this post was submitted on 25 Oct 2025
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The really long words are nouns, and commands are verbs: calm.
It's only nouns ? can german not agglutinate several verbs into one super-verb to express an action made up of many components or steps ?
It certainly isn't just nouns, you do have classics like "zusammensetzen" (put together) and "verschlimmbessern" (to make something worse, despite attempting to improve it).
But yeah, I'm having a hard time coming up with a particularly long composite verb that still makes sense.
Usually, it's one word + a normal verb to kind of change the meaning of the verb, like "tanzen" means "to dance", and "seiltanzen" means "to walk on a tightrope" (literally: "to rope-dance").
And while you could theoretically extend it, e.g. as "hochseiltanzen" ("Hochseil" is a tightrope that's high above the ground; literally "high-rope"), we just say "auf dem Hochseil tanzen" instead ("to dance on the high-rope").
Or I guess, you'd specify that it's a Hochseil once and then say "seiltanzen" in the following sentences.
That's great, I enjoyed this little dive very much. Thank you. What if you were to use hochseiltanzen, would it sound out of place ?
Yeah, people would understand it, but would look at you funny.
Partially, because they're just not used to it. "Hochseil" and "seiltanzen" are composite words, but are also just used commonly, so they have made it into the dictionary as separate entries. Meanwhile, "hochseiltanzen" is merely a neologism at this point.
But it does also just sound like you're really shoehorning in that you're specifically walking on a high wire. Like you're just bragging about it.
What's also kind of funny, is that we have nominalization in German as well, so where a verb (or other word) is used as a noun, and using "das Hochseiltanzen" as a noun does not sound out of place to me. In fact, when I throw "hochseiltanzen" into a search engine, I get four results, all of which use it as a noun and like it's a completely normal word that does not need explaining.
It can’t. German can only make compound nouns and even then it usually can’t combine multiple concepts. Instead, everything except the last component is there to specify what the last component is about.
Source: am German
I see, every qualifier goes first and then the noun. Seems pretty intuitive
no, thats not how composits work. Sure there are composite-verbs but they are rather limited (unlike composite-nouns which can become extremely long)
Ok I see, thanks
So I've heard. There probably are other languages that could work. ChatGPT says polysynthetic languages like Inuktitut, Mohawk, and Chukchi do. I don't have time to double check, but I'm sure if ChatGPT's wrong there are other examples where it's true.
Unfortunately, in 2025 they closed the loophole. You only can use the listed commands. And I notice the loophole didn't work for sending in either version of 5e (or in 3.5). It specifies a "short" message of 25 words or less, so while you could compress an arbitrarily long message into a single word (though possibly having to use some Morse code-type deal) it wouldn't help because it wouldn't be a "short" message.
Fortunately 2024 5e isn't real and can't hurt you.
Hm, I don't like to rely on LLMs to look up definitions to be honest. Thanks for your insight