This host does a great job of taking a concept that they're getting into the weeds on and actually keeping it interesting through their mannerisms and speech patterns, instead of it being drab and boring.
Yes, and no annoying, bouncy, meaningless hand gestures that go with the verbal cadence of many factual TH-cam video presenters. That usually makes it a lot harder for me to pay attention to the content. VERY GOOD JOB 👍
"Words are the clothes that thoughts wear..." Samuel Butler...ALSO...."When I use a word', Humpty Dumpty said in a rather scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less." Lewis Carroll
I know that under every single "long word" video there will be german speakers parading our long words and it's getting annoying but there is one I have to mention: "Die Bundespräsidentenstichwahlwiederholungsverschiebung", the historical event that took place in Austria in 2016 where the rerun of the run-off of the election of the federal president had to be postponed. I just feel like it needs to be known that that happened and that's what it's called.
@@carolaoffhaus5240 that extremely long Welsh village name on Anglesey is: Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch However, it was deliberately invented in the 1860s to attract rail tourists, the village was originally called Llanfair Pwllgwyngyll, locals just call it Llanfair or Llanfair PG ;-)
There's also a Māori placename in New Zealand which I won't attempt to type on my phone because (a) I'll probably get it wrong and (b) spellchecker will have a fit.
The ideas presented in this video are why I always laugh at this exchange in the Avengers: Thor: Where we have to go is Nidavellir. Drax: That's a made-up word! Thor: All words are made-up.
I like the similar conversation in the Big Bang Theory. Sheldon: Let's play Physics Fiesta. Penny: You just made that up. Sheldon: All games are made up. You don't just stumble across a rich vein of Rock 'Em Sock' Em Robots.
This could have just listed the longest words known, but you made it so much more entertaining and so much more informative. I really enjoy this series.
2:24 My favorite conflation of space/no space is setup vs. set up. "Set up" being a verbal phrase meaning to prepare; "setup" being a noun meaning either the way to prepare/arrange or the preparation/arrangement itself. Every time I want to leave out the space, no matter the usage.
This tends to bug me when I see login as a verb (it's the noun. "What's your login?"). The button you press should say "log in." Interestingly, it used to be that web page had to have a space in it, but now I think many people consider it also acceptable to be spaceless: webpage. It also used to be required to capitalize Web and Internet, but I think that's changing over time.
@@resourceress7 yeah. I believe the internet and web thing has been a result of people perceiving them more as common nouns rather than proper nouns because they're both so ubiquitous in daily life. I guess that pragmatically they're no longer perceived as places you visit, but instead things you go on or enter. They're less like going to London and more like using a table perhaps.
Me, too. I don't think I've decoded all of it. The clouds say "language" in ASL (as much as disembodied hands could do without a face and a body), The Morse code banner says "PBS," I'm not sure if there's a significance to the (typewriter?) letters R S T...
About that Wilkins guy - the idea isn’t entirely without merit I think. It’s just much more easily done numerically than as a language. (As was proven ably by certain librarian named Dewy.)
It certainly was interesting but as pointed out people don't naturally learn words by analysis or rules we just do by memorization. The first generation of Wilkins speakers can learn it analytically as a second language but their children will pick up the words naturally by memorization which would "normalize" the language like any other.
And people keep revisiting the idea of these "dense" languages often. Just visit the subreddit for artifical languages and you can find tables and tables of grammatical and noun construction
@@reijek990 And once Wilkins had native speakers, it would start to evolve away from its roots like any other language -- at least if if its speakers didn't _also_ learn its analytical underpinnings. And even if they did, would that really stop it, or just maintain a "formal" version that differed a bit from informal conversation?
I have always liked the idea of sounds having inherent meanings, but that system would be too limited and simplistic. You'd either need like an alphabet with 200-300 letters/sounds, or all the words would be like 30 letters long. Impractical. Maybe you could do it with a syllabary.
"But what is a WORD?" Me: - screams in German Studies TA who tutored a bunch of first semesters - No but for real, I don't think we ever even defined WHAT a word is because my professor has a whole CLASS on that. Just on... word. I did however use the Rindfleischettikettierungsüberwachungsgesetz for de Sassure because it is 1)funny and 2)therefore a good way to talk about compound nouns and grammatical vs. lexicological :D I love this new series btw!!! All of you people make kickass, cool, stuff so much love to Dr. Erica, Dr. Z., Lindsay and Princess! (&everyone behind them)
German is fun, creative and efficient... the forest is on fire? What do you need? "Ich brauch ein Zweipersonenwaldbranddoppeldeckerlöschflugzeug!" "Alles klar!"
Hehe, as a computer scientist I always have a definition of what a word and what a language is. ;) Actually Chomsky as a linguist is quite a big deal in theoretical CS.
The mention of idioms immediately reminded me of "Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra" and the recent internet discourse about Milkshake ducks and bean dads for shrimp toast crunch
Ah yes, this is a fine location for our collective wordnerdery. I am *not* uncharacteristically gleeful that my phone just asked me to add wordnerdery to its dictionary. Now it's in my auto-suggest!!!!🥳🤓
"what the word 'word' really means" One of those cunningly much-more-complex-than-it-sounds questions. I already LOVE this show, and I'm at 1:30. A great great addition to Storied.
