posted
Hee hee, I know I'm setting myself up to be shot down in flames here by someone who knows what they're talking about but I'm going to venture a tentative no.
From what I understand of languages, English is one of the hardest languages to learn as a second language because it has little or no structure. We place words willy nilly in pretty much any order we choose - adverbs can come before or after the verb for example, or even before the subject if we fancy it and it's the same with just about everything else - verbs, nouns,pronouns, adjectives, different clauses. The list of combinations and permutations is endless and sometimes you can see many of them in the same piece of writing.
I'm currently learning ancient Greek and that is a much more carefully structured language, right down to the length and sounds of words. You can tell which adjectives and adverbs etc. belong to which verbs and nouns simply by its position in the text, not to mention which case it's in, something else English lacks a distinction for.
[This message has been edited by Gwalchmai (edited February 06, 2004).]
posted
I won't shoot you down! And English is supposed to be one of the hardest 2nd languages to learn - all the exceptions to the rules! I know when I took the first year of Chinese (mandarin) it was so nice because of the rules and structure, though I was told it would get harder and that there would be changes (but never got to year two - was rushed off to grad school).
This is an interesting question - are you trying to create a language or an evolved version of English for a story?
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Actually, the fact that English does not have noun cases requires it to have a bit more structure than languages that do. Word order is important in English.
John hit George. George hit John. Hit John George.
The first two sentences reverse who is hitting whom. The third sentence makes sense only if somebody is being instructed to hit a person named John George.
As a general rule, the subject of a verb comes before the verb. This rule is seldom violated; in fact, right now I can't come up with a sentence in which it would make sense to do so.
posted
English grammar is really one of the least complicated grammars to learn. What makes English difficult is the irregular spelling/pronunciation and the huge vocabulary.
Verb conjugation in English is very simple, with relatively few exceptions (such as "to be"):
Present tense: I talk. You talk. ("Thou talkest" is archaic.) He talks. We talk. You talk. They talk.
Notice that the only one that is different based on which person is talking is third-person singular.
posted
But that's the point of what makes English so difficult to understand. Having the same verb endings for so many different forms makes things too ambiguous for those who are used to a more structured language.
If I walked into a room with twelve people in it and said 'run!' how does anybody know whether I'm talking to the person I just happened to make eye contact with as I came through the door or to everybody?
The reason other languages have such complicated (to us only because we're too lazy to have them) conjugations is that it makes their language more precise. And I don't know if I would agree that English has a larger vocabulary. Other languages have just as many different names for the same thing as we do.
As for word order, it's not that strict:
John walked slowly along the path. Along the path, John walked slowly. Slowly, John walked along the path. John slowly walked along the path. Along the path, John slowly walked. Along the path, walked John slowly.
[This message has been edited by Gwalchmai (edited February 06, 2004).]
posted
Is it Latin where the last piece of information you get in a sentence is the noun? I seem to recall someone saying it makes it almost impossible to tell jokes because of it.
Anyway, to answer the original question: Yup. We do have a certain pattern as regards noun/verb placement and all that stuff.
However, the more modern your setting, the more malleable the grammer. Thanks to our ability to place certain pre- and post-modifiers to any word in the dictionary nouns become adjectives, adjectives become nouns AND verbs, and verbs become articles. It's all very confusing.
posted
Did a search - found some interesting things. Many of the exceptions have to do with things like pluralization, pronounciation,etc. Grammar structure rules are more solid. Here are a few links:
posted
A friend of mine from Iran who has learned both German and English told me it was like this: German is very hard at the beginning, but once you get a grip on the basics, it's pretty simple. English is pretty easy at the beginning, but gets more difficult the deeper into it you get. As far as German goes, I can back him up, since I learned German as a second language. English, I'm not sure. Hard to judge the difficulty of your own native tongue.
Posts: 1528 | Registered: Dec 2003
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I didn't say that the word order was strict; I said that it was important because we do not have noun cases.
Only one of your examples has the subject after the verb, and it only works because the verb "to walk" is intransitive. (Granted, I should have thought of that possibility.)
I would like to see a sentence using a transitive verb, in which the verb's subject comes after the verb and the verb's direct object comes before it. Even if such a sentence is grammatically possible, I think it would still sound very weird to a native English-speaker.
Yes, English is flexible regarding word order, but not nearly as flexible as languages that use verb conjugations and cases which make word order irrelevant.
quote:But that's the point of what makes English so difficult to understand. Having the same verb endings for so many different forms makes things too ambiguous for those who are used to a more structured language.
