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1,000,000 words for English | ||
Tags: Number of words | English | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Tyr Senior Member Sweden Joined 5784 days ago 316 posts - 384 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Swedish | Message 9 of 19 12 May 2009 at 4:49pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
OK, you just said speakers though at first which would cover all. Just covers the EU but interesting: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_the_eu What did you mean with England having help anyway? It was the British empire, not the English one so Scotland would be included in that. Edited by Tyr on 12 May 2009 at 4:51pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6705 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 10 of 19 12 May 2009 at 4:57pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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"It also dwarfs the French total of about 100,000 and Spanish 250,000"
It is probably true that French has less words than English and maybe even less than Spanish, but certainly more than 100.000 words. I have found references to at least two French dictionaries with more than 100.000 words, the on-line version of Le Grand Robert and the paper version of Le Trésor de la Langue Française (online here). However the source for link no. 2 admits that the 'Trésor' predominantly is based on literature, and that many technical words have been excluded, plus slang and many very rare words etc. Heaven knows how many words that have been left out, but the total number of French words must be much higher than a mere 100.000 words. I doubt that even Danish has so few words, - the largest dictionary in Danish (in 28 scholarly tomes) has alone 150.000 words (excluding compunds), and this leaves out many neologisms. So congrats to English for having demonstrably more words than anybody can ever learn, but there must be many languages out there with more than 100.000 words. The problem is to find somebody who cares enough about those languages to collect and count their wordstock. 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 11 of 19 12 May 2009 at 9:34pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
You're right. I guess I wasn't considering Russia as part of Europe. Usually when I think of Russia, I just think of Russia. It's probably big enough for its own continent. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| Sennin Senior Member Bulgaria Joined 6036 days ago 1457 posts - 1759 votes 5 sounds | Message 12 of 19 13 May 2009 at 2:03am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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Russianbear makes a good point, most of the Russian population is concentrated in the European part of the country. This makes the language one of the biggest in Europe, at the very least geographically speaking (if not politically).
Furthermore, Russian is an Indo-European language, so from a linguistic point of view it also makes sense to brand it European. Edited by Sennin on 13 May 2009 at 2:09am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| Marc Frisch Heptaglot Senior Member Germany Joined 6667 days ago 1001 posts - 1169 votes Speaks: German*, French, English, Spanish, Portuguese, Turkish, Italian Studies: Persian, Tamil | Message 13 of 19 13 May 2009 at 10:04pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
Anyone who knows those languages will agree that the Spanish vocabulary is not so much more expressive than French, and English certainly doesn't use 10 times more words than French, it's just that they have found a dictionary that does a good job at digging out rarely used words. I personally feel that the vocab in literary texts is equivalently varied in all three of them. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6705 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 14 of 19 14 May 2009 at 3:08am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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The text "It also dwarfs the French total of about 100,000 and Spanish 250,000" is a quote from Null's post. Let me add that I don't find it totally impossible that English can have 1.000.000 words, if you include everything - slang, dialectal words, deviant forms and names for animals, plants, bacteria, technical gadgets and company names. The problem is that other languages may not have a monitor function that counts these things, or if it exists that the source quoted by Null may not be aware of it. Therefore it isn't advisable to say that language X has Y words, but instead that dictionary Z for language X has registrered Y lexemes.
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| guesto Groupie Australia Joined 5743 days ago 76 posts - 118 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian, Spanish | Message 15 of 19 14 May 2009 at 4:39am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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I'd like to actually see this list. Do they include, for example, chemical compounds and if so, since these words are built agglutinatively, would any permutation of the parts be considered a word, even if such a compound does not exist in reality?
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| Akipenda Lugha Diglot Groupie Canada Joined 5740 days ago 78 posts - 82 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Swahili, Sign Language, Spanish | Message 16 of 19 14 May 2009 at 4:46am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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How sad if 'defriend' is our millionth word together...
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