I realize there may not be a definitive answer to this question, but my concern is to know how big is the Japanese language compared to English.

I'm not sure, I don't have any evidence to back up my claim but: I know English has over 1 million words now.

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This is a completely meaningless question. You can't determine in any useful sense how many words there are in a given language, so of course you can't compare the number of words in two different languages. And even if you did know such things, the knowledge wouldn't be useful for anyone.

http://www.slate.com/articles/life/the_g...count.html

I don't have any hard numbers to hand, but I think you'll find English has far more words than Japanese. Japanese has all the yamato words, and almost all of them duplicated by a chinese import to replace them, and a tiny smattering of other loan words from Portuguese, Dutch, and English, and at least one (Arubaito) from German.

English is Germanic at its base, and has borrowed heavily from French, Latin, and Greek, grabbed extra words from its Germanic cousins whenever it fell behind, and also has a smattering taken from 'exotic' languages, which is to say, languages from countries located far from England (but attacked or colonized by England, the finest form of language exchange!)

James Nicoll's observation,

Quote:The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.

is not relevant only to how inconsistent English conjugation is, but also to how many near-duplicate words we've accumulated. England and all of its colonies, many of which are now full-fledged nations of themselves, have simply had -far- more language contact than the Japanese (well, depending on how you count the Chinese dialects, I suppose, which make at least two and possibly hundreds of languages... but once you make it a Japanese kanji word it tends to settle to one ON reading per word. Usually.)

Well, that bit of self-indulgent speculation aside, time for some hardnosed research at Wikipedia, where I find this concrete information on the number of words in the English language:

The current FAQ for the OED Wrote:How many words are there in the English language? There is no single sensible answer to this question. It's impossible to count the number of words in a language, because it's so hard to decide what actually counts as a word.

However, the Wikipedia article on the Japanese language doesn't even discuss how many words it may contain, which clearly shows that they know there's no hope for Japanese to be the #1 largest language, whereas English is a good contender in that field and hence the eternal hope that an accurate measure will be found to prove the superior obesity of the English language.

english has the most words of any language, but i think a more interesting question would be which has a larger everyday usage / recognition vocabulary. the average english user has a recognition vocabulary of about 30,000 words. i don't know what that is for japanese

one way to estimate this though would be the size of the average dictionaries. i do know that the average college level english-english dictionary (aside from specialty ones like the oxford) contains about 200,000 words, which is more than, say, spanish, where the average college level spanish-spanish dictionary contains about 100,000 words. so we'd just need to find out how many words the average japanese-japanese dictionary contains and compare it to those

the average college-level dictionary is a good measure because it contains all the words you are reasonably expected to encounter in the language, and excludes extremely rare and obscure words

according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_di...xicography, the larger ones are in the range of 200,000, same as english

rinkuhero Wrote:one way to estimate this though would be the size of the average dictionaries. i do know that the average college level english-english dictionary (aside from specialty ones like the oxford) contains about 200,000 words, which is more than, say, spanish, where the average college level spanish-spanish dictionary contains about 100,000 words.[...]

I don't think that says much—there's too much room for interpretation and it also depends on factors such as the quality of dictionaries available (for both print and electronic versions) and physical/pricing limitations for their print versions. For example, being a little off-topic here just to illustrate, in BR Portuguese the dictionaries are usually not classified by level—such as "college-level"—but by size (small, medium and large), with the number of entries depending on their physical size + price alone and nothing else; their electronic forms tend to have all the entries of their largest paper brothers plus a few hundred/thousands more. As a matter of comparison, in BR Portuguese the three most popular dicionaries are:

• Houaiss: 228.500 entries
• Michaelis: 201.174 entries
• Aurélio: 200.000+ entries

Michaelis also gives an interesting info regarding their electronic version: if you consider the adverbial locutions ("adverbial phrases"), it contains over 800.000 entries, and more than 2.000.000 if you include conjugations.

Sigh, again?
I'm just gonna re-post the quote I gave on that thread:

Wikipedia Wrote:Comparisons of the vocabulary size of English to that of other languages are generally not taken very seriously by linguists and lexicographers. Besides the fact that dictionaries will vary in their policies for including and counting entries, what is meant by a given language and what counts as a word do not have simple definitions. Also, a definition of word that works for one language may not work well in another, with differences in morphology and orthography making cross-linguistic definitions and word-counting difficult, and potentially giving very different results. Linguist Geoffrey K. Pullum has gone so far as to compare concerns over vocabulary size (and the notion that a supposedly larger lexicon leads to "greater richness and precision") to an obsession with penis length.

vonPeterhof Wrote:Sigh, again?

If we didn't repeat things over and over we wouldn't be humans! Or anything that exists...

Even if we did agree on how many words English and Japanese have, it really wouldn't make that much of a difference, because the vast majority of those words would be unknown to the average speaker. You would never, in your entire life, encounter the majority of those words, and you wouldn't find yourself at a loss of words either.

I work as a translator from English to French. I've often seen articles mention that English has over a million words and that French has over 150,000. However, on a practical level, when you have to communicate a message from one language to another with fine precision, even if you go through great pains to pick exactly the right words given the context, it doesn't really make any difference how many words there are and it's not the case that English has more words than French to express the same reality -- or vice-versa. An obscure word is not interchangeable with a more common one, even if they technically have the same meaning. So even if French had only 2 available words for a concept, but English had 6, 4 or which are antiquated and obscure, the reality is that I still only have 2 words available to me.