This specific channel is kind of like an optical illusion but about words. Like in an optical illusion you take things that you normally see and warp them to where it's mind-boggling. This channel has taken words and explain them in ways that I never thought about before which completely messes with my brain
Even Turks (I'm one) have a hard time understanding those insanely long words which nobody uses. But it works so technically "muvaffakiyetsizleştiricileştiriveremeyebileceklerimizdenmişsinizcesine" is a word but I need to read it part by part to process it.
4:15 i think that's actually a smart idea. Yes, a kid would just memorize the word as "zita," but they would also memorize many, many words similar to it the same way. After a while, it would become naturally easy to know the meaning of words you've never heard before. For example, if I said "prejump," even though it's not a word, it's easy to see it means 'before a jump."
Fun video! My parents had a big unabridged dictionary, and I still remember the longest word I could find was floccinaucinihilipilification, though it's possible this was only the case because it was at the top of the page, as it was the first or last word of the page.
Floccinaucinihilipilification is recognised the longest word that has ever been used in debate in the UK Parliament by Jacob Rees Mogg on February 21st 2012.
But wha did it mean? Ah, the good old days of browsing the dictionary. Also, I thought your username was "Mellon", the Elvish word for "friend". Then I saw that it was "melior" which I'm thinking may be related to the Italian "megliore" or "improve". So, what does it mean?
The idea of words being simply sounds with a shared collective knowledge and memory among speakers, and especially the idea of expanding words to include idioms, reminds me of that star trek species that communicated in allegory and story references. Kinda cool, i thunk.
in school i had the misfortune of having a teacher who thought my native language going strictly by the book and leaving out all the juicy information that could make the lesson interesting, language is much more flexible and colorful then what those old books provided thank you for this rubric and all the new information you provide us, and sorry for the grammer English isn't my first language
Until today, I thought antidisestablishmentarianism was constructed specifically to be a long word because it includes two negatives ('anti' and 'dis'). But knowing that it's being opposed to the removal of something, I can bring it back into my own personal use!
Love how you expect this episode to just have a bunch of straightforward answers, like a list of longest words. But then it introduces you to the philosophy of what even counts as a word in the first place. That's what word nerds like me are here for!
I enjoyed 'uncharacteristically simplistic for a linguistics show' so much that I went back over it... all the while not realising how close I was to discovering the truth! Fantastic show. Love how philosophical it gets.
I think that's super cool! I know that it's hard to define longest/biggest/heaviest anything in physics and nature, but it's cool to see that's true in linguistics too!
I've heard a lot of Alaskan and Aleut languages are highly agglunitive thus way, too. I think the word for Greenland in their native language is pretty long, for example.
Such a great video. Can’t believe pbs is still teaching me at 30 years old. Kinda mind boggling to think that I owe them so much to my education and it’s why I will now start donating money because this is not only practical but necessary to have a well educated population. Thank you PBS!
I love the geekiness of this show. It's like a serious Seinfeld about topics that can only meaningful if you enjoy them. Thank you Otherwords-woman. Really, it's a compliment. Sorry if doesn't come as such. I truly enjoy the show.
Putting spaces between word combinations (ice cream) is a very English custom, not common in Germanic languages in general. The custom has started to creep into Scandnavian languages, due to the domination of English popculture, but it can cause hilarious changes in meaning. Not to mention how annoying it is to have to figure out when to use a space for an English word.
I don't know the grammatic formality of it, but sometimes we'll put a hyphen in between spaced words: ice-cream, laser-tag, small-town, ect. This is sometimes done on a larger scale with phrases like "run-of-the-mill" which is similar to the longer German phrase-words.
Generally newly created words get hyphenated, then over time for whatever reason either come to be seen as properly one word (the hyphen is dropped and they're mashed together as a compound) or not (it's replaced with a space). This process seemingly has little or nothing to do with their actual usage, save perhaps frequency. Doesn't help that English Used To (as in, it basically vanished shortly before I was born) have a diacritic that indicated that what appeared to be a digraph actually had a syllable break in the middle of it and so was two seperate sounds (though I think it only applied to vowels?)... Which was initially replaced with a hyphen as well (for reasons that initially had to do with typewriters but carried over to early computers, and then stuck)... And then Those hyphens got dropped entirely as well. Leading to joys such as "coöperation" becoming first co-operation and then cooperation with no change in pronounciation (and I can only type that because I'm using a virtual keyboard. On a standard physical one I'd have to spend an unreasonable amount of time and effort hunting around the list in the "insert special characters" function... Only to often find many typefaces incapable of actually displaying it (that latter issue is much reduced these days)... And then almost no one reading it would realise that that was actually proper English and so many would instead try to read it like it was German or something...
@@laurencefraser on that note, a few years back I read the 1920s novel Babbitt, and words like to-day, to-night, and to-morrow were all still hyphenated, certain things that are normally shortened like etcetera were fully spelled out, and there were probably plenty of other linguistic anachronisms that I I don't recall offhand.
This spacing has infected German, too. The German language has the ability to create very long compound words, e.g. Eierschalensollbruchstellenverursacher or Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz. The last is a legal term, though, and not something used in normal speech, the first is not very common either due to the existence of the shorter term "Eierköpfer". Both of these long terms are, by the way, compound words made of compound words.
