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For the Teutophile on Your Christmas List

Hartmann von Aue
@HartmannvonAue
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We've all seen the memes about German Scrabble, right? Well, being a professional translator specializing in legal and medical documents, I have had ample opportunity to collect specimens of the longest, most complicated German lexical monstrosities known to man. A sub-set of these, 100 in number, I have compiled here:

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It makes a great gift for the Germano-logophile among your friends, relatives, and associates. And it does, for mercy's sake, include some more common words you might actually use.

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Discussion (10)

  • John H.@JohnH
    ReplyingtoBlue Suede Shoes
    Hartmann von Aue (View Post):

    We’ve all seen the memes about German Scrabble, right?

    Blue Suede Shoes (View Comment):

    I hadn’t,

    Me neither

    so I searched for “German Scrabble memes:”

    German Scrabble | Funny memes, Funny pictures, Language jokes

    Oh, come on. German words aren’t that long. I get the idea that German has an outsize reputation for difficulty only because the usual foreign-language alternatives in high schools are French and Spanish. As if those were easier. I don’t think so. By the way, I have played Spanish Scrabble and also read Nicaraguan newspapers and on these very pages asserted that you could never lay down “deafeningly,” ensordecedoramente. Because no other player could even lay down the core adjective. But oh the cumulative multiple letter- and word-scores if you could!

    Now tell me anything at all about Turkish Scrabble. There is in Turkish Wikipedia an article for Scrabble but it doesn’t actually say the game exists in that country. Seems to me it would need to have some special dispensations, so players could trade in tiles if the ones they had lacked vowel harmony, or if they wanted to add suffixes that required changing final k to ğ. If you could do things like that, you could make some enormous words. And if you couldn’t do things like that, the game might not even get started! So, OK, German Scrabble may in fact be more awesome. But not by much.

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