People often say that German, unlike English, is super special because it makes super long words

[conuly]

Nine times out of ten, the example they point to is something having to do with municipal government. The tenth time it's schadenfreude, in which case, joke's on them - the English word for schadenfreude is, indeed, schadenfreude.

But those other nine times are wrong too, because English does that too. It's just that when we write these long lexical units down we tend to prefer to keep the spaces, but as the definition of "word" is not "something surrounded by spaces when written down", same diff.

My usual example is "coffee table book", but I recently came across a more classic, "municipal thingy" version on a sign.

Temporary Site Safety Training Card

We know this is a single lexical unit instead of five discrete words because it was written with every initial letter capitalized, despite being smack in the middle of a sentence. Yes, I'm using orthography here when previously I was strenuously arguing against orthography, but we also know it's a lexical unit all its own because you can't understand what it means just by looking at the component morphemes. You have to have the context. (In this case, all my context is "it's some sort of municipal thingy". Don't ask me.)

Comments

[siliconshaman]

German makes super long words by taking a bunch of short words, taking out the spaces and welding them together. Often with technical German, the 'word' is actually a descriptive sentence, with the verb(s) at the end, which is very hard to process.

(and ironically my dyslexic brain turned 'German makes' into 'Germakes' at first.)

[conuly]

Right, right, but "spaces" are an orthographical convention. They have nothing to do with "words".

[siliconshaman]

Technically yes... buttheydomakeiteasiertounderstand.

[conuly]

Tell that to the Romans!

[bitterlawngnome]

(Words are like porn.)

Megszentségteleníthetetlenségeskedéseitekért is often cited as the longest "official" word in Hungarian, with the only independant part being the root word szent. It's a completely different way of making long words :)

[conuly]

Yes, combining bound morphemes in this way is definitely different from what I'm talking about. It's another thing we also do in English, though I don't think "antidisestablishmentarianism" comes in at quite as many letters.

[bitterlawngnome]

Does German do that to any extent?

[semperfiona]

or the Chinese, Japanese and others.....

[cellio]

Temporary Site Safety Training Card

When I see something like that, and knowing that bureaucrats are categorically incapable of proper punctuation (like hyphens), I always wonder which words modify which. Is this a training card about temporary site safety, maybe short-term mitigation factors? Is this a temporary card to prove you took some training in site safety? Is this about safety of a temporary site, like the storage locker you're keeping the valuable equipment in until the new space is ready? Is the site safety expected to be temporary, like this will only keep you safe for N hours but, really, get out of the radiation zone?

Inquiring minds want to know!

[conuly]

https://www.safetycardtracker.com/

[silveradept]

I thought English had strong Germanic roots and was prone to the same lexical constructions as a result. And, I believe I asked a German speaker about the long words and it came back "eh, mostly in technical or legal documents." So, consistency again between the two languages.

[conuly]

Yes, English is a Germanic language, albeit one with a lot of borrowings from Latin and Medieval French.

[adafrog]

I think municipal thingy should be what we always use for these sorts of places.

Very interesting, though.

[marahmarie]

I hate German. I hate every word of it and I am German, mostly, 2nd gen no less. My great-grandmother on one side spoke German and English fluently, grandmother on the other, same. And I hate German all the same. Ugly, weird language both to look at and speak.

And on my internet-brain:

"We know this is a single lexical unit instead of five discrete words because it was written with every initial letter capitalized"

All I could think was "If it's a single lexical unit then why aren't the words camelbacked?" ie, in which the internet eats/has practically become my brain - because of course a single lexical unit should be TemporarySiteSafetyTrainingCard(.com!) because internet, brain