From Gulliver's Travels by J. Swift "Brobdingnagian" and "Lilliputian" are (of course) words for very large and very small respectively.

Does anyone care to take a guess at what the appropriate adjectival forms for "Houyhnhnm" and "Laputa" might be?

In case your memory needs to be jogged, Houyhnhnm is the land of the loathsome yahoos ruled by a race of horses endowed with superior powers of reasoning.

Laputa is the floating island where the inhabitants are maniacally devoted to a life of fantastically impractical projects for the advancement of speculative knowledge.

I would go with "Houyhnhnmous wisdom" and "Laputan absurdity" myself. Maybe "Laputanesque".

What do you think?

I think Houyhnhnm likens to whinny. Dunno about t'other. Oh--hmm--here:
"Lindalino"
The short (three-paragraph) story in Part III telling of the rebellion of the surface city of Lindalino against the flying island of Laputa was an obvious allegory to the affair of The Drapier's Letters, of which Swift was (justifiably) proud. Lindalino was Dublin (Lin-da-lin = Double-lin = Dublin) and the impositions of Laputa represented the British imposition of Wood's poor-quality currency. As an Irish publisher, Faulkner had felt unable to include the passage even 10 years after the events allegorised, so he omitted it. Modern editions derive from the Faulkner edition with the inclusion of this 1899 addendum.
hidden meanings

Houyhnhnmous
But how would you pronounce that? I can't come up with anything that makes sense. There're too many consonants...just like with Cymraeg (the language of Wales)

Simple - it sounds just like the tree whose leaves the koala eats! Y'know, the one with the "true name."

Better aim more carefully - ya wanna miss?

Wrong again. Not the Koala's tree; that's the eucalyptus. Oh well, I got the Eu- part right, anyway. The one I was thinking of has a large number of species, trees and ground cover and other things, and in my back yard grows much too much like a weed to have such a legitimate pedigree.

You can listen to the pronunciation of Houyhnhnm here.

thanks, HL. definitely horse-ish.

Quote:

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You can listen to the pronunciation of Houyhnhnm here.

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That's interesting. Whenever I've read the word I've always assumed that the pronunciation is WHEE-n'm. That sounds more like a horse to me. But then I grew up listening to Mr. Ed, so go figure.