I saw a claim in another post that English has more words than any other language on earth.
Is this true?
How does one determine the number of words in a language? It seems in some languages which are heavily compounded, like German, the number of words could be almost infinite.
Didn’t we just do a whole thread on this? Brief answer: depending upon what count as a word, a whole bunch of languages could qualify for this title. But English is probably the winner by any objective standard due to the huge number of foreign imports, scientific terms, and synonyms.
Not to mention polysynthetic languages like the ones Cecil Himself examined, in which you can stack word upon word on each other to produce an entire sentence-within-a-word. I think the question is pretty much unanswerable.
(Slight hijack here…)
I’ve heard more than a few times, not that English has the most words, but that it’s one of the most “irregular” languages on Earth. That is to say, the structure and syntax is very difficult to learn because there are few, if any, rules.
How does English compare in that respect to other languages?
Well, the thing with English is that there are so many ways to say one simple sentence, with so many different words that mean the same thing or mean similar but different things.
Said it before, I’ll say it again… English sucks.
Oh, there are plenty of rules. Unfortunately, they are inherited haphazardly from as many different languages as we inherit words from.
Everyone I’ve met who speaks multiple languages (English not first) says that English is much harder than other languages they know. My experiences with French, Latin, German, Russian, and Japanese (none fluently, I’m afraid) have led me to believe that they are vastly more structured and normal than English.
Hell, you obviously speak it! What about it seems real structured to you? Not the fact that the grammer always comes in the same order, obviously. Certainly not the words, which vary from chemise to kamekaze and back across.
Technically:
Japanese has a very strict grammar which makes it very easy to determine emphasis and word placement. Unfortunately, they have a really complex ‘conjugation’ set (they have different modes of address for varying levels of politeness) and many of their words are even more multi-meaning than English words.
Russian and German are both very nice in my opinion when it comes to grammar and words. Plus, Russian has a conjugation for ‘until one loses all perception of reality’, so some verbs can be made very entertaining.
French and Latin are essentially the same language (obviously, they have varied word sets, but their grammer and style is extremely similar, for obvious reasons). That language has a lot of irritating peculiarities. Less than Japanese and waaay less than English, but still not easy.
I (native German speaker) can only give my personal view, but to me English was a very easy language to learn (compared to the other languages I’ve learned or am learning, French, Latin, and Spanish, and some bits of Italian). I think the rules of the grammar are rather simple (and at least pretty logical), the most difficult part is pronunciation and spelling.
Pros for English as an “easy” language:
All in all, I think English wouldn’t have become the world’s leading lingua franca if it were more difficult (even though this rise is mostly due to historical and political reasons).
Germans themselves, btw, usually think they’re language is an unnessecarily difficult one and a pain for foreigners to learn. From what Paper Greek says, I guess that’s not the case.
Despite the overlay of foreign terms and various other accretions, though, English and German DO share a common root back, oh, 1500 to 2000 years… which might give a German speaker an advantage in learning English. Or might not.
Myself, I didn’t find it difficult to learn to communicate in French, but I do find it hard to communicate fluently in that language.
Schnitte
not forgetting no stupid masculine and feminine to learn- “la porte” indeed
It´s easy to learn English, but it´s hard to learn to speak it well, as I´ve heard several linguists point out, and I think they´re right.
It´s easy to learn to communicate in English because the syntax is easy, the basic grammar isn´t that hard (there aren´t different verb forms for every person as in most languages - I,you,we, you, they * go*, only he/she goes -, nouns don´t have gender or cases as in German or Latin, etc) and because you can get along with a basic vocabulary.
But as English does in fact have such a rich vocabulary, so many synonyms and quasi-synonyms with just slightly different shades of meaning, and so many homonyms (words or expressions that are written the same way but can have a very different meaning depending on the context - think of “make up”) it´s hard for a foreigner to master it perfectly.
