Member Joh… Posted March 4, 2008 Share Posted March 4, 2008 Aiaia Sometimes spelled as Aeaea. The name of Circe's island in Homer's Odyssey. A lot of words in the 1969 Marshallese orthography looked really weird -- actually, they first looked like encoding errors to this non-reader -- because the ampersand was used as a vowel: Yi'yaqey y&q! Yij yetal gan Hay&l&gļapļap. (Hello! I'm going to Ailinglaplap.) Actually, 'Ailinglaplap' is a pretty fun word even without the ampersands. In a more recent orthographic reform the ampersand was replaced by ę, presumably under the slogan 'Ogoneks. Not just for Poles.' Link to comment
Member Joh… Posted March 4, 2008 Share Posted March 4, 2008 Oceans of Lotions. There was a store with this name. Presumably they went out of business as a casualty of the new airline security cabin luggage restrictions that the Guardian diary referred to as 'The War on Hand-Cream'. Link to comment
Member Hir… Posted March 4, 2008 Share Posted March 4, 2008 supercalafragilisticexpialadotious Link to comment
Member Tho… Posted March 5, 2008 Share Posted March 5, 2008 parterretrap or: parterreserretrap Link to comment
Member Ois… Posted March 5, 2008 Share Posted March 5, 2008 «But seriously, I don’t recall seeing capital letters in the middle of words when I was growing up in Wales, but I may have simply missed this aspect of the orthography. Can you give me some examples, Patricia?» I think she might possibly be mixing up one Celtic language with another (well, two others): in both Irish and Scottish, when initial consonants are eclipsed, only the original consonant is capitalised, not the eclipsing consonant. So, for example, bróg ‘shoe’, dlí ‘law’, grá ‘love’, poll ‘hole’, teach ‘house’, and cill ‘church’, if eclipsed and capitalised, would be written thus: a mBróga ‘their shoes’a nDlíthe ‘their laws’i nGrá ‘in love’i bPoll ‘in a hole’i dTigh ‘in(side) a house’i gCill ‘in a church’ Even if written in all-caps, it should still be A mBRÓGA, A nDLÍTHE, &c. I can’t think of any instance in Welsh where a similar situation would arise, either. Eclipses (or soft lenitions, or whatever you call them in Welsh—Welsh initial mutations confuse me a bit) are, to my knowledge, capitalised normally in Welsh, on the rare occasion that they result in multiple letters. I have a song called Yng Ngolau Ddydd, for instance; not Yng nGolau Ddydd. Link to comment
Member eli… Posted March 5, 2008 Share Posted March 5, 2008 redivider WAVY LAVA Oshkosh Link to comment
Member Tim… Posted March 5, 2008 Share Posted March 5, 2008 in Swedish: lyxvillor in German: Schneeeule, Sauerstoffflasche, Passstraße, Schifffahrt, Betttuch, Schritttempo, Kussszene, Bassstimme, Fetttropfen, Teeei, Kohlenstofffaser, Eisschnelllauf, Fußballländerspiel, Klapppult, Geschirrreiniger, Essstäbchen Link to comment
Member pat… Posted March 5, 2008 Share Posted March 5, 2008 It might have been Gaelic, not Welsh, where I saw those words with caps in the middle. Also Turkish always looks like anagrams to me. Link to comment
Member pau… Posted March 5, 2008 Share Posted March 5, 2008 lyxvillor this one must be somewhat famous as Gerard Unger has petitioned it to be removed from the Swedish language as it wrecks any attempt at typeface fitting with all those diagonals being followed immediately by three straight stroked letters. Link to comment
Member pat… Posted March 5, 2008 Share Posted March 5, 2008 A turkish poem. To my western eyes, this language looks soooo strange. Like the Scrabble board before you have started putting the letters into words. Ben giderim adım kalır Dostlar beni hatırlasın Düğün olur bayram gelir Dostlar beni hatırlasın Can kafeste durmaz uçar Dünya bir han konan Ay dolanır yıllar geçer Dostlar beni hatırlasın Can bedenden ayrılacak Tütmez baca yanmaz ocak Selam olsun kucak kucak Dostlar beni hatırlasın Açar solar türlü çiçek Kimler gülmüş kim gülecek Murat yalan ölüm gerçekh Dostlar beni hatırlasın Gün ikindi akşam olur Gör ki başa neler gelir Veysel gider adı kalır Dostlar beni hatırlasın Link to comment
Member Hal… Posted March 5, 2008 Share Posted March 5, 2008 Oceans of Lotions is the best!! Hot Pants & Coelacanths Link to comment
Member tea… Posted March 5, 2008 Share Posted March 5, 2008 sexes I like the x in the middle and the s as bookends. I want to see the last e and s as a mirror image of the first though. Link to comment
Member Tho… Posted March 5, 2008 Share Posted March 5, 2008 Yes palindromes are nice, I already gave 2 Dutch ones. What about a palindrome in a phrase like: "Live not on evil." Or a very long one from an old Donald Duck magazine (in Dutch): "Koos Eekfeen keek door 't rood kerkraam maar krek door 't rood keek neef Kees ook." :) Link to comment
Member Tim… Posted March 5, 2008 Share Posted March 5, 2008 lyxvillor this one must be somewhat famous as Gerard Unger has petitioned it to be removed from the Swedish language as it wrecks any attempt at typeface fitting with all those diagonals being followed immediately by three straight stroked letters. Yes, indeed it is. What makes it even worse is the combination "ill" that follows, which tends to be relatively compact. Link to comment
Member dez… Posted March 5, 2008 Share Posted March 5, 2008 Actually, Mili should chime in with all those Finnish words with a bazillion double umlauted glyphs. I also hate strings of i with diacritics all bashed together. I don't know what real words would have such things though and hope they are rare. ChrisL Link to comment
Member Kri… Posted March 5, 2008 Share Posted March 5, 2008 Patty, that's enough Scrabulous for you! Link to comment
Member Joh… Posted March 5, 2008 Share Posted March 5, 2008 Great palindrome: T Eliot, top bard, notes putrid tang emanating, is sad. I'd assign it a name: gnat dirt upset on drab pot toilet. Link to comment
Member Jon… Posted March 5, 2008 Share Posted March 5, 2008 Pizza. I think it's fascinating that that is one of the first words that children learn to recognize. Link to comment
Member Blu… Posted March 5, 2008 Share Posted March 5, 2008 I did a logo once for a company called Sahara and loved playing with the type. I think Honolulu is fun to type and say. And I went to High School in Tullahoma, Tennessee. All are places. It seems that places have more funky fun names than other things. Link to comment
Member Ois… Posted March 5, 2008 Share Posted March 5, 2008 «in German: Schneeeule, Sauerstoffflasche, Passstraße, Schifffahrt, Betttuch, Schritttempo, Kussszene, Bassstimme, Fetttropfen, Teeei, Kohlenstofffaser, Eisschnelllauf, Fußballländerspiel, Klapppult, Geschirrreiniger, Essstäbchen» My German is quite bad, so I might well be wrong, but hasn’t the new(est) spelling reform done away with all those (except Schneeeule and Teeei)? I thought I’d read somewhere that in the new orthography, triple consonants were always reduced to double consonants. There is of course always the lovely Welsh town of Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch, which, quite apart from being ridiculously long, contains -(b)wllllan- with no less than four l’s in a row. And then goes on to end in -ogogogoch, which, in combo-Scandinavian, would mean ‘andandandand’. Cauaiauaia (place in Angola) looks odd, too. Link to comment
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