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May 22, 2003

Eskimo Pies Coming to You

The coolest thing that I learned yesterday is that in Canada and Alaska, certain indigenous languages are constructed in such a way that, often enough, whole sentences can consist of one gigantic word. In Greenlandic Eskimo the sentiment, “I should stop drinking,” can be expressed in the word, “Iminngernaveersaartunngortussaavunga.” This almost makes up for the disappointment I felt when I learned that Eskimos don’t really have forty words for snow.

Posted by pogo at May 22, 2003 10:08 AM

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Comments

you know, faulkner showed that entire chapters of a novel can be expressed as a single sentence, but i’m not sure if it’s a good thing.

Posted by: jacob on May 22, 2003 11:33 AM

when i was in high school, a very advanced german speaker told me that the world’s longest curse (to his knowledge) was in german and it went something like, “herrgottkreuzverdampterhimmeldonnerwetternachtmal.” it can be broken down into individual curses (and i may be getting the “nachtmal” part wrong, because i don’t remember what that’s supposed to mean.) i like the idea of attaching words to words until you get the exact, right meaning.

Literally, it means something like Mr God, Christ, damn, heaven thunder weather [which is a very strong curse in itself, and has no English equivalent, or so I’m told] and then the last part, which I don’t recall. strong words!

he also could have been a giant liar, because a. we all know that i am terribly gullible and b. i’ve never met a german person that knows this curse. it’s probably some obscure bavarian thing. at any rate, if i was ever mad enough to use it, more than likely all i would be able to do would be to sputter the word, “fuck” repeatedly.

Posted by: tam on May 22, 2003 1:50 PM

see if you can find the CD by nuuk posse… they’re from greenland and rap in greenlandic, which is an agglutinative language. 33 degrees used to have it, but it’s not there anymore.

Posted by: chris on May 22, 2003 3:20 PM

“agglutinative?” is that what they put in protein 2000?

Posted by: jacob on June 3, 2003 11:52 PM