It's so fascinating how seemingly simple concepts like "word" and "language" that we use regular and expect to understand are actually very hard to define when you get down to it. I'd love a video on "What is a language?" I got into an argument about that on Reddit recently.
Came here via eon, another pbs channel. Like that there is now something to learn about words. I frankly learned most of my vocabulary growing up via books and reading (once I started no one could stop me and so before I was even in fifth grade I was reading college level books with decent comprehension, my parents gave up limiting my reading material and turned to just answering questions). I remember in middle school I was punished in detention to copy the dictionary. I then loved it so much I was then banned from this punishment during later detentions (mostly got these because my sister made us perpetually late to school so often no matter what I tried). I learned quite a bit about words then. Later in life I took up a huge interest in psychology, history, and in particular anthropology, which the last may have always been a thing considered I partially pushed myself to learn to read because I already had an obsession with ancient Egyptian culture and wanted access to the books on it. Anyway, this led to me further wants me to understand linguistics which has an origin as a field in anthropology or at least it partially does. I also remember debating in college with an English teacher over how English as a language gathered so many words it considers its own and my argument was more from its history of conquest and economics while hers...honestly I didn’t get it but it was definitely not based in this. So I don’t remember my point in this any more but hope you liked my comment
“What’s the longest word? Well, a more interesting question is, what counts as a word?” That was really fun! Keep this up and you’re going to give Monstrum competition as my favorite edutainment show on TH-cam (just don’t tell Dr. Z I said that).
This channel is slowly becoming a mish-mash of things I love : monster, literature, language. What's next? Will you add cooking too and travel? I'm not complaining but I see potential of those to be added cause there are plenty of interesting food mention in stories and it would be nice to see the places where story's setting were based of.
At 3:33, you talked about Bishop John Wilkins. The author/linguist Arika Okrent pointed out the strong similarities between Wilkins' word-lists and Roget's Thesaurus hundreds of years later.
The longest complicated high brow word I could think of before seeing this comment was "Brobdingnagian," if you've seen that episode of Big Bang Theory you'll get it
Yeah, I was shocked that neither "sesquipedalian" nor "mellifluous" came up in this video. Nor that "hippopotamo..." word that is supposed to mean fear of long words.
This puts learning new words in a new language into better perspective! Only ever speaking english never really consider why my brain knows these words
Having not studied linguistics, I'm hoping you'll cover the Chomsky inherent brain structures for acquiring language thing and whether that's still strongly supported and what the theories are today (in your entertaining style that is). Loving the show so far (also mainly commenting for yt witchcraft).
Came from PBS Terra 🙃 Subbed, 👍 and 🔔 As someone who's been fascinated by Linguistics since I was really young I love this idea, finally a good channel to binge watch and learn in a fun way, thank you! 😊
There could even be an argument that a word like "internationalization" might be a phrase when first encountered, and then become a word after it is heard/spoken some number of times. Like, I don't think I had ever heard the word before, and I parsed it immediately. But, I parsed it as "international", and "ization", like a phrase. And I can literally feel in my head how that hits differently than a "WORD" that is truly its own thing. But as I get more used to it, the parts will congeal into a whole through repeated use. I actually think a conlang like Wilkish is really interesting, because it means that if you come into contact with a new word you've never seen, and there's no one to help you, you can try to figure out how to parse it. The same way that I can parse "internationalization", despite never having heard it.
I'm just gonna type some long words I use in this comment. Anachronistic, Disillusionment, Indiscrepancies, Postmodernism, Horticulturalists, Interdependent, Cataclysmically, Serendipitously, Intravenously, Parasocialism, Palatability, EFFERVESCENTLY. Okay, I'm done now. Thanks for the video! I wasn't expecting it to posit the ideas that it did, I thought it was just gonna be a trivia video.
The longest *regularly used* word in Danish: Markedsføringsøkonomuddannelsen. Many languages, such as the Germanic and the Finno-Urgric ones, can make indefinitely long words. But I think only words actually in regular use should count. And while Danish *can* make indefinitely long words like in German, we tend not to, and instead rephrase the concepts to more words for ease of reading.
Bit random but the way the presenter described how we memorise and understand compound words as a single word rather than two, really reminded me of certain celebrity names. The ones you always hear as First Name Last Name, so that it seems strange when you stop and consider that e.g. Robin Williams was probably known to this friend as just Robin. Like I know that's his name, but that's not his name.
Using the full name helps to distinguish from other celebrities with the same name, which is why we don't do that if the name is uncommon (at least in the industry) ie: Madonna, Beyonce, Donovan, ect. We do occasionally say just part of a celebrity's name, but it's more often the last name in professional or journalistic settings. In contrast, fans will use given names instead because it feels more personal. On top of that, using the full name as a single word is essentially using the name as a brand. You can see that in clothing brands and food: Thomas Kemper, Calvin Klein...
@@BonaparteBardithion Yes, totally agree. It's like the full name is a brand rather than a name. The two parts of the name so consistently go together that (in my mind at least) they merge into one and it sounds strange to hear the first part on its own. The compound words are similar in a way - written as two separate words but we hear it as one.
