Barbara Geier: When a few letters just won’t do

TEXT & PHOTOS: BARBARA GEIER

We Germans seem to love stringing nouns together to make up new terms. This results in some seriously long words, often including a hyphen in written language, to help overwhelmed eyes cope with the barrage of characters on the screen or paper. However, a lot of these words are not actually part of our official vocabulary, meaning they are not listed in the ultimate reference for all things German language, called Duden after Konrad Duden who first published this dictionary of the Standard High German language in 1880. And many are simply theoretical words and not part of everyday language, because a considerable share of mega compounds is firmly confined to the realm of bureaucracy, that is the language of law and public administration.

Trust me, no ordinary German would ever have uttered the word Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz (63 letters, feel free to count). It was the name of a law passed in the state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania in 1999, with the purpose of ensuring the correct implementation of EU regulations on the traceability of beef following the mad cow disease crisis. If you want it shorter, the abbreviation is RkReÜAÜG, and in English it would have been something along the lines of the Act on the Transfer of Beef Labelling Monitoring Tasks. Much easier, isn’t it? Sometimes it makes sense to arrange individual words with a few connectors instead of just cobbling them all together. But anyway, no need to worry about this mad compound noun any longer. The Act was repealed in 2013.

The officially longest German word according to Duden is currently Aufmerksamkeitsdefizit-Hyperaktivitätsstörung, at 44 letters without the hyphen. Although, in everyday life, that doesn’t really hold true either. Because what we actually use in the real world is the abbreviation for this word, which is ADHS. I have a feeling that a not inconsiderable share of the German population wouldn’t know what’s behind those letters, because the acronym has effectively become the word. Should you be wondering what it means in English, it’s attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, better known as ADHD. Here we go, sometimes only an abbreviation will do. No matter if in German, where, as per the Duden definition, words need to have a minimum of 32 letters to qualify for the category long, or in English, where, taking an educated guess, that figure would probably be closer to a modest 15. And with that, I’m leaving you to go back above and count the letters of you-know-what…

Barbara Geier is a London-based freelance writer, translator and communications consultant. She is also the face behind www.germanyiswunderbar.com, a German travel and tourism guide and blog that was set up together with UK travel writer Andrew Eames in 2010.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Discover Germany, Switzerland & Austria.

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