Any history of the English language will explain that because of the various invasions of the British Isles during its history, the English language has multiple words for the same concept from different languages (German from the Anglo Saxons, French from the Normans, Scandinavian from the Vikings, plus a smattering of Gaelic from the original Britons). These different words came to have subtly different meanings over the years giving English its expressive power (e.g. skill from the Norse vs craft from the German)
But, seeing as multiple invasions by different peoples with different languages is not solely the preserve of the British Isles, how unusual is that? Does English even have a actually have higher than average number of synonyms? Is there anything unusual about how synonyms used in English, with subtle different meanings. Which language has the most synonyms?
English certainly has a larger total vocabulary than most modern languages. That means that there are either a lot of concepts for which English has a word and other languages don’t, or a lot of synonyms. I’d guess it’s the latter.
The Oxford Dictionaries does think English probably has more wordsthan comparable languages. (Of course, this depends a lot on what you consider a “word” with agglutinative languages like German forming multiply-compound words readily so they have an almost infinite number of words. However, these would almost necessarily not be synonyms of other words.)
This articlesays that few other languages use thesauruses, which would also imply that English is unusually rich in synonyms…
I’m currently plowing through all 101 podcasts in the A history of English series, and am up to episode 56 or so.
One of the things I’ve learned is that English has borrowed so heavily from so many different languages (latin, greek, german, dutch, danish, norse, swedish, french, just to name a few) that we’ve ended up with multiple words for the same thing.
So according to that website, yes, we do have more synonyms than average. By far. Thanks to borrowing from so many more languages than typical.
Actually that podcast is one of the things that prompted this podcast.
Most of the loan words come from the two invasions(Vikings and Normans), which as county’s histories go is not a huge number of invasions. Hell I’m sure Poland went through more than that in a week.
Firstly, because No one was ever precious about the language. To be sure we have letters from dismayed of Croydon, complaining about split infinitives and the use of ‘them’ as an inclusive pronoun for he/she, but nobody really cares. Of course, there are many different dialects and languages within the various parts of the UK, but Welsh and Gaelic aside, we mostly understand one another. Oop Norf, they use a lot of old Norse words like ‘beck’ and ‘tarn’ because the Vikings settled there for a while. Dahn Sarf, we swallowed the Norman invaders whole, and while the common folk carried on using the old language, the aristo’s switched to French - this meant that if you wanted to seem a bit posh, you called your pig meat ‘porc’ and cow meat ‘boeuf’. For legal and church matters they used Latin so that the plebs wouldn’t understand what they were saying.
All of that pales into insignificance compared to the effect of The British Empire. A great many commonly used words originated in the Subcontinent and Africa, just as those countries used English as a convenient common language.
Because the English were busy invading other nations and making them part of their empire. At the same time, Americans were conquering the continent and adding Native American words.
Also, the Norman Invasion was an influence for centuries: Normans ruled England, and there was a need for synonyms that allowed legal terms to be understand by the English peasantry and the Norman rulers. You had two languages for longer than most other invaded countries, so much so that the French words were assimilated into English. When science came along, Latin and Greek words were added.
A few loan words came that way (jodphur, kayak, barbeque, bungalow, etc. ) I cant think of any synonyms (except maybe powwow Vs parley?) So that doesn’t explain it to me.
While that’s obviously the case why wasnt that the case for countless other conquered nations?
A few loan words came that way (jodphur, kayak, barbeque, bungalow, etc. ) I cant think of any synonyms (except maybe powwow Vs parley?) So that doesn’t explain it to me.
While that’s obviously the case why wasnt that the case for countless other conquered nations?
A synonym isn’t simply an alternate word that is interchangeable with another. Synonyms emerge and take hold when variations on an already existing lexical denotation arise though new contexts or communicative needs, to convey different connotations. And this doesn’t just mean with new technologies, etc.; it is driven more, I believe, by new social dynamics. Combine this with the history of the British Isles, along with Britain’s colonial conquests, and more recently add the U.S., with its own history, and you have a vast arena for the expansion of a lexicon in this way. Probably nothing exemplifies all of this more than the phrasal verbs of English, which by their highly productive and polysemous nature provide English with a huge wealth of synonyms.
C’mon, again? That question has actually been hashed and rehashed in these boards, from there we jump to “what are you calling a word”, pointing out that for example English dictionaries have separate entries for different forms of the same verb or different-gendered versions of the same profession whereas those of other European languages do not…
IOW: prove that assertion, because so far every time it’s cropped up here it’s been left unproven and it’s come up quite a few times.
There’s a lot of good info above, but no one’s mentioned inkhorn terms. What’s that?
Well, for a couple-three centuries or so, scholars coined lots of new words from Latin and Greek, or sometimes French, even though there was a prefectly good English word that meant more or less what they wanted to say. Maybe it wasn’t a perfect fit, so they wanted a word that was. Or maybe they just looked down on English words, thinking they were inferior to Latinate words. Not all of them were adopted into English, but many were.