There's one good thing and important use of pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis: brag to your frieds that you can say gibberish for two seconds straight without stopping and leave then super confused
Although I totally buy the theory about memorizing individual tokens being easier than formulaically constructing words like sentences, I will say that the freshman bio project I did where we had to memorize a bunch of common Latin-based prefixes and suffixes and their meanings has really stuck with me into my adult life, and constantly helps me figure out (or at least make a good guess at!) tough unfamiliar words I encounter still to this day
I adore your show! It's part of my morning breakfast routine. Not everyday, of course (I'd run out of videos to watch before long); after all, I watch anywhere from one to three videos back to back. And, it very much help how ADORABLE You are!
One that has always stuck in my mind is a word I read once in The New York Times (I think) around 2003: "dehusseinification" (18). Despite having never seen this word before or since, the meaning is instantly clear due to our understanding of affixes and affixation.
Definitely didn't expect a Keyser-Soze-style twist in a linguistics video but I'm totally here for it.
Right?!
Keyser-soze??? Help😭😭😭
@@erpmo3326 It's a reference to a film called The Usual Suspects. If you can stomach watching Kevin Spacey, it's a stone-cold classic.
@@Inscriptions37 so what is Keyser-soze specifically? How does it work?
@@erpmo3326 If I answer that, it'll spoil the movie.
This series is much more imaginative than I expected.
This host does a great job of taking a concept that they're getting into the weeds on and actually keeping it interesting through their mannerisms and speech patterns, instead of it being drab and boring.
Yes, and no annoying, bouncy, meaningless hand gestures that go with the verbal cadence of many factual TH-cam video presenters. That usually makes it a lot harder for me to pay attention to the content.
VERY GOOD JOB 👍
@@resourceress7 Couldn't agree more! Very good editing as well, the zoom in jump cuts are much more natural
"Words are the clothes that thoughts wear..." Samuel Butler...ALSO...."When I use a word', Humpty Dumpty said in a rather scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less." Lewis Carroll
Impenetrability!
@@Lucius1958 Ha! Exactly! "When I make a word do a lot of work like that,' said Humpty Dumpty ,'I always pay it extra."
That Humpty was a progressive linguist and descriptive grammarian.
@@barrettdecutler8979 Yes! And I believe that you should be congratulated for knowing that little known fact!
@@classicslover Thanks!
I know that under every single "long word" video there will be german speakers parading our long words and it's getting annoying but there is one I have to mention: "Die Bundespräsidentenstichwahlwiederholungsverschiebung", the historical event that took place in Austria in 2016 where the rerun of the run-off of the election of the federal president had to be postponed. I just feel like it needs to be known that that happened and that's what it's called.
🤣🤣 I am German and i also tgought about with what I could show off here. And then I found a Welsh word/name. But kudos to the Austrian word!
@@carolaoffhaus5240 that extremely long Welsh village name on Anglesey is:
Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch
However, it was deliberately invented in the 1860s to attract rail tourists, the village was originally called Llanfair Pwllgwyngyll, locals just call it
Llanfair or Llanfair PG ;-)
@@DavyHulme I believe the station name is mashing together the village and the names of a number of other nearby points of interest or some such?
@@laurencefraser Yep, well, except for -ogo(f) goch or 'red cave' tacked on the end, that's a mystery locally.
There's also a Māori placename in New Zealand which I won't attempt to type on my phone because (a) I'll probably get it wrong and (b) spellchecker will have a fit.
The ideas presented in this video are why I always laugh at this exchange in the Avengers:
Thor: Where we have to go is Nidavellir.
Drax: That's a made-up word!
Thor: All words are made-up.
I like the similar conversation in the Big Bang Theory.
Sheldon: Let's play Physics Fiesta.
Penny: You just made that up.
Sheldon: All games are made up. You don't just stumble across a rich vein of Rock 'Em Sock' Em Robots.
Yes just think of the word "twerk" so humanmade
🤣🤣
Nidavellir just means [wane of the moon] + [fields].
In other words: The dark land.
Commenting for the algorithm because this show is a treasure 💎
This could have just listed the longest words known, but you made it so much more entertaining and so much more informative. I really enjoy this series.
2:24 My favorite conflation of space/no space is setup vs. set up. "Set up" being a verbal phrase meaning to prepare; "setup" being a noun meaning either the way to prepare/arrange or the preparation/arrangement itself. Every time I want to leave out the space, no matter the usage.
This tends to bug me when I see login as a verb (it's the noun. "What's your login?"). The button you press should say "log in."
Interestingly, it used to be that web page had to have a space in it, but now I think many people consider it also acceptable to be spaceless: webpage.
It also used to be required to capitalize Web and Internet, but I think that's changing over time.
@@resourceress7 I understand Web since you can have smaller webs, but why Internet? There's only one. Anything smaller is an intranet.
@@resourceress7 yeah. I believe the internet and web thing has been a result of people perceiving them more as common nouns rather than proper nouns because they're both so ubiquitous in daily life. I guess that pragmatically they're no longer perceived as places you visit, but instead things you go on or enter. They're less like going to London and more like using a table perhaps.
also lookout and look out!
