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Language with short vocabulary | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Philological Room |  | |
| Akao aka FailArtist Senior Member United States Joined 5340 days ago 315 posts - 347 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Mandarin, Toki Pona | Message 1 of 7 27 July 2010 at 4:19am | IP Logged |
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Not few in number, but short in length. Chinese is a prime example, but other than
Chinese, which language uses the fewest syllables in their words? EDIT: By the way, this is on an average scale, not the extremes. Edited by Akao on 27 July 2010 at 4:23am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| johntm93 Senior Member United States Joined 5331 days ago 587 posts - 746 votes 2 sounds Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish | Message 2 of 7 27 July 2010 at 4:23am | IP Logged |
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Most languages with tones (the Chinese languages, maybe Vietnamese too?) would have small words, I think. You know, because they'd run out of monosyllabic words and have to add tones to have a distinction.
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| Akao aka FailArtist Senior Member United States Joined 5340 days ago 315 posts - 347 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Mandarin, Toki Pona | Message 3 of 7 27 July 2010 at 4:28am | IP Logged |
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Are there any major languages that are tonal besides Chinese?
Also, which non-tonal language would you think to have at least shorter vocabulary? 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| The Real CZ Senior Member United States Joined 5653 days ago 1069 posts - 1495 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Korean | Message 4 of 7 27 July 2010 at 4:29am | IP Logged |
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Korean does too since a lot of vocab is derived from Chinese. (And yet the Japanese make the words 2-3x longer.)
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| johntm93 Senior Member United States Joined 5331 days ago 587 posts - 746 votes 2 sounds Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish | Message 5 of 7 27 July 2010 at 4:39am | IP Logged |
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Here's Wikipedia's list of tonal languages
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| Derian Triglot Senior Member PolandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5312 days ago 227 posts - 464 votes Speaks: Polish*, English, German Studies: Spanish, Russian, Czech, French, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 6 of 7 27 July 2010 at 2:22pm | IP Logged |
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I have heard a hypothesis that the tones in today's tonal languages emerged because the words had been getting so short that it lead to a problematic abundance of homonymy. And so, the speakers started to contrast similiar word forms using pitch.
In European languages, the language that strikes me with the shortness of words is English. The number of monosyllabic words is huge. This very comment of mine consists of 87 words, 60 (69%) of which are monosyllabic. I used 519 characters, thus the average length of a word is 5.96 characters. -------------- Now the same comment translated to Polish: Słyszałem hipotezę, że tony w dzisiejszych językach tonalnych powstały, ponieważ słowa stawały się tak krótkie, że prowadziło to do kłopotliwego nadmiaru homonimii. Dlatego też użytkownicy języka zaczęli odróżniać podobne formy wyrazów za pomocą tonów. Pośród języków europejskich, językiem z zaskakująco krótkimi wyrazami jest angielski. Ilość jednosylabowych słów jest potężna. Monosyllabic words: (12/49) = 25% Characters: 379 => avg. word length = 7.74 characters Edited by Derian on 27 July 2010 at 5:23pm 5 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Marc Frisch Heptaglot Senior Member Germany Joined 6669 days ago 1001 posts - 1169 votes Speaks: German*, French, English, Spanish, Portuguese, Turkish, Italian Studies: Persian, Tamil | Message 7 of 7 27 July 2010 at 10:48pm | IP Logged |
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Turkish has very short word stems, most of them have one or two syllables. However, being an agglutinating language, suffixes are added to the words to indicate their grammatical function or to create derivations.
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