I think you are overestimating the severity of this problem. The amount of time it would take to teach people to understand the rules of verb conjugation for every person and tense combination in English, and to teach them to find the subject of a verb, is far less than it would take to teach the rules of verb conjugation for every person and tense combination in a language such as Spanish or Italian.
quote:And I don't know if I would agree that English has a larger vocabulary. Other languages have just as many different names for the same thing as we do.
English by far has the largest vocabulary of any language, and the largest vocabulary in common usage. (The only way people can dispute that assessment is by using arguments such as "In Finnish, all numbers are written as one word, so Finnish has a potentially infinite number of words" or "In German, you can take a bunch of words and cram them together into one long word, and if you do that enough times then you'll have more words than English." These are not serious arguments.)
Please note that I'm not saying English is a better langauge than others because it has a larger vocabulary. All I'm saying is that, in the context of language learning, the fact that English has the largest active vocabulary makes it more difficult to learn.
I am wondering where you obtained the data which supports the claim that English has a larger working vocabulary than any other language. Not that I don't buy into the idea that it may be true, but I am curious to know if this is really a proven fact. I think it's a significant claim, at any rate. Please let all of us know.
posted
Well, I can't cite you chapter and verse on active vocabulary, but I know I read several things about it when I was working as a researcher for the U.S.English Foundation a few years ago.
Looks like I'll have to do a little web searching.
posted
If I may try and return to the original post: without concern for irregular spellings, can English be reduced to a forumulaic structure such as:
(noun) (verb) (pronoun) (noun) (verb: past tense) (adjective)
the spelling and variations are actually irrelevant to my question - I'm trying to explore the underlying structure here.
Anyway...hi Kolona.
Just popped back as this question is actually very important to myself - I figured this was one of the best places to ask.
Not submitted yet - but I'd love to have you e-mail me and tell me how things have been for you.
If you want one formula that will describe on a single-word level all possible grammatically-correct sentences, then the answer is a practical no. (While it might be theoretically possible to design such a formula, it would be so complex as to be of no practical use.)
If you want formulas that will produce various types of gramatically correct sentences, then it's possible.
The simplest such formula (though not necessarily producing the simplest sentence) would be:
posted
The variations were meant to show that English couldn't be broken down into a formula such as:
(noun) (verb) (pronoun) (noun) (verb: past tense) (adjective)
As EJS said, usually the subject of the verb comes before it, except in a few rare cases. But other than that I believe nouns, pronouns and adjectives can be entered just about anywhere and often are. Two simple sentences:
He walked slowly... (subject) (verb) (adverb) He slowly walked... (subject) (adverb) (verb)
More complicated sentences can produce more combinations. Another example is the positioning of subordinate clauses, which can go either at the beginning, middle or end of the sentence.
EJS, I'm sorry. My last post came across as being a bit terse. Wasn't meant to be. I was trying to make the point (not very well) that while in cases such as 'John hit George' the word order couldn't be any other way, in a lot of cases it can. Take the many different ways in which the sentences in this paragraph could be put together for example.
To me a structured language is one where words have to be placed in certain positions like in the original suggested formula, which is why I don't regard English as such.
I'm still not completely convinced about the vocabulary either but then I can't say I know huge amounts about that kind of thing. All I base my opinion on there is that everything can be pretty much translated from one language to another. I agree wholeheartedly with your comments regarding Finnish, German and similar languages though.
posted
English has the largest active vocabulary by probably an order of magnituded above the nearest contenders. It has a formal vocabulary at least two or three times that of Chinese, which I believe is the nearest contender (for formal vocabulary). One of the peculiar virtues of English is that it is truly a hetrogenous language, the very origin of English as a language is in the borrowing of words from other languages, and it has never lost that distinctive characteristic.
Which is why English cannot have 'structure' as defined by Gwalchmai and others. Words cannot vary according to a set of set rules, because those words originally come from hundreds (yes literally hundreds) of other languages, each with a different rule of verb modification. Thus the verb modifications (except for certain fairly archaic words) are all quite simple and can be applied to words taken from any spoken language (of course, we usually change both the original spelling and the common pronounciation...which makes things hard sometimes).
You see, the one is the cause of the other. English's huge (larger than any other language ever developed by humans, and getting larger all the time) vocabulary and simple grammer are each the effective cause of the other. We borrow words from other languages or simply make them up because the structure of our language allows it so readily...the structure of our language has to be contained mostly in word order rather than modification because we borrow words from so many places.