I love this show overall, but I especially love the trippy, 1970s style intro - it’s so fun 🤩
Me, too. I don't think I've decoded all of it. The clouds say "language" in ASL (as much as disembodied hands could do without a face and a body), The Morse code banner says "PBS," I'm not sure if there's a significance to the (typewriter?) letters R S T...
Nah, I hate it.
Schoolhouse Rock retro vibes.
Same. It's nostalgic to me - reminds me of kid shows I watched in the 80s that had a 70s feel
The music gets stuck in my head!
Come for the monstrum, stay for the word nerding
Sane here
Yes definitely my precious e hehehe
As an English language student, I adore this show❤️
Yea, I wish she was my English teacher too 😍
About that Wilkins guy - the idea isn’t entirely without merit I think. It’s just much more easily done numerically than as a language. (As was proven ably by certain librarian named Dewy.)
I like Wilkins' idea, too. 😊
It certainly was interesting but as pointed out people don't naturally learn words by analysis or rules we just do by memorization. The first generation of Wilkins speakers can learn it analytically as a second language but their children will pick up the words naturally by memorization which would "normalize" the language like any other.
And people keep revisiting the idea of these "dense" languages often. Just visit the subreddit for artifical languages and you can find tables and tables of grammatical and noun construction
@@reijek990 And once Wilkins had native speakers, it would start to evolve away from its roots like any other language -- at least if if its speakers didn't _also_ learn its analytical underpinnings. And even if they did, would that really stop it, or just maintain a "formal" version that differed a bit from informal conversation?
I have always liked the idea of sounds having inherent meanings, but that system would be too limited and simplistic. You'd either need like an alphabet with 200-300 letters/sounds, or all the words would be like 30 letters long. Impractical. Maybe you could do it with a syllabary.
"But what is a WORD?"
Me: - screams in German Studies TA who tutored a bunch of first semesters -
No but for real, I don't think we ever even defined WHAT a word is because my professor has a whole CLASS on that. Just on... word.
I did however use the Rindfleischettikettierungsüberwachungsgesetz for de Sassure because it is 1)funny and 2)therefore a good way to talk about compound nouns and grammatical vs. lexicological :D
I love this new series btw!!! All of you people make kickass, cool, stuff so much love to Dr. Erica, Dr. Z., Lindsay and Princess! (&everyone behind them)
*laughs in German*
@@barbarusbloodshed6347 *Also laughs in German* Warte, worüber lachen wir?
German is fun, creative and efficient... the forest is on fire? What do you need?
"Ich brauch ein Zweipersonenwaldbranddoppeldeckerlöschflugzeug!"
"Alles klar!"
@@SarahWolverine Wir lachen über die lächerlich kurzen Wörter der englischen Sprache ;)
Hose runter, Wortvergleich! :D :D :D
Hehe, as a computer scientist I always have a definition of what a word and what a language is. ;)
Actually Chomsky as a linguist is quite a big deal in theoretical CS.
The mention of idioms immediately reminded me of "Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra" and the recent internet discourse about Milkshake ducks and bean dads for shrimp toast crunch
*"All language is a system of quotations."*
- Jorge Luis Borges
Temba, his arms wide!
WTF did I just read? Felt like a stroke.
@@barrettdecutler8979 The Tamarianization of our language.
Planting those three long words to make your point is kinda slick.
I just realized that words are basically memes: humanmade, shared sociocultural entities that evolve and change through usage and over time.
You're kinda late.
That's more or less what the word was intended to mean when it was coined circa late 70's. A transmissible unit of culture analogous to a gene.
Basically any social construct is. Art, music, fashion, race, gender, class. They are all coined, distibuted, adopted, and altered by society.
three people misunderstood you. tough luck bud. and i do agree with you lol, quite interesting
Also all words are made up.
I love this channel and linguistics!
NERRRRRDDDD!!! Lolol jkjk
Wordnerd
Ah yes, this is a fine location for our collective wordnerdery.
I am *not* uncharacteristically gleeful that my phone just asked me to add wordnerdery to its dictionary. Now it's in my auto-suggest!!!!🥳🤓
I'm today years old when I found out PODCAST is a broadcast for your IPOD...
whoa...TIL...
Same
W…h…o…a…
Weird
It’s finally happened. It’s entered the collective consciousness.
"what the word 'word' really means"
One of those cunningly much-more-complex-than-it-sounds questions.
I already LOVE this show, and I'm at 1:30.
A great great addition to Storied.
She must be a cunning linguist.
@@barrettdecutler8979i do not enjoy this sentance.
Not a really a word, but my favorite phrase that looks like a word is "djeet", which, in case you don't know, is New Jersey slang for "Did you eat?".
And Jeff Foxworthy's closely related wordf rom Southern English, "djeetyet", or "Did you eat yet?"
6:06 ok that was a great twist, beautifully written script, given that writer a raise!
This specific channel is kind of like an optical illusion but about words. Like in an optical illusion you take things that you normally see and warp them to where it's mind-boggling. This channel has taken words and explain them in ways that I never thought about before which completely messes with my brain
Even Turks (I'm one) have a hard time understanding those insanely long words which nobody uses. But it works so technically "muvaffakiyetsizleştiricileştiriveremeyebileceklerimizdenmişsinizcesine" is a word but I need to read it part by part to process it.
