|
 |
1,000,000 words for English | ||
Tags: Number of words | English | ||
Share with:
| ||
 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| null Groupie China Joined 6127 days ago 76 posts - 82 votes  Speaks: Mandarin* | Message 1 of 19 12 May 2009 at 12:22pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
|
English language to get one millionth word - chart the history of words here
The word's out for lexicologists and it doesn't get more exciting than this. And even if you dont consider yourself a wordsmith, an event predicted for 10.22am on June 10 is still historically momentous. Unless you're an ugsome noob. That is when, according to the Global Language Monitor, the one millionth word will be added to the English language. This milestone will mean that English has twice as many words as Cantonese, the worlds second most dense language. It also dwarfs the French total of about 100,000 and Spanish 250,000. Even so, most of us will use only a tiny fraction of them the average persons vocabulary is fewer than 14,000 words, or 1.4 per cent of the total. And even the most linguistically gifted use only around 70,000 words. You dont say. For a new word to enter the English language officially, it must be understood by 100 million people and appear at least 25,000 times in the mainstream global media, on social networking sites and in other sources. At the current pace, a new word is created every 98 minutes. Among the terms which could take English to the one million mark are defollowand defriend words describing what users of online social networks Twitter and Facebook do to contacts they dont want to stay in touch with. Another contender is noob, a derogatory name for someone new to a particular task or community. Paul Payack, chief word analyst of the Global Language Monitor (GLM), a Texas-based linguistic consultancy, says: Language boils up from the people and we see this by the assimilation of words from hip-hop, Hollywood and Bollywood. English is the global language. It is understood by 25 per cent of people on the planet. More people know English in China than they do in the Commonwealth. David Crystal, a linguistics expert at Bangor University, agrees that English is unique among languages in the way it has evolved. I dont think any other language has had so many influences upon it as English, says Prof Crystal. It started a thousand years ago with the Anglo Saxons, then along came the French in 1066 bringing in their own words, then a couple of hundred years later the Renaissance and the Empire brought words from all over. For instance, take the words kingly, royal and regal. Kingly is Anglo-Saxon, royal is French and regal is Latin. They all mean the same thing but they are each used in different ways. source: http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/top-stories/2009/05/08/england- are-the-word-champions-of-the-world-and-about-to-make-it-to- one-million-words-115875-21341646/ Edited by null on 12 May 2009 at 12:25pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Recht Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5803 days ago 241 posts - 270 votes Speaks: English*, GermanB1 | Message 2 of 19 12 May 2009 at 12:41pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
|
I'm pretty sure England had a weeee bit of help spreading English, especially since
English isn't even the most spoken language in Europe. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Tyr Senior Member Sweden Joined 5784 days ago 316 posts - 384 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Swedish | Message 3 of 19 12 May 2009 at 12:57pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
That isn't mentioned in the article... But English is the most spoken language in Europe.
Now that is rubbish, they've obviously gotten their facts mixed up and they mean more people speak it foreign in China than they do native in the commonwealth. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Recht Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5803 days ago 241 posts - 270 votes Speaks: English*, GermanB1 | Message 4 of 19 12 May 2009 at 1:34pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
~100 million German speakers in Europe vs. ~60 million English speakers. I'm referring to native language. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Argonaut Newbie United States Joined 5678 days ago 3 posts - 3 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Norwegian, Finnish | Message 5 of 19 12 May 2009 at 1:44pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
|
If only it were a commemorative word for the occasion.
1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Toufik18 Bilingual Tetraglot Senior Member Algeria Joined 5746 days ago 188 posts - 202 votes Speaks: Arabic (Written)*, Arabic (classical)*, French, English | Message 6 of 19 12 May 2009 at 3:05pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
|
Arabic has about 4 Million word but only about 100000 of theme is used in literature
I don't think that anybody can claim that he knows all the words in arabic even the native ones, so I think it's indispansable to stick with the overall words but expanding the knowledge of vocab as much as possible . 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| leonidus Triglot Senior Member Russian Federation Joined 6328 days ago 113 posts - 123 votes Speaks: Russian*, English, French Studies: German, Mandarin | Message 7 of 19 12 May 2009 at 3:11pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
|
What? million words? Sounds like BS to me. Maybe overall meanings total 1 000 000, that could be true, but the actual number of words, no, I don't believe it.
1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Russianbear Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 6777 days ago 358 posts - 422 votes 1 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, Ukrainian Studies: Spanish | Message 8 of 19 12 May 2009 at 4:16pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Somehow I doubt most of those 1 million words would fulfill these criteria. Perhaps these criteria have been added recently to prevent the dictionaries from balooning up with words nobody understands. If we were to use strict criteria like that, I strongly doubt English would end up having more words than other major European languages.
Russian probably has considerably more than 100 million native speakers in Europe - probably close to 150 million. In Russia alone, 78% of 140+ million live in European Russia, which would mean ~110 million Russian speakers in Russia alone. Then there are at least 25-30 million in the Ukraine and close to 10 million in Belarus, etc. Edited by Russianbear on 12 May 2009 at 4:33pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
|  | 
Printable version
|
| Copyright 2024 FX Micheloud - All rights reserved No part of this website may be copied by any means without my written authorization. |
