The longest star names I can think of are Zubenelgenubi and Zubeneshanali (Alpha and Beta Librae, from Arabic expressions for “the southern claw” and “the northern claw”). Thirteen letters, or fourteen if you spell the northern one as Zubeneschanali. Perhaps you know of a longer.
Detail from a star map showing the constellation Libra.
We had a visit a few days ago from an architect with an eighteen-letter Basque surname: Olavegogeascoechea. To his credit he didn’t shorten it. I didn’t catch it the first time, but I was able to greet him with it the next time we met. I asked how to analyse it, and learned that “olave” is “smith,” “echea” is “house,” and “-asco” is an ending meaning “much,” though he was unsure where “goge” came from. Perhaps it added up to “smith of a multitude of houses,” which would be appropriate. And he had now yielded to presenting himself as Olave.
There are languages that tend to produce polysyllabic names – Georgian (Dzhugashvili), Sinhalese (Wickramasinghe), and I think I remember seeing in the atlas long names for Laccadive or Andaman islands in the Indian Ocean. There was a silly schoolboy joke: “Constantinople is a long name, how do you spell it?,” the answer being “I T.” I’ll cut this short and paste in a piece on “Long Words” that I once printed in a magazine.
Humuhumuhunukunukuapuaa, a kind of small fish (Hawaiian).
Lummagirnuntashagazaggipadda, a canal, cut by king Eannatum of Lagash in Sumeria about 2855 B.C.
Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogococh, a small village in Anglesey, the island off the north coast of Wales. It means “church [of] Mary [on the] pool [of the] white hazels rather near the swift whirlpool [near the] church [of] Tysilio [of the] red cave.” Until the British railway-system was reduced some years back, there used to be a station at this little place, and the nameboard was reputed to be longer than the platform. But it is usually called “Llanfair P.G.”
Taumatawhakatangihangakoauauatamateapokaiwhenuaakitanatahu, a spot in New Zealand. Amazinglym the same number of letters (58) as Llanfair… It means something like “the hill on which Rangi (Tamatea) sat and played the nose-flute to his beloved.” With Reed’s Lilliput Dictionary, Maori-English and English-Maori (576 pages, two inches high), I have managed to identify some, but not all, of the parts of this word. One of the Rev. Peter Cape’s New Zealand songs is made out of it.
And the champion:
Lepadotemakhoselakhogaleoleipsanodrimupotrimmatosilphiokarabomelitokatakekhumenokikhlepikossupho-phattoperisteralektruonoptokephalliokinkIopeleioIagiiosiraiobaphétraganopterugon. 177, though 9 fewer in Greek because kh and ph are single letters.
This is the Greek for “haggis.” At least, an old Scots teacher translated it that way. Actually, it’s just a humorous word invented by Aristophanes, and consisting of all the ingredients of the haggis – limpet, polecat, coleslaw, asafoetida, scarab-beetle, etcetera. If you happen to be learning Greek, you might enjoy hunting for lepado-, temakho-, and the rest in a dictionary. Each element ends in -o-, except for drim-, kikhl- , perister-, alektruon-, baphê-, and pterugôn.
It’s not hard to say these monster words from memory. Surely many a schoolboy in the high days of classical education used to rattle off Lepadotemakho… for the amusement of his friends or the astonishment of his relatives. Taumatawhaka…, according to Peter Cape, is “easier to sing than to say,” and it’s true. And one can imagine the station-master of Llanfairpwllgwyn… announcing it in a lloud and flluent voice as the London-to-Holyhead passengers peered out of their windows. The only one that, I find, does not slip easily off my tongue is the shortest, the (small!) Hawaiian fish.
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According to the Wikipedia site on official star names, another star in Libra (gamma) has the name of Zubenelhakrabi, which has 14 characters. I had never heard of that one before. Perusing the long list, I was surprised to see the number of seemingly insignificant stars (at least in terms of brightness) for which various countries have submitted name recommendations to the IAU. One example of this that caught my eye is the star HD 45652 in Monoceros, for which Portugal submitted the name “Lusitania”, a region in Iberia which current day Portugal mostly occupies. While scanning the list and seeing that name, of course I thought immediately that it related to the ill-fated ship that was a prime factor in U.S. entry into World War I, but that’s not the justification, thank goodness.
