wikipedia articles in each language. See the credits link at the bottom for more about it.
~ CREDITS & SOURCES ~
Art, narration, animation and most music by Josh from NativLang
Sneaky Snooper from audionautix.com
Assorted Rimshots from incompetech.com (4 sec used for “reveal”)
Sources for claims and for imgs, fonts and sfx:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1D4HryVtWVZj3fgbSDCKwfYH-ZLVl44FiASk1DD8vkc8/
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1472230801
2016-08-26 17:00:01
4:2
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NativLang
3161
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