long words

“Although the salamanders found it relatively easy to learn foreign languages and were keen to do so there were found to be some peculiar difficulties, partly to do with adapting their speech organs to human language and partly to do with mainly psychological reasons; they had difficulty, for instance, in pronouncing long words with many syllables and would try to reduce them to a single syllable which they would bark out in a rather nasal voice; they would say L instead of R and lisp on their sibilants; they would leave off grammatical endings, they never did learn to distinguish between 'I' and 'we' and the question of whether a noun was masculine or feminine was matter of complete indifference for them (this may have been manifestation of their indifference to sex outside the breeding season).”

The War with the Newts