Are the longest German and Turkish words really single words?

Question

1. First, I don't speak/understand any so-called agglutinative languages, like Turkish. I also don't know German.

2. I understand there's no good definition for the concept of "word", which could apply to all languages. But for the sake of this questions let's assume we define word as something independent of writing.

3. I am always a bit skeptical about some languages being able to construct very long words. This skepticism come from the fact that I've seen such claims about languages I know well. For example: many times I have heard and read info like "English words are much longer than Chinese and Vietnamese words" while in my opinion these claims are based on the biased bracketing of the syllables and morphemes. For example a word like: "unbreakable" translates to Vietnamese "không thể phá vỡ", for some reason "không thể phá vỡ" is never regarded as a word neither by Vietnamese nor by English speakers. I would not consider "unbreakable" a single word any more than "không thể phá vỡ".

Now I think similar "tricks" are made with German and Turkish long words. That is I believe that the Turkish "muvaffakiyetsizleştiricileştiriveremeyebileceklerimizdenmişsinizcesine" and the German "Kraftfahrzeug-Haftpflichtversicherung" are just bunches of words. It just happens that spaces are not put inside these bunches.

The only doubt I have about my example is that "không" is actually a single word that can be uttered alone, while the English prefix "un" is not.

Could anyone break down these long words to shorter words to show it's possible or contradict my intuition-based claims otherwise?

Answer 1

From the perspective of linguistics, the question is meaningless though well-intentioned. "Word" is not a well-defined technical concept in linguistics (or, some people may have concocted a definition of "word" for their purposes, but there isn't even a widely-believed definition). The best definition is "a maximal string of letters not containing spaces", and that's really not very good (not all writing systems use spaces, plus that means that unwritten languages don't have words).

One approach has been to equate "word" with "syntactic terminal", which simply swaps the question to "what is a syntactic terminal?". In contemporary Minimalist syntax, verbs especially are composed of many many nodes which still are realized as "a word" in a language like Latin (with tense, aspect, person and number agreements each of which contributes a syntactic node). There are also phonological accounts which appeal (circularly) to some property of assumed words (stress on the penultimate syllable of the word; a requirement to have at least 2 syllables in the word).

It seems to be true that anything that a naive speaker of a language can utter alone is at least a word, therefore an English speaker can't say "gira" which is a sub-part of "giraffe" and a Saami speaker can't say "beatna" which is a sub-part of [beatnag-a] "dog (acc. sg)". Clearly, not every utterance is a word. If you define "word" as a minimal utterance, then you would exclude the German and Turkish examples as "not words" (they are not minimal). But then "oxen" and "cats" are not words, because then contain words – "ox, cat". And that just seems wrong.

There does appear to be a phonological object, a grouping of many syllables into a thing, where rules apply within that thing, or with reference to the thing ("no obstruents at the end of the ___"), which we call the phonological word, or ω. This thing isn't "defined", it is or may be constructed, with language-specific rules. When you find that a large sub-part of an "utterance" has a certain kind of coherence w.r.t. phonological rules, you can call that unit a "(P-)word". But it turns out that this ω thing is not always coherent in a language, and clitics can present contradictory evidence where they partially act like they are "in the word" and partially act like they are outside.

Hence, most linguists have abandoned the concept of "word" as a coherent technical concept.

Answer 2

In German, noun phrases that are used to describe a separate entity other than their individual nouns are written without spaces. Thus, the example of Kraftfahrzeug-Haftpflichtversicherung may indeed be considered as a "bunch of words" in the sense you have described. In Turkish however, this is not true. The example in Turkish you have provided contains only a single "word" which is muvaffakiyet, meaning success. All of the remaining parts of that word are suffixes. They are used to modify the meaning, add the notion of time etc.

For example:

• Muvaffakiyet = Success
• Muvaffakiyetsiz = Unsuccessful
• Muvaffakiyetsizleş (-mek) = to become unsuccessful and so on.

If you check the last part, you might think that the last added part "-leş" means "to become". But that would be incorrect. It is just a suffix and is meaningless on its own. So your example in Turkish is not a "bunch of words" written without spaces since except for the first one, muvaffakiyet, none of the components have a meaning on its own.

On the other hand, your German example, Kraftfahrzeug-Haftpflichtversicherung, translated into Turkish would be "motorlu araç sorumluluk sigortası". As you can see, that is written with spaces as each of the individual parts are not suffixes, but nouns, meaning that they have a meaning on their own. (Motor (-lu) = (with/containing) motor, araç = vehicle, sorumluluk = liability, sigorta (-sı) = insurance (of))

Answer 3

In German these compound terms are being called "Komposita" (which is the plural form of "Kompositum").. As per your example "Kraftfahrzeug-Haftpflichtversicherung", this could as well be expressed as a "Haftpflichtversicherung für ein Kraftfahrzeug". In order to merge such even more lengthy descriptions into a single term (without inventing a new one), compound terms are often being formed. The term "Kraftfahrzeug-Haftpflichtversicherung" can be split up into 5 words:
"Kraft" (power), "Fahrzeug" (vehicle), "Haft(ung)" (liability), "Pflicht" (duty), "Versicherung" (insurance).

The term "Donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaft" is probably still the most promeniert, due to the extraordinary tripple f (which only may occur in such a compound term, but nowhere else).

Answer 4

There are double leş-tir suffix in muvaffakiyetsizleştiricileştir- so it is non-sense. If you want you may add more suffixes like this to any word and you may reach a gibberish string sounds like Turkish.