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According to the Guinness Book of World Records, the longest word coined by a major author and the longest word ever to appear in literature comes from a word coined by Aristophanes (c. 392 BC) in his comedy Assemblywomen (line 1169-74), which in Greek contains 173 letters, which far surpasses that of Shakespeare's 27-letter long word, "honorificabilitudinitatibus" in his Love's Labour's Lost (V.I). In Greek it is:
λοπαδοτεμαχοσελαχογαλεοκρανιολειψανοδριμυποτριμματοσιλφιοκαραβομελιτοκατακεχυμενοκιχλεπικοσσυφοφαττοπεριστεραλεκτρυονοπτοκεφαλλιοκιγκλοπελειολαγῳοσιραιοβαφητραγανοπτερύγων
The English transliteration has 182 letters:
lopadotemachoselachogaleokranioleipsanodrimupotrimmatosilphioliparomelitoaktakexhumenokichlepikossuphophattoperisteralektruonoptopiphallidokinklopeleioplagoosiraiobaphetragalopterugon
What it describes is a fictional food dish consisting of 17 ingredients, combining fish, poultry and other meat. It was originally coined by Aristophanes as poking fun at the fact that stringing together words to form compound words was common practice, and wanted to show an extreme version of the lengths that sometimes resulted in doing so.
Liddell and Scott define this as "name of a dish compounded of all kinds of dainties, fish, flesh, fowl, and sauces."
More specifically, the dish is a fricasee, with 17 sweet and sour ingredients, including brains, honey, vinegar, fish, pickles, and the following: fish slices, fish of the Elasmobranchii subclass (a shark or ray), rotted dogfish or small shark’s head, silphion laserwort – a kind of fennel, a kind of crab, beetle, or crayfish, eagle, cheese, honey, wrasse or thrush, topped with a sea fish or blackbird, wood pigeon, domestic pigeon, chicken, roasted headof dabchick, hare (a kind of bird or sea hare – a mollusk), must (wine), dessert, fruit, or other raw food, and wing or fin.
Specifically:
-lopado- from λοπάς (lopas, stem lopad-) “dish, meal”,
-temacho- from τέμαχος (temachos) “fish slice”,
-selacho- from σέλαχος (selachos) “fish of the Elasmobranchii subclass (a shark or ray)
-galeo- from γαλεός (galeos) “dogfish, small shark”
-kranio- from κρανίον (cranion) “head”
-leipsano- from λείψανον (leipsanon) “remnant”
-drimy- from δριμύς (drimys) “sharp, pungent”
-hypotrimmato- from ὑπότριμμα (hypotrimma) “generally sharp-tasting dish of several ingredients grated and pounded together”
-silphio- from σίλφιον (silphion) “laserwort” (apparently a kind of giant fennel
-karabo- from κάραβος (karabos) “a kind of crab, beetle, or crayfish” (the word is related to scarab)
-parao- appears to be from παραός (paraos) “eagle”
-tyro- is clearly just τυρός (tyros) “cheese”
-melito- from μέλι (meli) “honey”
-katakechymeno- is from κατακεχυμένος (catacechymenos), something like “poured down”, past participle of καταχεύω (catacheuō)
-kichl- from κίχλη (cichlē) “wrasse” (or “thrush”)
-epi- from επι (epi) “upon, on top of”
-kossypho- from κόσσυφος (cossyphos) “a kind of sea-fish” (or “blackbird”)
-phatto- from φάττα (phatta) “wood pigeon”
-perister- from περιστερός (peristeros) “domestic pigeon”
-alektryono- from ἀλεκτρυών (alectryōn) “chicken”
-opto-/-opte- from ὀπτός (optos) “roasted, baked”
-kephallio-/-kephalio- from κεφάλιον (cephalion), diminutive of “head”
-kinklo-/kigklo- from κίγκλος (cinclos) “dabchick”
-peleio- from πέλεια (pelīa) “pigeon”
-lagoio- probably from λαγῶς (also accented λαγώς) meaning basically “hare” but also a kind of bird or a kind of sea-hare
-siraio- from σίραιον (siraeon) “new wine boiled down”
-baphe- from βαφή (baphē) “dipping” (also ‘dyeing’, ‘temper (of a blade)’)
-tragano- from τραγανός (traganos) “he-goat” (but if it is really ‘-tragalo-’ as in one variant, then maybe it is really from τραγάλιον “dessert fruit; thing eaten uncooked”)
-pterygon from πτέρυξ (pteryx) “wing, fin”.
