On 9/11/2019 12:14 PM, NY wrote:
"Frank Slootweg" wrote in message
...
NY wrote:
[...]
I remember learning German compound words such as Luftkissenfahrzeug
(hovercraft - "air cushion travel thing") and Fernsehapparat (TV -
"far see
apparatus"). My grandpa was a member of a model railway society and
they had
dealings with a similar society in Germany. They sent my grandpa (who
was
editor of his society's newsletter) a ****-take of their own
language, as a
story in "German" with English translation. The word that they
translated as
"cab" was "Herrlokomotivdirektordonnerundblitzenhaus". So Germans
*do* have
a sense of humour after all.

*You mean like:

Leichtmetallhochdrukdampfkochkesselmitautomatische mshreianlage

(kettle with a whistle)

Eisenbahnknotenpunkthinundhersteller

(the person who changes the switches in a railway track)

Ineinemverdecktenkastenaufgestellte....

(Can't remember the rest, but it's a souffleur in a theatre.)

No, I'm *not* German! :-)

I've often thought that it must make a typesetter's job a nightmare,
especially when full-justifying text in narrow newspaper columns ;-)
The first one would take several lines of hyphenated text.

I'm sure a lot of the longest ones are not in common use. I was rather
miffed, after learning Luftkissenfahrzeug, to discover that Germans
usually use das Hovercraft.


I remember many years ago in an edition of the Guinness Book of Records,
under the section "longest word", that the record was a Fijiian word
which translated as "Father-in-law, don't look now, I'm bending over".
It is their word for... mini-skirt ;-) Yeah, right. I'm sure it is.

Leave it to Wiki to have an article on the world's longest words:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longest_words

No mention of Fijian.

I concur as a retired chemist that the longest words would be chemical
names.

I had also studied German when studying chemistry and while I am not
fluent in it, I did publish a short communication in a German journal.