Looong words

A Dutch pharmaceutical company has developed a vaccine against the avian flu and it is now to be tried on humans in Finland and there have been ads in the newspapers seeking volunteers for the trial in two of the biggest cities. The vaccine in the trial is said to be “dead” but it still might have some beneficial effects with making the participants in the trial immune to the avian flu.

Anyway, Finland is a country that loves long words and as there are no prepositions to describe how things are done are by attaching a suffix to the end of the word to express for instance; with, by, at, out of, below, on top of are.

In the Finnish language the words can become very extensive. Maybe there are more languages that have even longer words that I am not aware of, but the Welsh language also has a great deal of long words with massive lengths of words attached to each other to express names of places for instance. The Finnish language also offers great opportunities to form log words and the longest word in use is: lentokonesuihkuturbiinimoottoriapumekaanikko with 44 letters if I have not counted them wrongly. That would mean about “assisting mechanic of airplane jet motor turbines”.

The longest palindrome in the world, that is a word that is exactly the same read from both ways also is a Finnish word, saippuankivikauppias, which would translate to about “soap stone salesman” or woman as the word does not express the sex of the person selling the soap stones. I wonder what soap stones are…

Anyway, the longest name of a place ai have found so far in Finland is Kristiinankaupunki with its’ 18 letters , a beautiful place to visit on the coast of Ostro-Botnia if you ever are in Finland.