THE LONGEST THINKABLE WORD IN YOUR LANGUAGE

No, Ed,

-(nasledn)ica is a female occupant of the position, -(nasledn)ikovica is the wife.

Serbo-Croatian is a morphological nightmare.

You should try Dutch morphology! Talking about nightmares...

OK...let's go the other way......the SHORTEST of places names! The honour for that here in the UK goes to a SCOTTISH village.....hooray!!!

It's a place called just: AE. Just two letters.

A small village that's true but seen on most maps.

It's in Dumfriesshire, in Galloway Region, down there in the SW of Scotland.

Now I suppose someone will come in here and tell us of single letter place names!

O? Somewhere in Afghanistan? Z? Somewhere in Poland? ;-)

Talking of linguistic nightmares.....

.....to practically ALL English people Welsh names are an absolute nightmare. Somehow, that isn't quite so for the Scots or Irish, but they do not quite derive the same perverse pleasure in making a deliberate dog's breakfast of non-Anglo Saxon names which is, sadly, a Sassenach characteristic! ;-)

To me, Llanfairfechan or Machynlleth of Abergynolwyn are a doddle gliding off the tongue! One of my best friends from uni comes from a tiny place with a big name: *Llanfairmathafarneithaf! As a fellow Celt he got me conversant with correct Welsh pronunciation skills.....easy peasy when you know how and have the right motivation.

AAMOI: *That village is 3 miles from Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllantisiliogogogoch.

Damian,I think we beat you....

In the Netherlands we have a "city" called "A".

<<Damian,I think we beat you.... >>

Yes you have, Sander!....I think I will shoot myself! :-(

Seriously, I never expected to hear of a one letter place name!

A ? Isn't that short for Amsterdam ?

Å One in Denmark, One in Norway

Y in France

In Serbia: Ba, Ub

You should try Dutch morphology! Talking about nightmares

It's not particularly fascinating for somebody who has dealt with a Slavic morphology, or say with the Latin or Greek ones.

For instance, every single noun in Serbo-Croatian has fourteen possible forms (cases), each of them bearing a random tone (of the four there are). Also, there are usually consonant mutations in the place where the root and the affix come into contact. For instance, these are the possible forms of the noun "passenger":

Singular: putnik, putnika, putniku, putnika, putni&#269;e, putnikom, putniku

Plural: putnici, putnika, putnicima, putnike, putnici, putnicima, putnicima

Each one of these forms, then, bears a tone. This word always has a long falling tone on the first u, but this tone would very frequently move around and change in quality and quantity seemingly randomly.

Antidisestablishmentarianism is the longest English word I can think of off hand.

It was first used to refer to people in Enland who were against the seperation of church and state.

It is somewhat of a double negative though. (anti + dis prefix) Establishmentarianism would pretty much mean the same thing.


Well, after doing a quick search "Floccinaucinihilipilification" ranks as the longest English word at one letter longer than antidisestablishmentarianism.

Ved,

Dutch is in the top 3 of most difficult languages in the world....

try this:
Almost every dutch verb is irregular ,soundshifts,and is spelled "weird".

Damian....plz dont shoot yourself,just dont . :-/

Damian,

Don't even get me started on Welsh. No offense to any Welsh peoploe on this board, but only the most masochistic linguist should attempt to learn that language, with its psychosis inducing voiceless l's and unhealthy level's of "h."

<<plz dont shoot yourself,just dont . :-/>>

Sander: the stupid gun had only blanks in it so I'm here to stay ftb at least. I picked up the pigeon scarer instead! LOL

Ben:

The Welsh lingo DOES have that effect on people I'm afraid....it even looks scary! It isn't really, I swear! I know that the double "LLs" and the "CHs" are intimidating not to say spray inducing if the speaker is a wee bit careless.

"Ved,

Dutch is in the top 3 of most difficult languages in the world....

try this:
Almost every dutch verb is irregular ,soundshifts,and is spelled "weird". "

Na, I still think it's easy-peasy.

Btw, where did you find a statistic that expresses the level of difficulty of various languages? Such a thing doesn't exist. And any European would learn Dutch much more easily than, say a polysynthetic North American language.

I still must insist that the morphology of Dutch is pretty simple, especially its inflectional morphology.