Thanks for drawing attention to that list, which I ought to look at. I imagine there could be an indefinite number of proposed star names, from two main sources: vanity proposal’s, like Portugal’s “Lusitania”; and translations from old Arabic names meaning things like “the left elbow of the shepherd”. Oh, and descriptive names for telescopic stars, such as “La Suprema” (red carbon star Y Canum Venaticorum).
But there is the difference of levek: relatively few names are actually used in ordinary discourse among non-specialist astronomy people, Names such as Sirius are firmly in that class; I think Zubenelgenubi just edges into it, being perhaps about as often used as Alpha Libae, but Zubenelhakrabicertainly does not.
I agree with you that Zubenelgenubi does edge into popular usage. As a kid in the 1970’s watching reruns of “Lost in Space”, I distinctly remember an episode in which a solitary traveler in his spaceship remarked, when looking out of his window to navigate using dead reckoning, “There’s Zubenelgenubi!”. The name just rolls off the tongue. Two other star names that I think are quite mellifluous are Miaplacidus and Zavijava. Betelgeuse must be one of the favorite names of non-astronomers. My least favorite star names are ones such as Acrux, Gacrux, and Atria. The most fun are Dnoces, Navi, and Regor, as well as Sualocin and Rotanev. Who says astronomers / astronauts don’t have a sense of humor?
Tomorrow evening, July 27, the Moon will pay a visit to Zubenelgenubi and Zubenelshamali.
One nice thing about words transliterated from a language with a different alphabet is that you can’t misspell them.
Question: were the two Zubenels originally considered part of Scorpio? I wondered because of the claws.
Yes. They were part of a larfer Arabic constellation.
According to “The Royal Inscriptions of Ancient Mesopotamia, Early Periods Volume 1: Presargonic Period (2700-2350 BC)” (by D R Frayne, University of Toronto Press, 2008), the preferred transliteration now should be Lummangirnuntashakugepada – I’ve expanded the diacritic annotated versions of the “g” => “ng” and “s” => “sh”, incidentally. This translates as “Lumma has been chosen from the ‘Princely Way’ by the pure heart” (p.145). Unfortunately however, this was not the name of a canal, but a piece of land Eanatum had recaptured militarily from the neighbouring city-state of Umma, also known as (the god) Ningirsu’s beloved field, the Gu’edena.
The only new canal recorded as dug by him in his inscriptions (p. 148) was called merely Lummangimdu (“Sweet like Lumma” – note that Lumma was actually Eanatum’s “battle name”, hence its frequent recurrence).
Not wishing to stop on too downbeat a note, perhaps the preferred citation from Eanatum’s reign would be the name he gave to what we often now refer to as the Stele of Vultures, one of the very few pictorial monuments that shows identifiable troops in warfare from this early period in ancient Mesopotamia, and which also has a very lengthy inscription describing in some detail why the battle happened, and to a much lesser extent, what happened during it. The battle was over that “beloved field”, which seems to have a defining event, probably early, in Eanatum’s reign. And the name of the monument? Ningirsuenmenlummanatiipiringedenna, “Ningirsu, the lord, crown of Lumma is the life of the Piring-Edena-Canal” (p. 140).
The chronology for this period is not well established, but as the dates for Frayne’s text suggest, 2855 BC is probably a little too early for Eanatum’s lifetime. His preferred Middle Chronology dating now would be around 2455-2425 BC (the circa thirty-year reign based partly on the unusually large number of his inscriptions that have survived – 19 in Frayne’s text, though the attribution of 19th to him is not certain). Other Chronologies are, however, also available…
Ringo apparently agrees with you about the pronounceability of humuhumunukunukuapaa.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=opFlIu_I9BQ