+++ also this word almost has no practical use so it makes much more harder to understand
4:15 i think that's actually a smart idea. Yes, a kid would just memorize the word as "zita," but they would also memorize many, many words similar to it the same way. After a while, it would become naturally easy to know the meaning of words you've never heard before. For example, if I said "prejump," even though it's not a word, it's easy to see it means 'before a jump."
Fun video! My parents had a big unabridged dictionary, and I still remember the longest word I could find was floccinaucinihilipilification, though it's possible this was only the case because it was at the top of the page, as it was the first or last word of the page.
Floccinaucinihilipilification is recognised the longest word that has ever been used in debate in the UK Parliament by Jacob Rees Mogg on February 21st 2012.
Yes, I was surprised it didn't get a mention in this video. It is still one of my favorite words.
But wha did it mean? Ah, the good old days of browsing the dictionary. Also, I thought your username was "Mellon", the Elvish word for "friend". Then I saw that it was "melior" which I'm thinking may be related to the Italian "megliore" or "improve". So, what does it mean?
It's in my shared vocabulary...and it doesn't trigger spell check LOL.
Thinking of phrases as a word never came up before. This was an incredible video.
The idea of words being simply sounds with a shared collective knowledge and memory among speakers, and especially the idea of expanding words to include idioms, reminds me of that star trek species that communicated in allegory and story references. Kinda cool, i thunk.
As a linguistics major and technical writer, I have a massive and unfettered crush on Dr. Brozovsky.
in school i had the misfortune of having a teacher who thought my native language going strictly by the book and leaving out all the juicy information that could make the lesson interesting, language is much more flexible and colorful then what those old books provided
thank you for this rubric and all the new information you provide us, and sorry for the grammer English isn't my first language
Now I want to know what the language was, what the book was, and what the juicy parts are.
"Why waste time say lot word when few word do trick" - Kevin.
Also, the lenght of a word can be determined in various ways.
- Number of letters
- number of syllables
- number of phonemes
I'm among those who do look into the origin of words.
Joe Hansen recommended this show, BTW.
Saw this through the algorithm, clicked because of It's Lit, enjoyed it -- thank you
Until today, I thought antidisestablishmentarianism was constructed specifically to be a long word because it includes two negatives ('anti' and 'dis'). But knowing that it's being opposed to the removal of something, I can bring it back into my own personal use!
Love how you expect this episode to just have a bunch of straightforward answers, like a list of longest words. But then it introduces you to the philosophy of what even counts as a word in the first place. That's what word nerds like me are here for!
I enjoyed 'uncharacteristically simplistic for a linguistics show' so much that I went back over it... all the while not realising how close I was to discovering the truth!
Fantastic show. Love how philosophical it gets.
I think that's super cool! I know that it's hard to define longest/biggest/heaviest anything in physics and nature, but it's cool to see that's true in linguistics too!
2 episodes in & I'm in love with this series
Longest word ever is when your mom starts yelling at you in Spanish and it sounds like one long pissed off word
and as a bonus I know the origin of the word podcast : D
iPOD broadCAST
@CoolFighterBoy - CFB PLAYS look at Bri10's answer and if you can't find it out there watch the video. actually either way watch the video.
@@bri1085 Another way of describing the origin is like "Animorphs" a portmanteau of two words; in this case a combination of iPod and broadcast
Okay 6:16 legitimately blew my mind.
This is FASCINATING! I was waiting for a Finnish example of a super-long compound word, but Hungarian is pretty close :)
I was waiting for Finnish too!!
Suihkuturbiinimoottorihuoltomekaanikkoaliupseerioppilas comes to mind. :p
Hungarian (non-compound): legeslegmegszentségteleníttethetetlenebbjeitekéiből
I've heard a lot of Alaskan and Aleut languages are highly agglunitive thus way, too. I think the word for Greenland in their native language is pretty long, for example.
@@barrettdecutler8979 hey 👋 Barrett you seem like a cool guy
This is what I was hoping for in college when I signed up for (what ended up being) my boring-ass linguistics class. I can't wait for more!
Sorry to hear that. Linguistics should be fun!
This was so cool. Thanks for adding this fun new program to Storied. It really got me back to the dissertation days studying Cognitive Linguistics.
Such a great video. Can’t believe pbs is still teaching me at 30 years old. Kinda mind boggling to think that I owe them so much to my education and it’s why I will now start donating money because this is not only practical but necessary to have a well educated population. Thank you PBS!
I love the geekiness of this show. It's like a serious Seinfeld about topics that can only meaningful if you enjoy them. Thank you Otherwords-woman. Really, it's a compliment. Sorry if doesn't come as such. I truly enjoy the show.
Putting spaces between word combinations (ice cream) is a very English custom, not common in Germanic languages in general. The custom has started to creep into Scandnavian languages, due to the domination of English popculture, but it can cause hilarious changes in meaning. Not to mention how annoying it is to have to figure out when to use a space for an English word.
I don't know the grammatic formality of it, but sometimes we'll put a hyphen in between spaced words: ice-cream, laser-tag, small-town, ect. This is sometimes done on a larger scale with phrases like "run-of-the-mill" which is similar to the longer German phrase-words.
