Writing with a fine-tipped language 2
December 9th 2008 15:01
Further musings on language.
English is the vocabulary king. It has far more words than French, Spanish or German. It has more words than any alphabet-based language on Earth, and is second only to Mandarin in all languages.
Or not, depending whom you listen to. Estimates of just how many words there are in English vary. One credible estimate comes from Robert McCrum, William Cran and Robert MacNeil in their book The Story of English (Penguin, 1992), in which they say, "The statistics of English are astonishing. Of all the world's languages (which now number some 2,700), it is arguably the richest in vocabulary. The compendious Oxford English Dictionary lists about 500,000 words, and a further half-million technical and scientific terms remain uncatalogued. According to traditional estimates, neighboring German has a vocabulary of about 185,000 and French fewer than 100,000, including such Franglais as le snacque-barre and le hit-parade."
Call me innocent, but "le snacque-barre" meant nothing to me. A Google search revealed that it is a snack bar. The search didn't reveal if we should blame French or English for this silliness.
Webster's Third New International Dictionary (the latest edition) contains about 450,000 words.
English keeps growing, and does so in several ways. The main way is to purloin, filch, plunder and steal words from other languages. It has in fact been doing this successfully ever since it created itself by dissociation from German about 1,500 years ago. About 80% of English words are borrowed, most of them from Latin. The Germans are the kings of compound nouns, but English does pretty well too, and this is another way its vocabulary grows (with words such as housewife, greenhouse and overdue).
The oldest words in English are about 14,000 years old, originating in a pre-Indo-European language group called Nostratic. Words from this language group that survive in modern English include apple, bad, gold and tin.
More than 750 million people use the English language, but only about 350 million of them learned it as a mother tongue.
Educated English speakers know about 20,000 words and will typically use about 2,000 words in the course of one week.
Wikipedia, hypertextbook.com, www.sentex.net
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However, as you've say that the "Educated English speakers know about 20,000 words," which it means it's about 4% out of 500,000 words!
Comment by Chris Champion
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