English is probably the only language that has seriously earned the distinction of borrowing words from every known human language, and certainly the one language in which the process of borrowing is most active, pervasive, and evident.
This is part of the reason why English has become a de facto language of world commerce...there are other reasons, but the fact is that the language itself is very easy to 'pidgin' (this can be a bit of a downfall at times...rf. H. Higgins theory of class distinction based on dialect ).
In fact, any objective linguistic examination of English would conclude that it is actually several hundred thousand distinct languages that happen to share some common elements of grammer and a small shared vocabulary...a competent English speaker must understand the several dozen influential core dialects and be able to identify the native speakers of each, and a fluent speaker understands and can identify hundreds.
Fortunately, we don't have objective linguists, they all like to call English a single language for various reasons of their own. Which is good, because none of us wants to carry the burden of consciously keeping track of how many hundreds of languages we speak, and to whom we speak each one.
posted
Someone else asked this, but I haven't seen it answered. What is the source of the information that English has the largest working vocabulary? My instincts are that this is probably true, given that English is spread over such a huge area geographicly and culturally. But what about French and Spanish? They also have diverse geographical and cultural ranges. And Spanish speakers seem pretty adept at incorporating words and phrases from other cultures. Also, I wonder how when a word is considered to be part of a language. Obviously, if you say you ate sushi with wasabi for dinner last night, almost any speaker of English is going to understand you, despite those words having Japanese origins. They are now part of the English vocabulary. But, if you are a Spanish speaker in Southern California and go into a Japanese restaurant, you'll also be ordering sushi with wasibi. So are those words part of the Spanish vocabularly?
To me, it seems that the assertion that one language has a larger vocabulary than another language would be almost impossible to quantify, given the constantly evolving nature of languages. (At least among active, growing languages like English and Spanish. Obviously, both are bigger than say, Cherokee.)
posted
"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."
Robert McCrum, William Cran, & Robert MacNeil. The Story of English. New York: Penguin, 1992: 1
"Of course, there are lots of slang and regional words that are not included and the big dictionary omits many proper names, scientific and technical terms, and jargon as a matter of editorial policy (e.g., there are some 1.4 million named species of insect alone). All told, estimates of the total vocabulary of English start at around three million words and go up from there."
Wilton, David. How Many Words Are There In The English Language? Wilton's Word & Phrase Origins. 7 February 2001.
posted
Unfortunately, the average American uses only 800 of these words in his everyday vocabulary, which is actually much less than in many other languages. Especially in the past decade or so, our language has become vague. In everyday conversation, precise words are rarely used (though they do exist.)
Posts: 292 | Registered: Feb 2004
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posted
My contrarian nature still isn't satisfied. The OED may indeed contain 500,000 words, while a competing French dictionary may only have 100,000, but I would be suspicious that this is due more to a cultural impulse among the British to catolog every possible oscure fact and reference, including words that haven't been in common spoken English in 500 years (the OED is chock full of stuff like this). The French, on the other hand, may have been too busy naming cheeses to worry about putting together a dictionary to compete with the OED. Also, at the risk of painting with a broad stereotypical brush, the French are snobs. It may be that their dictionary compilers throw out words that don't seem French enough, even if the words are in common usage.
As for many scientific names and terms, they are Latin, and you can't include them in the English word count without also including them in the word counts of other languages.
I am also dubious of the 800 word figure on most people's daily vocabulary. Is this just words they use or words they know? I've got a Meriam-Webster Dictionary sitting next to me that has 60,000 entries. Just to test, I started flipping through at random, and it took me 13 pages before I found a word I didn't know. (Pellucid.) I find it tough to believe that most people function using only 1.3% of the average dictionary.
The only way that the 800 word figure makes sense to me is if it refers to words I actually speak. If you take out all the silences, I would say that at most I talk a cumulative 2 hours a day. Assuming I jabbered away at one word a second, I could pack in 7200 words a day, of which most are probably repetitions, common words I use multiple times in the same breath like "the" and "and" and "tequila." If 90% of my speaking is repetition, and the remaining 10% unique words, the 800 figure seems pretty accurate. But it's not a limit of vocabulary--it's just that there's only so much time in the day that people will put up with my blathering.
posted
English is the most awful language in the Universe, and anyone who loves it must be the spawn of Satan.
