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Comment by MisterTea | Hacker News Reader

> longest swear word in German

Inquiring minds want to know...

I wish I could remember. Words in German can be long as they are composed of other words. It was along the lines of thunder and lightning and terrible storms blight you! But I think there was a bit more to it than that.

EDIT; and the teacher may have made the entire thing up of course! Loved his lessons.

By the way, English also has compound nouns, only they are sometimes written with spaces and sometimes without. Sometimes even with dashes. E.g. compare "coalmine" and "file name". Compound nouns can get arbitrarily long too, e.g. "file name length limit history blog post introduction".

And they work as swears too.

Goddamnmotherfuckingsonofabitch

etc.

Though I believe that's technically not a compound noun. (Fun fact: "compound noun" is a compound noun.)

While English has compound nouns, they are different in that they are not (generally) single words.

For example, the lovely and memorable

Donaudampfschiffahrtselektrizitätenhauptbetriebswerkbauunterbeamtengesellschaft

would be translated into something like

"Association for Subordinate Officials of the Main Maintenance Building of the Danube Steamboat Shipping Company"

It just takes longer to standardize them but English absolutely has compound single words. Examples include “folklore”, “pancake”, “manslaughter”, “oatmeal”, “pocketknife”, and “gunman”.

Right, they're just typically limited to two subwords.

And you can't typically just make them up as you go along and have them accepted as "words."

Albeit rare, triple compound words are nonetheless commonly used and recognized in English. Many of them sound formal and archaic but they are nevertheless still in common usage nowadays, not merely a relic of the days of highwaymen and crossbowmen. The archaic examples heretofore used notwithstanding, it would be false to claim that there are no triple compound words whatsoever.

(Inasmuch as I've made my point, I will spare you any further woebegone prose.)

This guy writes.

Squashing "danube steamboat shipping company electric services main maintenance building subordinate officials association" into a single word vs leaving it spaced out is kind of irrelevant. It's like getting excited over PascalCase vs snake_case.

Instead try for example "washing machine motor" and you'll find it's a feature fixing issues with clarity, not a style preference.

That translation is inaccurate because the original is a compound noun, while your translation isn't. The translation posted by knome is more accurate.

> While English has compound nouns, they are different in that they are not (generally) single words.

That's if you define "word" as anything that is separated by spaces in writing. But you could instead count all compound nouns as words. That would have the advantage of not being dependent on arbitrary rules in the writing system.

Untergrundbahnhofzeitschriftsplatz: Subway station newspaper stand

The root primitives are so easy to discern and interpret: under,ground, train,yard time,writing place

(Bahn is more like track, not train)

Sorry to be a pedant but bahnhof means train station

..and then "autobahn" would be..?

almost as if word meanings were dependent on context ("railway" would probably have been a more accurate than "train", but going "actually it means track" is just not helpful in this context)

I think you missed the comment that was doing a complete breakdown of the components. If anything by your argument it's more relevant because it shows the breakdown can sometimes be misleading.

no, I didn't.

Himmi Herrgott Sackl Zement Zefix Halleluja Mi Leckst Am Oarsch Scheiss Glump Faregets

Edit: It‘s irrelevant if you write it as one word, you certainly say it as one.

> It‘s irrelevant if you write it as one word, you certainly say it as one.

True, but you say everything as one word. You produce "It's irrelevant if you write it as one word" as one word. It has substitutable parts, which is also true of German compound words.

People are shockingly gullible about the fact that compound nouns in German are written without spaces while the grammatically identical compound nouns that are so common in English are written with them, as if spaces occurred in speech.

> People are shockingly gullible about the fact that compound nouns in German are written without spaces while the grammatically identical compound nouns that are so common in English are written with them, as if spaces occurred in speech.

Yeah. And distinctions that don't even occur in speech are arguably not suited to define the general concept of "word". You wouldn't know from speaking that "coalmine" has no space but "file name" has. I would count them both as single words, because they are single compound nouns.

The "space theory of words" would mean that languages without a writing system don't have "words", or that people who can't read also can't distinguish "words", which is clearly nonsense.

Is "file name" really two words? I can't remember a time I ever saw `file_name`, it's always just `filename`.

Well, I would humbly propose that "file name" is one word, even if it is written with a space, and despite consisting of two words.

No you don't. There are stress patterns in words that wouldn't exist if a sentence was all one word - in English words have at most one primary stressed syllable, and a sentence may have multiple such syllables.

Those stress patterns already do exist in sentences. What do you think the difference is between a word that is pronounced without its citation form primary stress ("at most one primary stressed syllable") and a sentence that is pronounced with several more or less equally stressed syllables?

The difference between primary and secondary word stress disappears when the word is put into a sentence.

There are stress patterns in sentences that don't exist in lexical words, but they do exist in compound phrases, and there is no symmetrical situation of stress patterns in words that don't happen in sentences.

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