Long and Short Words: Language Typology

Some languages have longer words than others -- but that's not just a simple choice. There's a lot of different ways to mix up morphemes, even if they all mean the same thing in the end.

[BTheHeretic]

My favorite Finnish word:
Juoksentelisinkohan.

Meaning: I wonder if I should run around aimlessly.

[paloauo]

In Finnish we have this word and it means "jet turbine engine auxiliary mechanic non-commissioned officer student".
We even have a word for "I wonder if even with his/her quality of not having been made unsystematized" which is

[lapsed]

sorry I can't participate, I'm on an agglutinative language-free diet

[LuisMejia]

Spanish native speaker here. I never realized how complex Spanish was until I started to learn English. The word "hablo" that Scott mentioned is a good example. You can imply the time, the person and other things with just one word. Like these:

- Hablo: I talk
- Hablas: You talk
- Habla: He/She talks
- Hablan: They talk
- Hablamos: We talk

- Hablé: I talked
- Hablaste: You talked
- Habló: He/She talked
- Hablaron: They talked
- Hablamos: We talked

- Hablaré: I will talk
- Hablarás: You will talk
- Hablará: He/She will talk
- Hablarán: They will talk
- Hablaremos: We will talk

[clockwardkailleach]

Okay that thing about children is *bloody fascinating* because kids in general don't work well with *anything* being separated out, and the world is generally very interconnected for them. Internal from external, ideas from reality, senses from one another, emotional personality states etc etc etc.

[mementomori]

You should have given examples for the other ones as well.
Would have loved to see a polysynthetic word-sentence and how it's broken down (like you did with inconceivable).

[CrushedAsian]

0:56 saved for future reference for when my friends ask why I picked Vietnamese as my third language

[seaniwu]

Just a friendly reminder, H is mute in Spanish. :)

[horseenthusiast]

1:38 Fusion is a cheap tactic to make short words longer.

[keilerbie]

In German you can add infinite morphines so you can have words that are hundreds of letters long.

[jackcoleman]

As for the Spanish silent h, in many cases the h was once sounded (centuries ago) in words like "hablo" and "hijo", which came from Latin "fabula" and "filius" respectively. Eventually the h phoneme was simply lost, hence its silence in modern Spanish.

[parkersummers]

im learning kalaallisut (greenlandic) and since it is polysynthetic, the hardest part for me (for me, idk about others) is the multiword sentences, as the line between when to split can be vague. some verbs, like {qaq}, are part of a single word, and are added to a word, yet other verbs, like {suli}, are the root and need a seperate word if you want to signify a subject/object

[futurestoryteller]

Now I have a word that explains my ability as a kid to extrapolate the meaning of unfamiliar words from the content of familiar words to the confusion of my peers. I even confidently used the word "malformed" once, having no certain idea that when I looked to the dictionary later I'd find it in plain ink.

[lfricmunuc]

The Old English word for daily in the Lord's Prayer, or Fæder ūre, is 'gedæghƿāmlīcan'. Not as long as some of the other languages, but there are some very cool words like this in Old English.

[TilmanBaumann]

So In- negates right?
Inflamable? Infamous? Ingenious?

Your language is buggy. :p

[CommunistHamster]

Your linguistics videos are solid gold, man.

[ksawerykaminski]

French is the only european language spokenly turning polysynthetic, which is cool

[nikolaswithak]

I dont care about learning things related to language, but anything Tom teaches I watch because he is just amazing at it.

[zongi]

here are some cool long Hungarian words (technically their meanings can be explained, but they are rather just meant as a joke, to poke fun at how long you can make words while still maintaining some sort of meaning): elkelkáposztástalaníthatatlanságoskodásaitokért, and

[zacharylobel]

Tom, at 1:12 you made a mistake, Inuktitut is a polysynthetic language not an agglutinating language. It is actually one of those languages spoken in the very north of North America that is polysynthetic.