Seriously, despite some of the comments here praising its simplicity, English is actually a very complex language. Researchers in Artificial Intelligence have been trying to crack the nut of natural language processing for decades, getting computers to "understand" written and spoken language. English grammar is one of the most difficult nuts to crack. English uses sentence structure to convey so much meaning in such complex ways that it defies analysis.
quote:Also, at the risk of painting with a broad stereotypical brush, the French are snobs. It may be that their dictionary compilers throw out words that don't seem French enough, even if the words are in common usage.
Haha. Actually, you nailed this one right on the head. The French are very strict about introducing words (yes, and even names) into their "official" language. Though this seems to have developed a much richer (though often more vulgar) underground slang than we have with English.
Mais français est le langue plus supérieur.
The 800 words is just a statistic I have heard multiple times. I think it's meaning is that somebody learning English as second language only needs to learn 800 words to understand the vast majority of English conversation, whereas if you were learning, say French, you need to know 3 or 4 times that many to have a comparable level of comprehension.
posted
The thing about English is, it's the product of about five different languages mixing together. English is about as pure-bred as your average American.
Back when the native Celts were overtaken by the Roman Empire, the official language of England became Latin. That's why we have so many latin roots in the language. Later, England was ruled by the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes (Germans). Later invasions by Vikings and the French mixed up the already mixed-up language even more. Today, we borrow words from Japanese, Italian, German, and more. This is the reason we have about six synonyms for some words, and this is the reason English has so many more words than any other language. Even countries that were repeatedly invaded were not invaded by so many different countries. England just got lucky that way, I guess.
Okay, fine. Hard facts have been introduced on the one side, nothing but sputtering challenges of the validity of such things as "facts" has been introduced on the other. I declare the subject dead. As I said, English isn't a single language at all. To speak of it as one invites nonsensical arguments. It has multiple grammers, multiple vocabularies, multiple national roots, multiple 'authoritative' sources. It is therefore multiple languages.
By the way, scientific names and terms, when they are made up by English speakers and submitted to English dictionary makers and accepted by said dictionary makers and published in English language journals as English words, are in fact English words with Latin roots. It is ridiculous to suppose that they are Latin words, since many of them would merely be rediculous if taken literally as Latin. Of course, many of these terms are also part of the official vocabularies of other languages...but official vocabularies have rules...and can be quantified. When you appeal to the fact that this or that word appears in the documented vocabulary of French or Spanish, you must accept the fact that those official vocabularies are quantifiably smaller than English...and not by a small margin either.
posted
"Hard facts have been introduced on the one side, nothing but sputtering challenges of the validity of such things as "facts" has been introduced on the other."
Survivor, I am a firm believer in facts. I believe that the sun rises in the East, I believe that nothing can be accelerated faster than the speed of light, I believe that Saddam actually had chemical weapons at one time, and I believe that very smart people can make the mistake of confusing assertions with facts. I have yet to see a fact introduced stating that English has the largest vocabulary of any language. Even the quote cut and pasted in the quote by Cicero doesn't claim to be hard fact--within the very context of the quote it states that the notion of English having the largest vocabulary is _arguable_, based upon _estimates_ of other languages. The author is using very precise language to state that his claim isn't very precise.
I think that the argument for English having the largest vocabulary is probably a good one, again based on cultural and geographic distribution. I doubt that Chinese would be in the running. Despite having a huge number of speakers, it is confined to one continent, and a fairly small range of cultures on that continent. French has little pockets of speakers in North America, South America, Africa and Asia, but doesn't really dominate any of these continents. I'm unaware that German has a major hold on any nation not touching Germany. If there is a rival language to English, I would guess that it's Spanish. It's been a long time since Spanish was a language with it's largest populations of speakers located in Spain, just as it's been a while since England was home to the biggest pocket of English speakers. English winds up with a lot of vocabulary not just by stealing words from other languages, but by having speakers in different areas use different phrases for the same thing. Thus, we wind up with sub, hoagie, and grinder all meaning the same thing--a sandwich on a long bun. I know that the same thing happens in Spanish because I had a Spanish class a few years ago with a teacher who was actually from Spain, and who was constantly explaining all the different variations in the language. We would ask how do you say this in Spanish and she would launch into long lectures about how you would say it this way if you were from the mountains of Spain and another way if you were from the coast and yet another way if you were from Mexico unless you were from the south of Mexico in which case all bets were off. I'm not disputing that English is a darn swell language, the best in the world maybe. I'm willing to root for the home team. But I'm also willing to question things I read.
quote:Something I would really like to know - is there a certain pattern to the English language? I mean specifically, could you rewrite the English language into something like:
(noun) (verb) (pronoun) (noun) (verb: past tense) (adjective) ...