Generally newly created words get hyphenated, then over time for whatever reason either come to be seen as properly one word (the hyphen is dropped and they're mashed together as a compound) or not (it's replaced with a space). This process seemingly has little or nothing to do with their actual usage, save perhaps frequency.
Doesn't help that English Used To (as in, it basically vanished shortly before I was born) have a diacritic that indicated that what appeared to be a digraph actually had a syllable break in the middle of it and so was two seperate sounds (though I think it only applied to vowels?)... Which was initially replaced with a hyphen as well (for reasons that initially had to do with typewriters but carried over to early computers, and then stuck)... And then Those hyphens got dropped entirely as well. Leading to joys such as "coöperation" becoming first co-operation and then cooperation with no change in pronounciation (and I can only type that because I'm using a virtual keyboard. On a standard physical one I'd have to spend an unreasonable amount of time and effort hunting around the list in the "insert special characters" function... Only to often find many typefaces incapable of actually displaying it (that latter issue is much reduced these days)... And then almost no one reading it would realise that that was actually proper English and so many would instead try to read it like it was German or something...
@@laurencefraser on that note, a few years back I read the 1920s novel Babbitt, and words like to-day, to-night, and to-morrow were all still hyphenated, certain things that are normally shortened like etcetera were fully spelled out, and there were probably plenty of other linguistic anachronisms that I I don't recall offhand.
@@AnnoyingNewslettersPage6 It's important when you're being paid by the character...
This spacing has infected German, too. The German language has the ability to create very long compound words, e.g. Eierschalensollbruchstellenverursacher or Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz. The last is a legal term, though, and not something used in normal speech, the first is not very common either due to the existence of the shorter term "Eierköpfer". Both of these long terms are, by the way, compound words made of compound words.
Don't worry. Blackadder will be back before Prince George can say it.
At least it is written in that big papery thing all tied up with string :) Thank you for a laugh!
Antidisnctinctlymintly...
Bladder!
Please help with the joke! I'm drowning!
"If you accept that the definition of a word is some letters surrounded by a gap, then xnopyt, a-"
It's so fascinating how seemingly simple concepts like "word" and "language" that we use regular and expect to understand are actually very hard to define when you get down to it. I'd love a video on "What is a language?" I got into an argument about that on Reddit recently.
Came here via eon, another pbs channel. Like that there is now something to learn about words. I frankly learned most of my vocabulary growing up via books and reading (once I started no one could stop me and so before I was even in fifth grade I was reading college level books with decent comprehension, my parents gave up limiting my reading material and turned to just answering questions). I remember in middle school I was punished in detention to copy the dictionary. I then loved it so much I was then banned from this punishment during later detentions (mostly got these because my sister made us perpetually late to school so often no matter what I tried). I learned quite a bit about words then. Later in life I took up a huge interest in psychology, history, and in particular anthropology, which the last may have always been a thing considered I partially pushed myself to learn to read because I already had an obsession with ancient Egyptian culture and wanted access to the books on it. Anyway, this led to me further wants me to understand linguistics which has an origin as a field in anthropology or at least it partially does. I also remember debating in college with an English teacher over how English as a language gathered so many words it considers its own and my argument was more from its history of conquest and economics while hers...honestly I didn’t get it but it was definitely not based in this. So I don’t remember my point in this any more but hope you liked my comment
I wish these shows had their own channels... But I get why it's done this way and this is really good sooooo subbed.
“What’s the longest word? Well, a more interesting question is, what counts as a word?” That was really fun! Keep this up and you’re going to give Monstrum competition as my favorite edutainment show on TH-cam (just don’t tell Dr. Z I said that).
This channel is slowly becoming a mish-mash of things I love : monster, literature, language. What's next? Will you add cooking too and travel? I'm not complaining but I see potential of those to be added cause there are plenty of interesting food mention in stories and it would be nice to see the places where story's setting were based of.
I can’t believe I missed this when it came out! I’m so excited for more linguistic videos.
At 3:33, you talked about Bishop John Wilkins. The author/linguist Arika Okrent pointed out the strong similarities between Wilkins' word-lists and Roget's Thesaurus hundreds of years later.
As a word nerd, I heartily approve 😁 Can't wait for more videos, I'm excited for this series to develop!
What a video! So much plot twist and narrative realisation in just seven minutes.
I love her animations, also her enthusiasm.
How sesquipedalian of you
Also the word for when you feel left out because people keep using overly long words: sesquipedalienation
The longest complicated high brow word I could think of before seeing this comment was "Brobdingnagian," if you've seen that episode of Big Bang Theory you'll get it
ha ha ha! Sesquipedalienation! I love it. I'll be adding that word to a conversation really really soon.
Yeah, I was shocked that neither "sesquipedalian" nor "mellifluous" came up in this video. Nor that "hippopotamo..." word that is supposed to mean fear of long words.
This puts learning new words in a new language into better perspective! Only ever speaking english never really consider why my brain knows these words
“Back yard” is two words when it’s a noun and I will die on this hill
Having not studied linguistics, I'm hoping you'll cover the Chomsky inherent brain structures for acquiring language thing and whether that's still strongly supported and what the theories are today (in your entertaining style that is). Loving the show so far (also mainly commenting for yt witchcraft).
