Monday, October 26, 2009

National Mall: Folklife Festival 2009


National Mall, Folklife Festival July 2009. One of the featured cultures this year was Wales so they included the obligatory "Welsh has lots of long place names" signage.

3 comments:

  1. Ah! Speaking of long words/names, I was reading a little bit about the Hungarian language today and noticed that the Hungarians (like the Germans) are fond of very long words.

    According to the Wikipedia entry, at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarian_language, there's a word which translates roughly to:

    "for your repeated pretending to be indesecratable"

    ...and if my count is correct, at 45 letters long, it isn't even the longest Hungarian word. Wonder how commonly it's used, though.

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  2. LOL. Those agglutinative languages sure are fun!

    Something like Hungarian does force us to reconsider what we (English speakers) would rightly consider a "word" in the first place. If you define a "word" as "a continuous string of letters" then you really cast your net wide, including Welsh names (like above), German compound nouns, and a heavily-inflected and suffixed (?) Hungarian monstrosity like the one you cite.

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