Simply curious.
Basically, yes. The standard indicative sentence structure is (determiner) (adjective) (noun) (auxiliary verb + main verb) (object or complement). It gets complicated when you start tacking on adverbs (which can go almost anywhere), prepositional phrases, and subordinate clauses. The only other language I really know is French, but it follows pretty much the same word order (with some exceptions like adjectives after nouns and object pronouns before verbs). Even prepositional phrases seem to be strung together in a certain order (I'm not quite sure what it IS, but it seems to be there).
Posts: 83 | Registered: Sep 2002
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posted
First, let me clarify what I meant by "active vocabulary" when I said English had the largest active vocabulary. I did not mean the total number of words that the average person uses when writing or speaking. I was referring to the number of words which are still being used; that is, the number of non-archaic words. I no longer have easy access to the academic publications in which I read about this subject, so I guess I don't have anything to cite to back up the assertion about active vocabulary.
With regard to overall vocabulary:
quote:The English vocabulary has increased greatly in more than 1500 years of development. The most nearly complete dictionary of the language, the Oxford English Dictionary (second edition, 20 volumes, 1989), contains more than 600,000 words, including obsolete forms and variant spellings. It has been estimated, however, that the present English vocabulary consists of more than 1 million words, including slang and dialect expressions and scientific and technical terms, many of which only came into use after the middle of the 20th century. The English vocabulary is more extensive than that of any other language in the world, although some other languages—Chinese, for example—have a word-building capacity equal to that of English. (MSN Ecarta Encyclopedia)
One of the reasons English has such a large vocabulary is that (due to the Norman conquest and the subsequent mingling of the Anglo-Saxon and Norman populations) it has two main sources of its words: the Germanic and the Latinate. A lot of concepts in English are represented by both a Germanic and a Latinate word. (For example, freedom and liberty.)
[This message has been edited by EricJamesStone (edited February 08, 2004).]
posted
Thank you for the assist on the Chinese vocabulary question, Eric.
Yes, Chinese is a lot higher ranked in official vocabulary than pretty much anything other than English. With over 500,000 distinct characters (though only about 5,000 are still commonly used and only about 50,000 are officially encoded in the latest versions of Unicode), Chinese has a potential vocabulary of tens of millions of words, though only a fraction of that potential is used.
James, face it, all the facts are on one side here. That was not an idle assertion. It is okay to argue speculatively based on principles, the argument (introduced by myself) that English is in fact not a single language at all is based on principles, not 'hard facts' (well, there are some hard facts, but my argument doesn't really rest on them...okay, it sort of kinda does rest on certain........).
Never mind all that. I'm not persuaded that English is a good language, since there is much redundancy, imprecision, illogic, and even simple vulgarity in it. But we were arguing a simple matter of fact, does English have the largest vocabulary. And taken as a simple question of fact (leaving aside moral issues about whether having millions of words is a good idea), the answer is simply yes, English has the largest vocabulary of any human language ever.
I don't mind creative arguments over intangible issues (like whether English or Chinese is better, or whether there are multiple languages contained within English, or whether I'm a pompous @$$ ), but excessive argument over established matters of fact bore and irritate me. It's like arguing that the modern numerals weren't descended from arabic. It just so happens that they were, so what is the point of arguing that they are not. I can argue till my tongue falls out (or till I get bored) that I'm actually over six feet tall--it won't change the fact that I'm not over six feet, and anyone can establish this fact with a measuring tape.
I don't even mind an argument over whether facts are of any importance whatsoever in an argument, but I insist that those arguing that facts are not important admit that this is what they argue. Whenever I take a position that calls the facts irrelevent to the case, I always admit it straight up. It is necessary to making a coherent argument contrary to the facts.
posted
As long as we can all agree that English is an inherently better language, that's the important thing. Empirical evidence proves that English is better.
Posts: 1528 | Registered: Dec 2003
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posted
To prove that you need to prove that just because a language has a bigger vocabulary and more complex potential syntax it is therefore 'better'. I regard that as an extreemely dubious proposition. Even having the most native speakers (which honor English does not recieve) doesn't mean a language is better.
You would have to define what is 'good' or 'bad' in a language. Most of the world's pornographic literature is probably now written or at least available in English. Is that 'good'? The vast bulk of the widely accepted scriptures in the world were written in other languages than English, as far as I'm aware, no major religion has all or even most of its scriptures originally in English. Does that have anything to do with whether English is the 'best' language? I mean, God probably does speak English, even if he ususally speaks in some other language, right?
