Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2022 May 21

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May 21

How many letters in a row can a German word have?

Inspired by seeing the word Kipppunkt. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 02:56, 21 May 2022 (UTC)

Do you mean letters in general (i.e. longest word), or consonant letters, or identical letters? AnonMoos (talk) 03:17, 21 May 2022 (UTC)

The example has 3 p's in a row. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 03:20, 21 May 2022 (UTC)

I noticed that, but it still did not entirely clarify his question. AnonMoos (talk) 03:55, 21 May 2022 (UTC)

Identical letters. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 03:30, 21 May 2022 (UTC)

German words do not ordinarily begin with double letters or end with triple letters, so 3 would seem to be the limit in ordinary cases. AnonMoos (talk) 03:55, 21 May 2022 (UTC)

Are there languages with more? Besides things like yessss!, zzzz's and mmmm, donuts. Llanfair...gogoch has llll somewhere but ll is a letter in Welsh. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 04:41, 21 May 2022 (UTC)

From Luxembourgish: wikt:zweeeeëg. —Amble (talk) 04:59, 21 May 2022 (UTC)

And from Manx: wikt:eeee. —Mahāgaja · talk 06:35, 21 May 2022 (UTC)

There’s a genus of beetles called Aaaaba. —Amble (talk) 20:23, 21 May 2022 (UTC)

Aaaaba reminds me of c. 1994 editions of the Manhattan white pages. Millions of mostly real people (since the yellow physical phone book is for business) preceded by stuff like AAAAAAAAAAAA Plumbers. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 03:33, 22 May 2022 (UTC)

So Aaaaba is called Aaaaba because Aaaba was taken. Why is Aaaba called Aaaba? (There isn't any Aaba, I checked.)  Card Zero  (talk) 11:06, 22 May 2022 (UTC)

Aaba and Aba exist but might not be taxons. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 20:02, 22 May 2022 (UTC)

Triple consonants are a recent phenomenon in German, legalised by the German orthography reform of 1996. —Kusma (talk) 06:02, 21 May 2022 (UTC)

Even before 1996, triple consonants were allowed in compounds where the second letter of the second word was a consonant, e.g. Kunststoffflasche. The orthography reform now also allows triple consonants in cases where the second letter of the second word is a vowel, e.g. Schifffahrt (formerly Schiffahrt). If an eel were found in the town of Aderklaa, I suppose it could be called an Aderklaaaal, though I suspect people would prefer to write that with a hyphen. In Welsh, sequences like dd, ff, and ll are actually considered single letters, so even though bleiddddyn 'werewolf' looks like it has 4 D's in a row to English speakers, as far as Welsh speakers are concerned, it has 2 DD's in a row. Nevertheless, that too is actually normally written with a hyphen: bleidd-ddyn. —Mahāgaja · talk 06:35, 21 May 2022 (UTC)

Oh yeah, I forgot about the old exception. Eels make great words: The Aa is a tiny river, but an eel found in it could be called Aaaal. —Kusma (talk) 08:42, 21 May 2022 (UTC)

Would an Afrikaaaal speak Afrikaans? Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 20:13, 22 May 2022 (UTC)

As far as I can tell, the ‹ë› in Luxembourgish is considered a separate letter from ‹e›, so zweeeeëg only has 4 identical letters in a row, and I'm yet to see one with 5. Meanwhile Manx eeee remains the longest row of identical letters I've seen that is not formed by compounding two stems, now matched by the made-up word Aaaaba. --Theurgist (talk) 13:22, 22 May 2022 (UTC)

As in the paaaalindrome "Aaaaba was I ere I saw Abaaaa. Clarityfiend (talk) 06:29, 23 May 2022 (UTC)