Languages with larger vocabularies (General discussion) Language Learning Forum

Languages with larger vocabularies
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Language Learning Forum : General discussion

14 messages over 2 pages: 1 2

Serpent
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Message 9 of 14

29 July 2012 at 5:25am | IP Logged

mikonai wrote:

I doubt the actual knowledge of a language makes me perceive the world any different, unless you consider what else I learned while I was learning the language.

If you learn a distinction that doesn't exist in your native language, it'll always be there. Provided it's important enough, you'll be thinking of it whenever you meet the phenomenon in real life. Or whenever you want to think of a specific part of the distinction, you'll be thinking in your L2.

Or one more way to put it: when you want to classify something more precisely than your native language allows, you'll be using L2. The best example is the use of Latin terms in science but it's not limited to that.

Edited by Serpent on 29 July 2012 at 5:32am
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Hekje
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Message 10 of 14

29 July 2012 at 6:47am | IP Logged

I don't know if it's that straightforward. These are my general thoughts, I suppose.

Different languages develop different sets of specialized vocabulary in order to
distinguish with high granularity between the things that are most important to them.
Were I to try to learn Navajo, I might be initially disappointed because they don't
have all the synonyms for blue I could find in even the simplest English-language novel
(cerulean, navy, sapphire, etc.). On the other hand, a monolingual speaker of Navajo
learning English might be dismayed that he or she can't use verb roots and prefixes as
adjectives for absolutely everything. You win some, you lose some.

Taking a more personal example, there is all this vocabulary in common use in Dutch
regarding dairy products (...not to fuel national stereotypes) that could be
said in English, but I have a feeling really never is. Just to start with, in a normal
grocery store there's at least belegen (mature) cheese, jong (young) cheese, karnemelk
(sour dairy byproduct), and a wide range of fruity yogurt drinks. Also, everyone knows
exactly what to call a kaasschaaf (the metal tool you use to shave cheese off a block).
Had I never learned Dutch, I would have literally gone around my whole life pointing to
that utensil and saying, "Can you hand me the cheese thingy?"

But all this doesn't mean that native English speakers experience the world in less
detail than native Dutch speakers, I think. It just means that Dutch has evolved a
specific set of terms uniquely suited to the Dutch cultural experience and English
isn't so strong in that particular area. In other situations it might be exactly the
opposite. I have the same ability to perceive in both languages, they just have
different cultural priorities and will therefore codify information in slightly varying
degrees of detail depending on the subject.

I've also observed that it really jumps out at me when a Dutch word lumps together two
concepts that I already know the difference between. It's harder to realize when
I am missing out on fine Dutch-language distinctions that just whoosh right over
my head.
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vonPeterhof
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Message 11 of 14

29 July 2012 at 6:49am | IP Logged

I'm already sorta getting tired of quoting this passage, but it seems appropriate here. The quote is about English, but I think that when people talk about a language with a larger vocabulary they are implying English 9 times out of 10 anyway.

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.

Serpent wrote:

Or one more way to put it: when you want to classify something more precisely than your native language allows, you'll be using L2. The best example is the use of Latin terms in science but it's not limited to that.

The use of Latin terms in science isn't usually considered to be "using L2", since these generally fall into the category of loanwords. And then there are words like "photosynthesis" - made up of Greek morphemes, but not really a loanword from Greek, because it wasn't coined in Greek. "Antidisestablishmentarianism" is often considered to be the longest English word, despite the fact that there isn't a single Anglo-Saxon morpheme in it (granted, this particular combination of morphemes probably wouldn't have been made in any other language).

Now that I think of it, drawing the line between using loanwords and code-switching can be tricky. If two Kannada speakers who were born and raised in the US keep using English words in the middle of Kannada sentences, does this count as code-switching, or are these words loanwords from English that are characteristic of their particular sociolect of Kannada? So what if some of those words aren't in the Kannada dictionary, I bet there are some perfectly Dravidian words out there that haven't made their way into official dictionaries either, because they are used only in a few remote villages or only in certain social circles.

Edited by vonPeterhof on 29 July 2012 at 6:53am
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frenkeld
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Message 12 of 14

29 July 2012 at 7:45am | IP Logged

vonPeterhof wrote:

I think that when people talk about a language with a larger vocabulary they are
implying English 9 times out of 10 anyway.

I've seen a claim somewhere that if one only looks at the words in current use, English and German have
about 200,000 each, while Spanish, Russian, and French have about 100,000 each.

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Serpent
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Message 13 of 14

29 July 2012 at 2:26pm | IP Logged

vonPeterhof wrote:

The use of Latin terms in science isn't usually considered to be "using L2", since these generally fall into the category of loanwords.

I don't mean all Latin terms but only things like names of species etc.
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LaughingChimp
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Message 14 of 14

29 July 2012 at 11:54pm | IP Logged

martinosek wrote:

'If you speak a language that has a larger vocabulary than other langagues, does it mean that you
experience the world in more details?'

I don't understand why you think so. Even if we assume that larger vocabulary = more precise language, why should it change your perception?

Edited by LaughingChimp on 29 July 2012 at 11:54pm

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