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Number of Words in a Language

  Tags: Number of words
 Language Learning Forum : Philological Room Post Reply
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berabero89
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 Message 1 of 9
29 August 2013 at 9:59pm | IP Logged 
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?
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tarvos
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 Message 2 of 9
29 August 2013 at 10:33pm | IP Logged 
How do you count words?

Because I can say a word in Ojibwe, but it covers a whole sentence.
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I'm With Stupid
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 Message 3 of 9
29 August 2013 at 10:49pm | IP Logged 
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

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vonPeterhof
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 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:

Wikipedia wrote:
Comparisons of the vocabulary size of English to that of other languages are generally not taken very seriously by linguists and lexicographers. Besides the fact that dictionaries will vary in their policies for including and counting entries, what is meant by a given language and what counts as a word do not have simple definitions. Also, a definition of word that works for one language may not work well in another, with differences in morphology and orthography making cross-linguistic definitions and word-counting difficult, and potentially giving very different results. Linguist Geoffrey K. Pullum has gone so far as to compare concerns over vocabulary size (and the notion that a supposedly larger lexicon leads to "greater richness and precision") to an obsession with penis length.


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Medulin
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 Message 5 of 9
30 August 2013 at 9:41pm | IP Logged 
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

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Aquila123
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 Message 6 of 9
04 September 2013 at 11:52pm | IP Logged 
It is better to count phonems, which are the meaning-carrying items in a language.
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Cabaire
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 Message 7 of 9
05 September 2013 at 6:12am | IP Logged 
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?
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Iversen
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 Message 8 of 9
05 September 2013 at 1:04pm | IP Logged 
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



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