Another source for synonyms is a new scientific discovery or invention and different people coining different words for the same thing. For example, various parts of the automobile are known by different terms on either side of the Atlantic. Most people are aware that the hood of a car is also called a bonnet. Similarly for lift and elevator; flashlight and torch; and other things. Neither set of terms has displaced the other; they’ve just added to the synonyms in English.
I am not sure either of these are widely used on opposite sides of the atlantic to count as synonyms. In the UK flashlight is not a synonym for torch, it is the American word for torch, that’s not a synonym any more than the French word for torch is a synonym (in the US it might do, as both torch and flashlight are used and have subtley different meanings, electric torch vs actual flaming torch)
ITV had a great series back in the 1990s (?) called the Adventure of English. I think it’s on YouTube but it may have been taken down. Thanks to the Normans, French actually has probably had the greatest impact on the English that was spoken prior to 1066. Latin words were probably infused into the English language before Duke William’s invasion and Latin had also influenced French, which further impacted the English language that was evolving during that time.
English got an infusion of Latin when Christianity arrived, which was long before William. Also, it would be quite the understatement to say that French influenced Latin. French is, essentially, a modern form of Latin like the other Romance Languages. And then during the age of science, Latin was still the language of the educated, along with Greek, so lots of Latin and Greek words borrowed (sometimes combined into the same word).
But yeah, with the influence of French, English pretty much became a different language in a few hundred years as what we call Old English because what we call Middle English. Chaucer is at least mostly readable by us modern speakers, but Beowulf is not. Of course, Chaucer was before the so-called Great Vowel shift was complete, so pronunciation is quite different.
On what grounds do you dispute the cite I provided in post #3? Oxford Dictionaries would appear to be a pretty authoritative source (although admittedly they say “quite probable” and refer to “comparable world languages” to exclude agglutinative languages).
The difficulty in counting “words” is recognized, but what specific languages do you propose have more than English? There’s little question that English has more words than Spanish, for example. And the fact that English may list different forms of the same verb separately has little impact on the total, since English has so few distinct forms (just four for most regular verbs, compared to over 30 in Spanish) and verbs make up only about one seventh of the total number of words in English (per Oxford Dictionaries.) There also aren’t all that many gendered nouns in English.
There’s little doubt much of the lexical richness of English is due to the fact that it is a fusion of a Germanic base with a Romance overlayer. The question is why this happened in English but not in other languages in countries that were conquered by a group with a different language. While Arabic influenced Spanish, Spanish adopted far fewer Arabic words even though the Arab occupation lasted seven hundred years vs only a few centuries before Norman French fused with Old English.
Interestingly, it didn’t happen between Anglo-Saxon and the Celtic languages of Britain. The Britons provided very few words for English, and neither did the other Celtic languages of the British Islands. There was influence from Norse, but not nearly to the extent of Norman French.
With due caution about Wikipedia in general, and also considering this article just compares the number of words in particular dictionaries in various languages, it has English somewhat down the list. And the English dictionary given is the Oxford English Dictionary. It notes that “There is one [other] count that puts the English vocabulary at about 1 million words — but that count presumably includes words such as Latin species names, prefixed and suffixed words, scientific terminology, jargon, foreign words of extremely limited English use and technical acronyms.”
But in dictionary comparison it says OED 228k words, Woori Mal Saem Korean dictionary 1.1mil, with several others in between. As a non-native speaker student of Korean I would say Korean has more commonly used words than English does. It’s got a somewhat similar thing going to Germanic and Latinate English words, Sino Korean and Korean indigenous words, plus a lot of English borrowed words, and areas of the language that specify common things more exactly than English (for example different ways to say ‘of them’ when counting X of something depending what you’re counting, different categories of relatives in the family, etc). Also ‘Sino-Korean’ words aren’t necessarily adopted directly from Chinese but can be coinages of Chinese characters unique to Korean, or coined by the Japanese which entered Korean in the colonial period, so many synonyms among them also.
Given that there are over 1.2 million named species, that couldn’t account for it. Also, a species name consists of a genus and species name, so it’s not a single word. Considering the genus and species names separately, however, would give a number that was not much lower, since although many specific names are the same most genera have only one or a few species. (For birds, the Helms Dictionary of Scientific Bird Names, which includes genus and specific names, has 8,500 entries for around 10,000 species of birds.) Also, since the purpose of scientific names is to transcend language, if you count scientific scientific names in one language, you would need to count them for all.
Lexically, it is. One could legitimately say that “sapiens” or “melanogaster” is not an English word, but that “Homo sapiens” and “Drosophila melanogaster” are.
But Colibri’s larger point is that it doesn’t matter, for the purpose of this discussion. If you’re trying to count words in different languages, you’re better off ignoring species words since they exist as part of every language. Why waste the time?