There is some disagreement as to the original form of the word and the correct transliteration.
Yes, but "Sanskrit, as reported in the Guinness Book of Records, has produced a word over twice as long as Aristophanes' monsterpiece":
ReplyDeleteनिरन्तरान्धकारिता-दिगन्तर-कन्दलदमन्द-सुधारस-बिन्दु-सान्द्रतर-घनाघन-वृन्द-सन्देहकर-स्यन्दमान-मकरन्द-बिन्दु-बन्धुरतर-माकन्द-तरु-कुल-तल्प-कल्प-मृदुल-सिकता-जाल-जटिल-मूल-तल-मरुवक-मिलदलघु-लघु-लय-कलित-रमणीय-पानीय-शालिका-बालिका-करार-विन्द-गलन्तिका-गलदेला-लवङ्ग-पाटल-घनसार-कस्तूरिकातिसौरभ-मेदुर-लघुतर-मधुर-शीतलतर-सलिलधारा-निराकरिष्णु-तदीय-विमल-विलोचन-मयूख-रेखापसारित-पिपासायास-पथिक-लोकान्
In addition, "writer/artist/director Nigel Tomm publishe[d] the longest sentence in literature which contains the longest published word. The sentence is contained in four volumes of Nigel Tomm's novel The Blah Story, i.e., the sentence occupies volumes 16, 17, 18 and 19, while The Blah Story, Volume 19' is almost entirely occupied by one word which contains all previously known longest words (except chemical names).
The sentence contains 2,403,109 words, 15,403,732 characters (with spaces) or 3,248 pages. ,The Blah Story, Volume 19 which is 812 pages long contains only 11 words, one of which 'somewhenot...dingown' consists of 3,609,750 letters it means the current day or date between real and imaginable today."
Take that, Gus Portokalos.
Obviously, neither Tirumalāmbā nor Tomm are considered "major author"s, but such is in the eye of the beholder. :)
The problem isn't whether or not Tomm is a major author. The problem is Tomm's "word" isn't really a word by any stretch of the imagination. He simply used a poetic device of smooshing all the words together without spaces between them to suggest it was a single word. The Greek word really is linguistically a single word. Words can be made up of units of sound&meaning that are even smaller than words. They are called "morphemes." A word like "government" has two morphemes: "govern" and "ment"-- where ment (stop autocorrecting me from ment to meant!!!) is a morpheme that changes a verb to a noun and adds a component of meaning roughly corresponding to "abstract entity related to the verb that is the root of the word." Very often, when morphemes are combined into bigger words, their pronunciation is altered. Here are some English examples to illustrate that: sign vs. signal. Notice how the vowel is pronounced differently and the silent g is pronounced in the word with two morphemes, but not in the word with one morpheme. Or: nation vs. national. or: sane vs. sanity. Vowels and consonants can have different pronunciations as the morphemes are added together. In Greek, the morphemes have a different pronunciation when they are part of a larger word: tyro- (part of larger word) tyros-- word on its own with only a root and grammatical ending. We have actually borrowed this convention into English wherever we have borrowed compound words from Greek and Latin. These are called "neoclassical compounds". Here is an example: anthropology. (anthropos+logy) philosophy (philia + sophy). Note how the morphemes are bound together with a linking vowel "o" in the English neoclassical compounds. This is a convention carried over from the Greek. Native English compounds rarely change the form of the words when they are compounded. Usually we only change the stress of the words as in: black board. or: film committee. (It doesn't matter that these compounds are written as two words. They function as a single word and that can be shown through linguistic tests. ) Note that the morphemes used in the example from Aristophanes all have been altered from the form the occur in as independent words. That is a sign that they are truly forming a single word in the pattern that we catch a glimpse of in our borrowed neoclassical compounds. The longest word of Aristophanes is clearly a compound of this type. Whereas Tomm's "word" does not behave like a single multi-morphemic (possibly compound) word in English.
DeleteAnd, the longest ever word is a scientific word: "The systematic name for deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) of the human mitochondria contains 16,569 nucleotide residues and is thus c. 207,000 letters long. It was published in key form in Nature on 9 Apr 1981."
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