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Number of Words in a Language | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Philological Room |  | |
| berabero89 Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 4628 days ago 101 posts - 137 votes  Speaks: English, Amharic* Studies: Spanish, Japanese, French | Message 1 of 9 29 August 2013 at 9:59pm | IP Logged | ||
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I read on this forum that Swahili had less words than other languages, and that got me
thinking: how much variation is there between the number of words needed to speak different languages? For example, to get to a solid B2 level, would one need more or less words depending on the language? There is, of course, the issue of languages that do not have the vocabulary for certain "advanced" things--cars, television, etc, but those languages tend to borrow those words from other languages and "assimilate" them anyway. If there are any languages that have a very high or very low number of words needed to get to an upper-intermediate (B2) or a lower-advanced (C1) level, what do you believe to be the reason for the differences? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4693 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 2 of 9 29 August 2013 at 10:33pm | IP Logged | ||
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How do you count words?
Because I can say a word in Ojibwe, but it covers a whole sentence. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| I'm With Stupid Senior Member Vietnam Joined 4159 days ago 165 posts - 349 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Vietnamese | Message 3 of 9 29 August 2013 at 10:49pm | IP Logged | ||
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I think number of words isn't massively useful. Take phrasal verbs in English, for example. You can know the meaning of "work" and the meaning of "out" without knowing that "work out" can mean exercise, solve or calculate. I suspect the languages with a seemingly small number of individual words have a large number of these compound words. Vietnamese certainly does. Anything more complex than pretty basic vocab items is usually a multi-word item made up of the simpler words. Edited by I'm With Stupid on 29 August 2013 at 10:50pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| vonPeterhof Tetraglot Senior Member Russian FederationRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4758 days ago 715 posts - 1527 votes Speaks: Russian*, EnglishC2, Japanese, German Studies: Kazakh, Korean, Norwegian, Turkish | Message 4 of 9 30 August 2013 at 6:27am | IP Logged | ||
Here's my favourite response to claims of English (or sometimes another language) having the world's largest vocabulary. I think it might also be relevant to your questions:
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| Medulin Tetraglot Senior Member Croatia Joined 4654 days ago 1199 posts - 2192 votes Speaks: Croatian*, English, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Norwegian, Hindi, Nepali | Message 5 of 9 30 August 2013 at 9:41pm | IP Logged | ||
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Some languages (like Vietnamese ) don't have a concept of what a word is so this issue is very relative, this was also a ''problem'' in Chinese before the 20century. Now, 普通話 for example is thought of as a single word pǔtōnghuà, and not as a three word expression (pǔ tōng huà). Vietnamese although Romanized, still has the old Chinese way of writing in its core, one character = one syllable = one word.
Until 10 years ago, ice cream was written as a single word in British English: ice-cream, now it's written as ice cream. Should ''ice cream'' still be considered a word or ''ice-cream'' by dropping the hyphen ceased to be a word!? In Indo-European languages, joined writing of compounds (as in German) would skew the number of words in their favor, so German '' Geschwindigkeitsbegrenzung'' would count as a single word but English ''speed limit'' would not. It would be better to count the number of adjectives (but then again some languages like Dravidian languages have very few adjectives, normally other words are used instead, compare California dreaming (noun+noun) vs Californian dreaming (adjective+noun). Overall, it's very difficult to compare languages. I have a book called ''An English dictionary of the Tamil verb'' (a great book by the way) which is a very good example of this. More often than not, simple one word English verbs correspond to complex expressions (including relative clauses or even whole sentences) in Tamil. The opposite is also true. Edited by Medulin on 30 August 2013 at 10:01pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Aquila123 Tetraglot Senior Member Norway mydeltapi.com Joined 5292 days ago 201 posts - 262 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English, Italian, Spanish Studies: Finnish, Russian | Message 6 of 9 04 September 2013 at 11:52pm | IP Logged | ||
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It is better to count phonems, which are the meaning-carrying items in a language.
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| Cabaire Senior Member Germany Joined 5585 days ago 725 posts - 1352 votes | Message 7 of 9 05 September 2013 at 6:12am | IP Logged | ||
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Phonemes do not say much about the treasure of words in a language. English has less than fifty. Extreme numbers in languages are 11 and 141.
Maybe you meant counting the morphemes? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6689 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 8 of 9 05 September 2013 at 1:04pm | IP Logged | ||
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I have personally had to consider the differences between languages when I have done my word counts, but to some astonishment also for myself the numbers I come up with across languages have roughly been comparable, even though some languages are more isolating than others (cfr. English versus German). The reason is that I have taken a certain size of dictionary as my standard, and for some reason there is roughly the same amount of bold-faced items in an English dictionary as in a German one. But in English many of those are word combinations, while they would tend to be long words composed of several elements in German.
The one thing that can disturb this bold and simple strategy is that all good dictionaries also contain idioms and examples. There isn't any clear demarcation line between fixed word combinations which can be equated with single words and idioms or fixed expressions, so to compensate for this inevitable fuzzyness I introduced in my last round a category for 'expressions' so that all items in my dictionaries in principle should end up somewhere instead of just being passed over. And I also introduced a tripartite evaluation system with "known", "guessable" and "unknown". The result was that it became more cumbersome to count words, and therefore I just made calculations for a subset of my languages. And noticed with glee that the numbers I achieved with a few minor exceptions had a close correlation with my own subjective estimation of my level in those languages. But having realized that, it also became much less relevant to obtain exact numbers for my remaining languages. As for the total number of words in different languages it should be logical that languages spoken by many people in vastly different societies and used for vastly different purposes including science and technology are liable to possess more words than languages spoken by small isolated populations with limited resources (or mainly by second language learners like Esperanto). Actually I'm more worried about the weaknesses in the scientific and technical spheres in languages which aren't used for communication about such subjects than I am about the concrete figures. But the total number of words in any language will almost certainly be higher than the number any single individual can learn during his or her lifetime. There is one factor more we should consider. 'Big' old languages like English or French or German and Spanish are blessed with enormous dictionaries, which once upon a time were compiled by towering giants with an incredible work capacity - like Samuel Johnson (and Blackadder) in England, Littré in France and Bratli in Denmark - the latter published a Spanish-Danish dictionary with a quarter of a million words, and I own this book, but it is so heavy that I never use it (you can get too much of a good thing). And their less industrious successsors of today can use computers to read through myriads of pages to collect words and build wordlists automatically from written sources. But what about languages like Swahili or - even worse - tribal languages? Their vocabularies has typically been collected by outsiders with limited time and sometimes other agendas (like missionaries, who just needed enough words to translate the Bible). It is hard to believe that they have hit upon all words in the languages they study, especially if they have studied languages without a written tradition. The total numbers given for such languages are almost certainly much too low. Edited by Iversen on 05 September 2013 at 1:29pm 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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