This was much more succinct than my 300-level morphology course
Came from PBS Terra 🙃
Subbed, 👍 and 🔔
As someone who's been fascinated by Linguistics since I was really young I love this idea, finally a good channel to binge watch and learn in a fun way, thank you! 😊
Truly a pleasure to watch and listen. 🚀🌕
There could even be an argument that a word like "internationalization" might be a phrase when first encountered, and then become a word after it is heard/spoken some number of times. Like, I don't think I had ever heard the word before, and I parsed it immediately. But, I parsed it as "international", and "ization", like a phrase. And I can literally feel in my head how that hits differently than a "WORD" that is truly its own thing. But as I get more used to it, the parts will congeal into a whole through repeated use.
I actually think a conlang like Wilkish is really interesting, because it means that if you come into contact with a new word you've never seen, and there's no one to help you, you can try to figure out how to parse it. The same way that I can parse "internationalization", despite never having heard it.
I'm really enjoying these episodes!! Grazie!
The Wilkish method could be a good way for writers to come up with a new sort of language for a race of beings.
I got sent here by Sound Field, and will definitely watch more of these. I love learning about language. :D
Otherwords is turning me into such a big word nerd 🤩🤩 love this!!
I'm just gonna type some long words I use in this comment.
Anachronistic, Disillusionment, Indiscrepancies, Postmodernism, Horticulturalists, Interdependent, Cataclysmically, Serendipitously, Intravenously, Parasocialism, Palatability, EFFERVESCENTLY.
Okay, I'm done now. Thanks for the video! I wasn't expecting it to posit the ideas that it did, I thought it was just gonna be a trivia video.
Great new channel! Was sent here by Its Lit, huge fan of Princess Weekes and Lindsay.
The longest *regularly used* word in Danish: Markedsføringsøkonomuddannelsen.
Many languages, such as the Germanic and the Finno-Urgric ones, can make indefinitely long words. But I think only words actually in regular use should count.
And while Danish *can* make indefinitely long words like in German, we tend not to, and instead rephrase the concepts to more words for ease of reading.
Wow this is brilliantly written
Bit random but the way the presenter described how we memorise and understand compound words as a single word rather than two, really reminded me of certain celebrity names. The ones you always hear as First Name Last Name, so that it seems strange when you stop and consider that e.g. Robin Williams was probably known to this friend as just Robin. Like I know that's his name, but that's not his name.
Using the full name helps to distinguish from other celebrities with the same name, which is why we don't do that if the name is uncommon (at least in the industry) ie: Madonna, Beyonce, Donovan, ect.
We do occasionally say just part of a celebrity's name, but it's more often the last name in professional or journalistic settings. In contrast, fans will use given names instead because it feels more personal.
On top of that, using the full name as a single word is essentially using the name as a brand. You can see that in clothing brands and food: Thomas Kemper, Calvin Klein...
@@BonaparteBardithion Yes, totally agree. It's like the full name is a brand rather than a name. The two parts of the name so consistently go together that (in my mind at least) they merge into one and it sounds strange to hear the first part on its own. The compound words are similar in a way - written as two separate words but we hear it as one.
Wasn't expecting that twist, yet my ESL-teacher brain really liked the tickle. Keep videos like these coming!
Ok, this is already super cool, but the amazing editing and into is some of the most delicious icing on top! And the fact it's PBS 😘👌 mmwah! Superb.
Binging all these Otherwords episodes, love love loving it!!
There's one good thing and important use of pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis: brag to your frieds that you can say gibberish for two seconds straight without stopping and leave then super confused
This piece is excellent and well reasoned.
Although I totally buy the theory about memorizing individual tokens being easier than formulaically constructing words like sentences, I will say that the freshman bio project I did where we had to memorize a bunch of common Latin-based prefixes and suffixes and their meanings has really stuck with me into my adult life, and constantly helps me figure out (or at least make a good guess at!) tough unfamiliar words I encounter still to this day
I adore your show! It's part of my morning breakfast routine. Not everyday, of course (I'd run out of videos to watch before long); after all, I watch anywhere from one to three videos back to back.
And, it very much help how ADORABLE You are!
Really enjoyed this Erica. Thank you. Storied is a great channel and Otherwords is shaping up to be a great addition to it.
1:41 Totally. I marvel at this every day.
An excellent new show with a snappy and witty host? Yes please :D
Love this show. Really entertaining, informative and well-produced (those animations!!).
this was way more entertaining than I expected. Thanks 2 Cents for sending me this way!
4:23 wohh, that's new to me!
I love how witty the writers of this show are
Love to see it !! 💕 who else came here from “It’s okay to be smart” ?
1:06 my new favourite phrase
My favorite long word is Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia, which is the fear of long words.
The irony! Thanks for teaching me a new word :) - Dr. B
Loved this video. Anymore, it's rare to learn something new on TH-cam.
And my day keeps getting better :)
One that has always stuck in my mind is a word I read once in The New York Times (I think) around 2003: "dehusseinification" (18). Despite having never seen this word before or since, the meaning is instantly clear due to our understanding of affixes and affixation.
When you know all the affixes but you don't understand the core meaning:
Linguistics is so fascinating.
So my mistake in figuring out the longest word is thinking I know what a word is
I am in love with this new show!