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by dividedbyzero 1364 days ago
I think that's fine, every word carries actual information, though not speaking German will render the last two words useless and not being well versed in German wines will do the same to a few words at the start, so perhaps the only universally understood tokens are 2001 and Riesling (and perhaps not even Riesling?)

However, there are lots of laws called things like Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz and I don't know which level of German language proficiency you need to be able to read that fluently, but probably one of the higher ones. Even native speakers sometimes struggle with lengthy concatenations and I feel that German legalese is a whole different level of crazy. So perhaps the crown for the most opaque naming scheme should go to the German Bundestag?

1 comments

That compound word is obviously never used in conversation so I don't think proficiency factors into it. I doubt it's frequently spelled out, even in legalese. This is no different from how Americans use catchy acronyms for new laws so they don't have to spell them out in full (PATRIOT Act being a more blatant backronym example).
>That compound word is obviously never used in conversation so I don't think proficiency factors into it.

It is in discussions about how the duties on surveilling the labelling beef on packaging are distributed (which is what this law was about). The official abbreviation was RflEttÜAÜG ...