While reading RoryB's depressing account of his worst christmas experience ever, including drinking beer while going blind, I linked over to a page describing a finnish guy's attempt to make the longest word in the world. Coincidentally, Finnish is the closest relative in the language tree to Hungarian, both belonging to the finno-ugric branch of the Uralic family of languages. so I thought of having fun with creating longish words in Hungarian. When I was back there teaching and giving presentations on the language to new students, I used to pull out my own personal long word, which, while fairly nonsensical, was grammatically correct and, unlike the afore-mentioned finnish word, actually could be translated into some semblance of rather odd meaning. (and, yes, I did toy around with the idea of going back to school in Hungary to study linguistics, something my Hungarian teachers seemed to be proponents of)

Hungarian (and apparently Finnish) is considered an agglutinative language, which means that, rather than adding helper words to enhance the meaning of another word, you can add prefixes and suffixes. So, being the annoying foreigner who just happened to be fluent in the language and loved to annoy people with that fact (especially when playing Hungarian scrabble), I started thinking of a nice word. Now, I'll give a description of its creation, leaving out the accents on the letters, mostly because they are annoying to write in HTML. :)

So - salt (n)

Sos - salty (adj)

Sosabb - saltier (adj)

Sosabbit - make saltier (v)

Sosabbithat - be able to make saltier (v)

Sosabbithatatlan - not be able to make saltier (v)

Sosabbithatatlansag - the state of not being able to make saltier (n), or not being able to make something saltier-ness

Needless to say, I got into many arguments with hungarians regarding the creation of this word and whether it could be considered a hungarian word. The main response I got was, “but nobody would ever use that,” which, to me, does not qualify something as “not a word.” In english, people rarely use the term “efficacy,” but it most definitely is a word. And, I was able to convince my hungarian teacher, Andras (and later, Maria), that it was a perfectly okay word, so there!

Speaking of these sorts of languages and word building, one game I miss from Hungarian, which isn't nearly as fun in English was a great game where the first person would put a letter down, then the next person would put another letter down either at the beginning or the end. Then, the next player would put a third letter either at the beginning of end, and, thusly, a word would start to form. The person who couldn't add a letter to either the beginning or the end and still maintain a path to a valid word lost. In english, it doesn't work too well, as there aren't too many prefixes and even fewer suffixes for words, so you can't keep adding letters to make more forms of the word. Sad.