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Languages that use low amount of vocab? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| Dylanarama Newbie United States Joined 5252 days ago 30 posts - 31 votes Speaks: English* | Message 1 of 7 28 January 2015 at 4:50am | IP Logged | ||
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I am wondering about languages that use the lowest amount of vocabulary, and which ones don't require and much as other languages? Edited by Dylanarama on 28 January 2015 at 4:54am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| robarb Nonaglot Senior Member United States languagenpluson Joined 4872 days ago 361 posts - 921 votes  Speaks: Portuguese, English*, German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, French Studies: Mandarin, Danish, Russian, Norwegian, Cantonese, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Greek, Latin, Nepali, Modern Hebrew | Message 2 of 7 28 January 2015 at 7:09am | IP Logged | ||
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That's tough to measure. There are a few complicating factors:
-What counts as a word? Some languages, like German, allow you to form compound words with much more flexibility than English, e.g. Regierungschef "Head of state" is transparently formed from Regierung(s) + Chef. In the extreme case of Mandarin, most words are compound words. If you count each character--the smallest units that are both meaningful and pronounceable--only a few thousand are in common use. But compound words, which can be found in dictionaries, extend this by 1-2 orders of magnitude. Some languages also have semi-irregular derivations, such as diminutives in Portuguese/Spanish, or perfective/imperfective verb pairs in Slavic languages. Would you count them as separate words if you can't derive them from each other using rules? -Do you mean the language as a system, or the language as it's used? I would guess that the average speaker of Swedish uses more words than the average speaker of Amharic, but not because Swedish has more vocabulary than Amharic, but because the average speaker of Swedish has more education than the average speaker of Amharic. -Do you count loanwords? How integrated do they have to be? In a lot of languages, there isn't a word for certain technical or cultural concepts (e-sports, vindaloo, microRNA). If the need arises, speakers of these languages will use the word from another language, either the language where the item originated, a regional language, or English. Does it count as a word in the vocabulary? Only if its sound is adapted to that language's phonology? You could find a small vocabulary in a language that borrows all its technical vocabulary if you counted too few of them. Conversely, if you counted too many of them, you could find a huge vocabulary in a language whose speakers habitually code-switch into English (e.g. Hindi). -Do you care about how many words are used in total in the entire language, or how many words are required for a certain level of coverage? In general, there are enough obscure words that you can find many hundreds of thousands or even over a million words if you keep looking at more texts and accept technical words, slang, and everything. The more the language is used, the easier it is to compile a gigantic list. This is one of the reasons people often claim English is the language with the most words. But no speakers know all those words. English may have, say, 2 million attested words, of which you need, say, 5000 to read a novel. Some other language may have only 200,000 attested words, but you still need 5000 to read a novel. So it's no simple matter to judge how many words are in the vocabulary of even a given text, much less a language as a whole. But, assuming you have a working definition of a "word," you might do well to check out a translation both from Language X to Language Y and from Language Y to Language X, and add up the number of words used in each language. Then you'll get the ratio of words used in those two languages, controlling for content! (depending, of course, on how you define a word). I am not aware of anyone doing this experiment systematically, but it would be easy enough to try it on some public domain ebooks in the major languages that have reasonable word-counters available. Probably most of the major national languages would come out in the same ballpark. As for smaller languages, I don't know. It's possible they would consistently come out with fewer words. There might also be an effect of whether a language has had significant influence from another language, since that tends to generate pairs like sleight of hand/legerdemain in English. Maybe an example of a language with a smaller vocabulary would be most signed languages, like ASL. While they are complete languages, they tend not to have a full complement of signed words for obscure and technical things. ASL signers will fingerspell English words for a lot of concepts that aren't part of the core language system. Edited by robarb on 28 January 2015 at 7:22am 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| smallwhite Pentaglot Senior Member Australia Joined 5121 days ago 537 posts - 1045 votes Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin, French, Spanish | Message 3 of 7 28 January 2015 at 9:06am | IP Logged | ||
I don't know about "lowest", but I believe French uses fewer words than English, and English fewer than German. That was my feeling, and once in a while I'd see figures that confirm my feeling, eg. those "the most frequent 3000 words covers 85% of all text" figures. French uses a lot of phrasal expressions (like "to be fond of" instead of "to like" in English), which I love. As to "lowest", primitive tribal languages would have small vocabulary, I suppose. Edited by smallwhite on 28 January 2015 at 9:06am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| chiara-sai Triglot Groupie United Kingdom Joined 3521 days ago 54 posts - 146 votes Speaks: Italian*, EnglishC2, French Studies: German, Japanese | Message 4 of 7 28 January 2015 at 9:26am | IP Logged | ||
Not really, they would have no words for things we talk about (computers, politics, science…) but they would have a huge vocabulary for animals, plants and other natural things. And this is why it's hard to say if a language has a larger vocabulary than another, because no single speaker uses all of the words in their language, and people vary wildly in their vocabulary size and in the areas in which they're sspecialised and therefore have more technical vocabulary than other speakers. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4520 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 5 of 7 28 January 2015 at 10:25am | IP Logged | ||
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Less morphology --> less words to learn --> meaning dependent on context more often -->
you're still screwed. 9 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| shk00design Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4257 days ago 747 posts - 1123 votes Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin Studies: French | Message 6 of 7 28 January 2015 at 8:09pm | IP Logged | ||
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There are languages with fewer different words & phrases. In English we have a number of words from from
other languages that are similar such as lamb & mutton, cow & beef. You can have 1 word in the place of 2 or more such as "forgo" in the place of "to give up", "abandon" in the place of "leave behind" The other day at a dinner party someone posted a challenge in the sentences we said the many words came from Latin, French and original Saxon. A language like Chinese there are words people would use in daily conversations and others we see in newspapers, magazines that are more formal. For example: 抓 zhuā and 拘捕 jūbǔ used in the context of "a policeman catches a thief". The common way of speaking would be 被警方抓走 (taken away by the police). In a newspaper or a news broadcast you'd see 被警方拘捕 (arrested by the police). In this case 抓走 & 拘捕 are used in the same context. When it comes to new electronic gadgets, we are finding new things added to the list every year that are not in the original language. In Chinese you hear "Android 技能手機" for an Android enabled portable phone. The term "Android" is only around for a few years and the Chinese would use the original without translation. Another word that has been around for a bit longer is 卡拉OK (kǎlā OK) or the simplified version K歌 (K gē) for Karaoke singing from Japanese with substitute English letters. A more recent phrase is 社交網絡 (shèjiāo wǎngluò) for social network (such as Facebook & Twitter). If we break it up we have 社交 for social contact and 網絡 for the Internet. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| kanewai Triglot Senior Member United States justpaste.it/kanewai Joined 4702 days ago 1386 posts - 3054 votes Speaks: English*, French, Marshallese Studies: Italian, Spanish | Message 7 of 7 28 January 2015 at 9:48pm | IP Logged | ||
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Sometimes I think that Hawaiian pidgin (which is, technically, a creole language) only
has one noun (da kine) and three verbs (you stay, you get, and you go) - when speakers even bother to use a verb. More here: Pidgin 1 person has voted this message useful |
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