Wednesday, September 17, 2014

Gettin' down with long German words

The German language is known for some rather long words. To those who don't speak the language, the words can be very frightening looking. To those who have a grasp of the language, it's not bad because they're very descriptive compound words. While the English language will often look to Greek or Latin to form new words, the German language looks to, well, German. For example, "beef" is called "Rindfleisch" (basically, cow flesh).

These compound words can describe a whole concept that might take several words or sentences to explain (for example, Schadenfreude [song about it here], literally "damage joy/pleasure," which is taking pleasure in the misfortune of others, but there's more to it than that). The word also might describe what would be broken into several different words in English. Here's an article about some of the very long German words.

I recently found a very catchy song about several of the long words. I'd sing along, but...


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