An astonishing amount of the everyday English we all know is only useful for offending people more pure-hearted than ourselves. Is that 'good'? How easy is it to talk about doing the right thing in English without sounding like an idiot? Not very, I think. It is much easier to sound clever while prescribing abominations in this language. Is that 'good'? Are any other languages better in this respect? I would hope so, but can anyone provide an example?
posted
I suppose the major source of argument here is how one defines the vocabulary of a language. I have a copy of the unabridged OED by my side, and it is full of words that are part of the documented vocabulary, but not actually in use any more. How often do you hear yex or wainful or specksioneer in casual conversation these days? I think that English (and possibly other languages--I can't say since I don't speak them) is interesting in that it has a large trove of words in dictionaries that aren't actually spoken, and another huge trove of words that are spoken but aren't in the dictionary. For instance, the OED doesn't contain the word "yowza," but I feel comfortable that most people understand me when I use it in the context, of, say, a superbowl half-time show.
I'm going to give this discussion a slight twist and make the argument that the English language isn't merely large, it is infinite. We mint words on the spot constantly. As long as the syllables that come out of your mouth are understood by your listeners (or by your readers if it is on a page,) it's a meaningful word. Darby Conley's latest Get Fuzzy collection is entitled, "Groovitude." Not in a dictionary, but I get the gist instantly. If I choose to describe the total number of words possible as "skidillions," most people will instantly recognize that as a huge, albeit made up, number. Science fiction writers make up new words all the time, things like ansibel and babbelfish, and no one has a problem with it. Finally, we take existing words and use them in new ways all the time. Again, citing a the comic strip "Get Fuzzy" as my scholarly source, the cat in the strip recently asserted that, "You can food anything if you chew it long enough." When the owner protests that he's using the language incorrectly, the cat points out that "These days, any word can be verbed." It may drive the language purists crazy, but, again, the real test for me is, does it convey the meaning the speaker intended to the listener? If so, I argue that it is a successful word.
I still haven't made up my mind, though, as to whether emoticons will be considered actual puncutation a century from now.
--James Maxey
[This message has been edited by James Maxey (edited February 10, 2004).]
posted
Once again this post is a bit old, having been written last night before James' most recent post.
Pattern to the English language?
Surely anyone you can see the possibility that the high numbers of words in the English language, may in part reflect, the proclivity for the English speaking world to be more inclusive in it's dictionaries. To borrow an example, isn't it actually likely that Spanish speakers say sushi too and it just hasn't made it in to their dictionaries? There by exaggerating English's word count with hundreds if not thousands of similar examples. It seems likely to me - though I don't have the resources to test this hypothesis.
It is easy to see why it is often argued that English is many languages, and there is certain grace to this perspective. But the fact is, is this is just as true of Spanish. In fact though James spoke of the existence of regional dialects as a factor in this, I suspect this is true of most every language. It is here, in Thailand where they have at least four regional dialects of Thai. But to me more the point (not that you missed this James,) is that both Spanish and English are primary languages on two or more different continents, and that provides a dynamic that can at least double the possibility of additional dialects and/or words.
This alone may indicate that Spanish could be far richer than a Spanish dictionary may indicate. And though because of the impossibility of truly measuring the vocabulary of a fluid, developing, 'live' language, it is in reality pointless for me even to venture an opinion, its far safer to make an appeal to authority, (an authority that uses who know what, possibly stale and dated source to compare the 'active' vocabulary of two languages,) even so, my best guess is that throughout history it is possible, nay likely, that practitioners of the English language where indeed far more consistently inclusive in their language, resulting in the language with the most words.
Sometimes there are simply not enough facts to 'prove' a point to an individual's satisfaction.
Full stop, sorry if I rambled. No more arguing for the moment.
By the way James, I am sorry if I stepped on your toes any - the above is me, my stupidisms and all, but when I read your above comments about the French and there language-pickiness being an influence in making their language look smaller than it really is, it was like you stole one of the gripes out of my head, and it lead me to wonder what other factors could lead to making English look so big relative to any other language, and I haven't listed half of them. Oh, and read the sample chapters to your book www.nobodygetsthegirl.com, it is just great fun and I plan to buy it when I return to the States. I remember taking certain amusement with your Canticle references. If you don't mind the comparison, the writing reminded me of some of the brighter, more surreal moments of Rucker's Software series.
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