Holger Schurig on Nostr: This long word of mine is of course a joke. It has a true root: very often ...

This long word of mine is of course a joke. It has a true root: very often bureaucratic language uses such composita. https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donaudampfschiffahrtsgesellschaftskapit%C3%A4n was actual in use from 1829 to 1991 in Austria. Which oftentimes seem a tad more bureaucratic than Germany.

So in official documents this word really existed (river danube steam ship company capt'n).

And then people used that base and enlarged it arbitrarily, like I. Adding things like "officer candidate school teachers room" and whatever else comes to mind.

Now, our brains have been trained on this and we understand it quite easily. In written form, and in spoken form due to rhythm. I'm unsure how good test-to-speech software would work on them. But composita with more than 3 nouns are extremely unlikely anyway.

For you it might not seem difficult. But English e.g. had also difficulties you don't recognize, but non-native speakers do, For example the highly irregular working of sounds, or speaking of similarly written letter combinations. That actually made English text-to-speech suck for quite some time. Example: say "same" and notice how you say the ending sound. Now we add two letters at the beginning and say "sesame". And suddenly the ending sound is completely different. English is full of such irregular things.

LLMs helped than tremendously, e. the. try the Python project piper.

Would these sound-words exist in German, we would write "saim" and "sessamih". Because we have a quite strict translation from letters to sounds and vica verca.

So if we see a letter sequence, we can always speak the word just because of the sequence, without prior knowledge of "How do I say XXX" like in English.

For this reason "Weltschmertz" is utterly wrong. When we say Schmerz, where is no explosive t-sound before the z-sound. There are a few words with a t-and before the z-sound, and exactly then we write a t, like in "Wetzstein".

And so if someone writes "Weltschmertz" or even "weltschmertz" then (s)he clearly communicated "I want to appear clever, but really I have no clue". In this case it was the Monty Python texter trying to be more witty than good :-)