I was going to cite another LL post (this one by Ben Zimmer):
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagel...02809.html

Quote:and a tiny smattering of other loan words from Portuguese, Dutch, and English, and at least one (Arubaito) from German.

Japanese has far more than a "tiny smattering" of loan words from English. The 外来語 dictionary on my electronic dictionary has 45,000 entries -- of course all of those are not from English but the majority of them are.

i think that even if it's not an important issue to linguists and lexicographers doesn't mean that it isn't an important issue to language-learners, who want to know how many words they know relative to how many words an average native speaker can recognize. it can be useful as a measure of progress

for instance, if someone's vocabulary deck is up to 10,000, it can be encouraging if they knew that the average vocabulary recognition in japan were only 20,000 words as opposed to 40,000 words, so they'd feel they were 1/2 of the way to a good knowledge of vocabulary as opposed to 1/4 of the way there

(just making the above 20k and 40k numbers up btw, for illustration)

SomeCallMeChris Wrote:a tiny smattering of other loan words from Portuguese, Dutch, and English, and at least one (Arubaito) from German.

Not that I disagree with your overall hypothesis, but it's hard to view your post as authoritative when you say things like this. As Yudan pointed out, there's far more than a tiny smattering of non-Chinese loan words, and there's obviously more than one loan word from German (テーマ, タクト, and カルテ to name three).

rinkuhero Wrote:for instance, if someone's vocabulary deck is up to 10,000, it can be encouraging if they knew that the average vocabulary recognition in japan were only 20,000 words as opposed to 40,000 words, so they'd feel they were 1/2 of the way to a good knowledge of vocabulary as opposed to 1/4 of the way there

Your comparison only stands if you were to compare the number of useful or commonly used words in both languages, which, among languages with a relatively rich history, is more or less the same. If the question is simply "how many words are there in X", then the fact that language B has an additional 20,000 words that are virtually never used is irrelevant.

rinkuhero Wrote:i think that even if it's not an important issue to linguists and lexicographers doesn't mean that it isn't an important issue to language-learners, who want to know how many words they know relative to how many words an average native speaker can recognize. it can be useful as a measure of progress

Learners should be discouraged from viewing their progress in a language in terms of numbers (of words, kanji, whatever), not encouraged.

JimmySeal Wrote:

SomeCallMeChris Wrote:a tiny smattering of other loan words from Portuguese, Dutch, and English, and at least one (Arubaito) from German.

Not that I disagree with your overall hypothesis, but it's hard to view your post as authoritative when you say things like this. As Yudan pointed out, there's far more than a tiny smattering of non-Chinese loan words, and there's obviously more than one loan word from German (テーマ, タクト, and カルテ to name three).

Well, I should hope nobody views my post as authoritative, since it was written firmly tongue in cheek! Perhaps I should have used emoticons... I was exaggerating by what I thought was only a little bit, but...

yudantaiteki Wrote:Japanese has far more than a "tiny smattering" of loan words from English. The 外来語 dictionary on my electronic dictionary has 45,000 entries -- of course all of those are not from English but the majority of them are.

Apparently I exaggerated by a lot! This surprised me for about three seconds until I thought about how the vast majority of computer and medical jargon, among other technical language, has been taken as loan words into Japanese (although many of those terms also have Japanese kanji compound equivalents, I believe, but I'm not well versed in any technical terminology. Just what I pick up from dramas with medical themes and using computers set to Japanese or Japanese web sites.)

Actually, I'm in the camp that thinks these kinds of comparisons are fairly useless. I do kind of half-believe my ramblings - English is spread over more of the world and has a history of both conquering and being conquered that Japanese doesn't - but on the other hand, contemporary, active, non-specialist vocabulary is probably roughly equal for most every language in the world since the mental abilities and communication needs are roughly equal for people everywhere in the world.

That English may have more words written down somewhere that most people don't know is not actually much of a bragging point and doesn't increase the language's expressive power.

Also, it may well depend on how you count words... Japanese does potentially get word-multiplication-power - or word-count penalty, depending on the method of counting - from kanji compounds with multiple pronunciations, and words with the same pronunciation and multiple kanji writings. Well, that just goes back to the point of the futility of the task.

vonPeterhof Wrote:Sigh, again?
I'm just gonna re-post the quote I gave on that thread:

Sometimes I wish that the original article that was reference by Wikipedia was used. It just seems that it would have been more informative, other my differ. Anyways, it may have gotten people attention more.

You can see more here if you are interested in whether particles are words. There might be other questions related to what is and is not a word in Japanese, I don't know.

http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?tid=7308

Omoishinji Wrote:

vonPeterhof Wrote:Sigh, again?
I'm just gonna re-post the quote I gave on that thread:

Sometimes I wish that the original article that was reference by Wikipedia was used. It just seems that it would have been more informative, other my differ. Anyways, it may have gotten people attention more.

I am not sure if I understand what you meant by that, but the passage that I quoted references four different articles, and I provided links to all of them in my quote, in case anyone wants to read further.