Quote Originally Posted by Magoroth View Post
German words are more like logical phrases and descriptors than real words, to be fair. Taking an extreme example, there's a word in German for 'Association for subordinate officials of the head office management of the Danube steamboat electrical services'. There used to be quite a few of those words in English as well, until we replaced most of them with either Norman or French ones (in culture and law) or with Latin equivalents, like, for instance: witengamot (basically, the royal council, literally the Wise Men's Meeting), Agenbite (of inwit) (which is supposed to be... remorse (which is itself formed from the root 'mordeo', to bite, and the prefix re-, which signifies repetition), as it's a direct translation (calque) of that word), and, my personal favorite, hleator-smiþ (literally laughter smith). My point is that those are not really words so much as expressions spelt without any spaces.

This is because German, like most modern Germanic languages (except for English and, I assume, the German dialects spoken in the Ticino Valley (I'm not 100% sure on the latter)) are agglutinative languages, meaning they can practically cobble together different words without changing them to account for ease of pronunciation. So, if you want a really fucked up language

ICELANDIC IS YOUR FRIEND

The longest word in this language is this one

Vaðlaheiðarvegavinnuverkfærageymsluskúraútidyralyk lakippuhringur