Donaudampfschifffahrtselektrizitätenhauptbetriebswerkbauunterbeamtengesellschaft.
Danube steamship company electricity main depot building officer company is essentially the meaning of the word and happens to hold the record for the longest word in the German dictionary with 80 letters in total. Looks intimidating to say the least but try to find words similar in German to the English translation.
The German language is riddled with almost an infinite number of such quirky combinations. The language exploits one its most fundamental grammatical functions in order to make this possible, something alike to which does exist in the English language but is almost taken for granted.
The monstrosity of a word you see above is the aftermath of KOMPOSITA or compound words as we call them fondly in English.
At some point in history words were often connected using a hyphen (-) in a badly-written old-fashioned half-a**ed attempt at creating a word.
Gerundally speaking compound words are separated from their main noun so instead of consuming your time writing an article you could be writing a time consuming article.
Essentially -
Compound words are the combination of two or more words to form a new object. For example - Note + book = notebook / Door + knob = doorknob.
But English ironically, in all it’s complexity doesn’t quite capture the beauty of this rudimentary yet potent function the way German does.
German relies heavily on the ability of one to understand from context in order to figure out. It’s like Mark Twain said “Whenever the literary German dives into a sentence, that is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of his Atlantic with his verb in his mouth”.
A student and I were discussing a Text in German the other day about banks and came across a word(a verb) that at first glance looked like a two-year old had come up with it.
UNTERSCHRIFT.
Used in contexts of forms and other important documents. It’s comprised of two words (unter meaning under and schrift meaning handrwiting). In which context of bank-work would one have to write under????
Any guesses?
The word Unterschrift effectively conveys the act of signing a document with the precision of a fifth grader drawing a line with a ruler in his math book.
That’s not to say Da vinci would have opposed such a proposition given his circumstances. He too used tools to guide his hands to mastery.
Such are the tools that German provides for us to learn more effectively a language that hides familiarity and common sense under the intimidating and sometimes bewildering length of their words.
The Jigsaw collection of prefixes and suffixes one can combine to ultimately create their own Irrgarten of Wörtergut is like tasting the finest Gottspeise straight from Mt Olympus.
Other really cool words in German -
selbstsüchtig(selbst - oneself / süchtig - addicting) = means selfish
antiheld (anti/ held - hero) = villain
aberglaube (aber- but/ glube - belief) = Superstition
Head to
http://www.twainquotes.com/German.html for more Mark Twain quotes about German.
https://www.dartmouth.edu/~deutsch/Grammatik/Wortbildung/Komposita.html to know more about compound words in German.
Dankeschön und Viele Grüße
:D
By Jarryd D’abreo
