As an agglutinative language, Turkish allows the construction of words by adding many suffixes to a word stem. The longest word in the Turkish language used in a text is () which has 70 letters. It is derived from the noun () and means . It was used in a contrived story designed to use this word.
Not considering suffixes, the longest Turkish dictionary words have 20 letters: (the biological family Motacillidae), () and (). In comparison, the word has 12 letters, so it should be possible to use various other suffixes to make an even longer word from these ones. Therefore, can be added as a suffix to any meaningful Turkish noun. For example, is another possible longest meaningful word in Turkish with 81 letters, which means .
There is no principled grammatical reason for not being able to make a Turkish word indefinitely long, as there are suffixes that can act recursively on a word stem. In practice, however, such words would become unintelligible after a few cycles of recursion.
Grammar
Turkish grammar is highly agglutinative, enabling the construction of words by stringing together various morphemes. It is theoretically possible for some words to be inflected an infinite number of times because certain suffixes generate words of the same type as the stem word, such that the new word can be modified again with the same suffix(es). An example for such a recursive pattern is:Çöltekin Ç., A Freely Available Morphological Analyzer for Turkish in Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC2010), Valletta, Malta, May 2010. ev-de-ki-nin-ki-ler-de-ki . . . house-LOC-REL-POS3s-REL-PLU-LOC-REL . . ... the one of the one in the one at the house.
Thus, case and possessive suffixes interspersed with the suffix can be added indefinitely to a noun, although in practice this would not be observed more than a few times.
The causative morpheme can also be used recursively to generate indefinitely long words that are grammatically valid. This morpheme shows quite some irregularity, but its regular form is , where is either (after a voiceless consonant) or (otherwise), and is one of , , or (depending on vowel harmony). Turkish Literal gloss Natural gloss they cooked it they caused it to be cooked they had it cooked they caused it to be caused to be cooked they had someone have it cooked they caused it to be caused to be caused to be cooked they had someone have someone have it cooked they caused it to be caused to be caused to be caused to be cooked they had someone have someone have someone have it cooked Multiple uses of this suffix are rare, but there is no theoretical limit.
History
The tongue twister is often said to be the longest word in Turkish, despite in written form appearing to be two separate words. This is because the question particle is by convention separated from the verb, despite being considered part of it. It means A slight modification, , (43 letters; ) is, however, even longer and, as it contains no question particle, it is written contiguously.
After the dissolution of Czechoslovakia, (53 letters) was often said to be the longest word in Turkish. It means . After the publication of longer words in popular media, it lost its popularity.
The word (70 letters) was proposed by Köksal Karakuş as the longest word in Turkish. Its use is illustrated by the following situation:
We are in a teachers' training school that has evil purposes. The teachers who are being educated in that school are being taught how to make unsuccessful ones from students. So, one by one, teachers are being educated as makers of unsuccessful ones. However, one of those teachers refuses to be maker-of-unsuccessful-ones, in other words, to be made a maker-of-unsuccessful-ones; he talks about and criticizes the school's stand on the issue. The headmaster who thinks every teacher can be made easily into a maker-of-unsuccessful-ones gets angry. He invites the teacher to his room and says:"You are talking as if you were one of those we can not easily turn into a maker-of-unsuccessful-ones, right?"
Word formation
Turkish EnglishSuccessfulSuccess (successfulness)Unsuccessful (without success')(To) become unsuccessful(To) make one unsuccessfulMaker of unsuccessful ones(To) become a maker of unsuccessful ones(To) make one a maker of unsuccessful ones(To) easily make one a maker of unsuccessful ones(To) be able to make one easily a maker of unsuccessful onesNot (to) be able to make one easily a maker of unsuccessful ones(S/he who) will not be able to make one easily a maker of unsuccessful onesThose who will not be able to make one easily a maker of unsuccessful onesThose who we will not be able to make easily a maker of unsuccessful onesFrom those whom we will not be able to easily make a maker of unsuccessful ones(S/he) happens to be have been from among those whom we will not be able to easily make a maker of unsuccessful onesYou happen to have been from among those whom we will not be able to easily make a maker of unsuccessful onesAs though you happen to have been from among those whom we will not be able to easily make a maker of unsuccessful ones
See also Agglutination Longest word in English Longest word in French Longest word in Romanian Longest word in Spanish Longest words
References