12/22/2023 0 Comments Esse in english![]() They use a smallish number of three-letter roots to coin huge numbers of words. Meanwhile, this disadvantages the Semitic languages like Arabic and Hebrew. But in the domain of morphemes we also have to include "un-" as a morpheme, and "methyl-" and many other things that traditionalists wouldn't include under "words", and it's not at all clear English has the largest number of them either. What about a claim like "English has more basic words" or "word roots" or some such? Now we're in the territory of what linguists call "morphemes", usable roots or pieces of words. We'd also have to throw out foreign-derived compounds like "television" and "geography". If we do that, we have to throw out English compounds, too no "shoelace", "windowsill", "phrasebook", "boatswain" and so on. And no fair disallowing Turkish and German's flexible word-coinage. So Turkish and German and a host of others like them have "more words" than English. We write it without spaces, pronounce it in one breath in speaking, it can't be interrupted with digressions, and so forth. "Were you one of those people whom we could not make into a Czechoslovak?" translates as one word in Turkish. It not only crams words together but does so in ways that make whole, meaningful sentences. This is even truer for Turkish, mentioned in that posting above. There's no reason to say "it's incredible how the Germans have a word for 'leave-taking performance'," because to create such words ad hoc is banal in German. Just one quick glance at the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung's home-page finds Abschiedsvorstellung("leave-taking performance", about South Africa putting on a display for the departing French in the World Cup), Weltmarktführer ("world market leader"), Stromtarifrechner("electricity bill calculator") and so on. Given the possibilities for compounds, German would quickly outstrip English, with new legitimate German "words", which Germans would accept without blinking, coined every day. Are compounds new words? Is the German Unabhängigkeitserkl ä rung, "declaration of independence", one word? It's certainly written that way in German. German is obvious it is a trifle to coin a new compound word for a new situation, as mentioned here. Moreover, many languages habitually build long words from short ones. So whether we count inflected forms will have a huge influence on final counts. The Spanish verb has dozens of forms- estoy, estás, está, "I am," "you are," "he is" and so on. Some languages inflect much more than English. "Run" the verb and "run" the noun: one or two? What about "run" as in the long run of a play on Broadway? Different enough from a jog around the park for its own entry? Different enough from a run in cricket? Do we count compounds? Is "home run" one word or two? Are the names of new chemical compounds, which could virtually infinite, words? What role does mere orthographic convention play? Is "home run" two words, but "homerun" (as it's often written) one? What sense does that make? These may seem to be quibbles, but discussing other languages, they become fundamental. Do we count "run", "runs" and "ran" as separate? The next problem is multiple meanings. The comparison simply can't be made in any agreed apples-to-apples way. It's not that another language has more words. For the really short version, though, the answer is "Sorry, Mr Fry." English is certainly rich in vocabulary, but this claim is nearly always made by enthusiastic lovers of English who don't really know how the many varieties of language beyond English work. For the summary version, skip to the end. Is that true, a friend e-mails me to ask? Rather as China is to the rest of the world in population, English is in the population of its words. STEPHEN FRY, whom I always enjoy, makes a claim (at about 6:10 of the video)
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