Can it be…the most beautiful word in the world?..

Via Berlin Metroblogging:

" A competition entitled "The most beautiful ABC of the world" ("Das schönste ABC der Welt") which was held in Berlin awarded the Turkish "yakamoz" the title, the most beautiful word of the world. The jury selected it from almost 2500 words.

"Yakamoz" means "the reflection of the moon in water". The Chinese word "hu lu" (呼噜, to snore) came in second. The African word "Volongoto" (Baganda tribe), which means messy or chaotic, was voted third place. According to the jury, they selected "yakamoz" over the others because in Turkish one is able to express in a single word, what can only be expressed in other languages using multiple nouns. "

So - is the victory of "yakamoz" a kind of homage to the increasing inflow of northbound southern immigrants? And linguistically, do the parts of the word actually carry all those separate meanings making up the whole constellation, or the associations with reflections, water and moon are called in mind by social conventions?

Like you know, Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious! (super- "above," cali- "beauty," fragillistic- "delicate," expeali- "to atone," and docious- "educable," -> "Atoning for educatability through delicate beauty.")

At a Linguistics conference one professor said that if a culture really needs to have a name for a notion, this name will be created. An example he gave was: if a culture considers relevant to name an act of a black middle-aged man crawling over a fence at midnight (with any of the semantic constituents relevant enough to differentiate this act from any other similar, though specifically out-standing ones, - then a word will be born. I forgot if he actually gave a possible example of such a hypothetic lexical unit. I wonder what it might be...

So unless a culture needs not such a word, descriptive attributes will suffice. Another curious example of this idea is that not many languages have a single word for the back of the knee... whatever it is called.

And, finally, what made "hu lu" sound beautiful? I am sure they took into consideration all the allusions and connotations of the word's semantics. Why, Russian speakers will agree with me, not "hu li" (狐狸, fox), - talking about associations and stuff? Makes me wanna dig into the depths of the Chinese semantics with doubled effort.

Um diddle diddle diddle um diddle ay!

Russian inside: Hardly the most beautiful semantics but amazing linguistic coincidences. Мир-труд-мяч практически :)