(2016-02-12, 12:20 am)vonPeterhof Wrote: This is a bit of a pet peeve of mine, but since it's kind of off-topic here I'll keep this brief: Citation needed.

Well the webster dictionary has about 500,000 entries but if you google around some people claim that English has about 1 million words, but that probably includes some truly archaic words and inflections. By comparison the 大辞林 has 255,000 entries and that includes some old words (古代) that probably aren't used any more.

Then there is this but even they state it about the same way I did, I didn't say "English has the most vocabulary" I said "English probably has the biggest vocabulary." And its because of the reasoning in that link: English is the result of many merges with other languages over the centuries. But then who cares, whether English reins supreme in word count or not is irrelevant to how people use the large range of words available to them and the way people react to that.

(2016-02-12, 12:20 am)vonPeterhof Wrote:

(2016-02-11, 8:09 pm)vix86 Wrote: English has probably one of the largest vocabularies of any language out there due to the assimilation of other languages.

This is a bit of a pet peeve of mine, but since it's kind of off-topic here I'll keep this brief: Citation needed.

I looked around but all I could find is that both English and Japanese unabridged dictionaries have between 450,000 and 500,000 entries. There are a few references to English having over a million words but as the Merriam Webster article puts it: "that tally includes the myriad names of chemicals and other scientific entities. Many of these are so peripheral to common English use that they do not or are not likely to appear even in an unabridged dictionary."

I also found something interesting while looking for Japanese discussions on this. This quote is all over the internet and it references wikipedia, but never gives a link and I couldn't find it anywhere on Wikipedia itself:

Quote:Wikipediaによると各語の90%以上を理解しようとする場合、フランス語なら約2000語、英語なら3000語、ドイツ語なら約5000語、日本語なら10000語が必要と言われている。

A few searches of the languages and numbers suggest that these ranges are often quoted, but I didn't bother to track down academic sources.

So maybe we can compile a list of words that we can consider to be English and that is a big number, but the vocabularies of native English speakers vs native Japanese speakers appear to be very close in word count. (I've linked the NTT Communications research published on Japanese vocabulary counts on this forum before which are around 40k for educated adults. Google searches give a similar number for English.)

vix86 Wrote:Well the webster dictionary has about 500,000 entries but if you google around some people claim that English has about 1 million words, but that probably includes some truly archaic words and inflections. By comparison the 大辞林 has 255,000 entries and that includes some old words (古代) that probably aren't used any more.

Here's one article that digs into those ~1mil words claims, and further proceeds to demonstrate how unreliable and arbitrary those word counts can get even within one language, where you don't have to deal with wildly differing morphologies, language policies and plain old prejudices (Académie française vis-a-vis Anglicisms, Russian dictionary makers vs. our highly productive profanities, etc.).

vix86 Wrote:Then there is this but even they state it about the same way I did, I didn't say "English has the most vocabulary" I said "English probably has the biggest vocabulary."

I think "it seems quite probable that English has more words than most comparable world languages" is a lot more modest a claim than "English probably has the biggest vocabulary", especially considering that the end of the article acknowledges the wild differences that exist between morphologies of the world's languages - differences great enough to make vocabulary size comparisons on a global scale utterly meaningless.

vix86 Wrote:English is the result of many merges with other languages over the centuries.

Personally I think that this point tends to get blown out of proportion. I mean, yeah, it may be unique among the Germanic languages (the question of the continued existence of a separate Scots language notwithstanding) and very different from Romance languages in this regard, but the sort of mass borrowing that was triggered by the Norman invasion is hardly a unique event globally - not when there are languages around with only 20% native vocabulary. Heck, Japanese itself is a language where the majority of the vocabulary is borrowed, words with the same basic meanings coming from different source languages get used differently depending on register and context, and the powers that be aren't terribly interested in limiting the influx of loanwords.