Of course, it´s always easier for a speaker of an Indogermanic language to learn another one, the English grammar is easily understandable to an e.g. German native speaker, while with Finnish, e.g., you have to learn a totally new way of thinking, so to say, to come to terms with the grammar (which is clearer and more logical than German grammar, in my opinion, but it works in a totally different way), and I suppose it´s the same with Japanese or Inuit or any other language from a different family - especially when even the words don´t have common roots (which happens to be the case with many German and English words, both have been influenced by Latin and other European languages).
What can I say, I absolutely adore compound words. They just make sense. There are a lot of hard parts to German, and I’m certainly not fluent, but it is more fun to use than French or Latin. IMHO.
Have you read that text Mark Twain penned about the German language? He seems to abhor compound words.
I’m in my fourth year of studying Spanish, and it seems (although it could just be because of vocab and grammer quizzes from hell every week) that Spanish has a lot more words than English. Assuming you count only English words and words that aren’t truly english but have been completely absorbed into the vocabulary, this still seems to hold true. Seems to me that there are multiple words for almost everything in spanish - ser/estar, por/para, saber/conocer, etc.
NinjaChick, mind telling us what those Spanish words mean? I’d be willing to bet that each of them has at least three synonyms in English.
Schnitte has some good points. Remember, Modern English is, at root, a very simplified language. Take a look at Old English and see what I mean – there are not only verb tenses, but there is gender and even declensions. The last two were dropped from the language, so that nearly every noun has only one form. (The exeception are those that deal with the sex of a person: actor/actress, and these are vanishing – “poetess,” for instance, is nearly obsolete.) Adjectives don’t have gender (except for one or two like blond/blonde). If you know an English noun or verb, you never need to worry about its inflected forms.
The vocabulary is very large because English wasn’t shy about borrowing from other languages.
<hijack of the hijack>
Chronos, I´n afraid they don´t. ser and estar are two forms of the verb to be and the difference has no equivalent in English (nor in many other languages). It would take a long time to explain it properly, but “ser” is for permanent attributes, while “estar” is momentary. eg. you can say “ella es bonita” (she is beautiful, as a permanent property - she is a beautiful girl) or “ella está bonita” which means she´s looking really beautiful today (because she´s wearing a new dress, she´s done her hair nicely, she´s happy and therefore looks beautiful, whatever). there´s many more possibilities and rules to the ser/estar distinction, and locations, for instance, are given with “estar” even if the house is always there and there´s nothing temporary about it.
por/para both translate to English as “for”, but they have different shades of meaning as well - para is the use, while por is the reason, roughly said. “este regalo es para mi madre” - this present is for my mother, while “hago eso por mi amigo” - I am doing this for my friend, as in “for the sake of”. (a more dramatic and illustrative example would be “morir por la patria” - to die for your country.)
saber/conocer both translate to English as “know”, but saber is as in “to know something”(knowledge) and conocer is used as in “to know a person/place/thing” - “sabes inglés?”-do you know English? vs. “conoces Inglaterra?” - do you know England?
these are but a few examples, but there are many examples of this - but vice versa as well. </hijack of the hijack>
NinjaChick, though these were particularly nice examples, I do think English has far more words than Spanish.
At least that´s what my linguistics professors say…
This is due to the fact that English assimilates words very easily, the loan words range from old Norse, Latin and French to just about all the languages of the former Empire. (And this even without counting the incredible number of regional varieties of English.)
Of course, many of these words are rarely used… but they´re there.
Universe , not to turn this into a debate, but I don’t know if it’s valid to count those as English words - you just said that they’re actually from different languages. Of course, I don’t know if languages can really be compartmentalized like that, as seperate entities from each other. But that did make me think - when I spent a month in Kentucky this summer, the locals spoke what seemed to be a whole different language - it almost bordered on culture shock. Just a random thought…
There are a lot of things about English that drive non-English speakers crazy, especially in present/past tenses. In the past tense, when we decided to choose we chose instead of choosed. Dump, dumped. Eat, ate (not eated). Run, ran. Bite, bit. Wander, wandered. Lie, lied, or lay, depending on the meaning. Lay, laid. Fly, flew. Sing, sang, or sung. Want, wanted. Another anomaly is I comb my hair – which means not just one hair, but all of them. But a werewolf can say “I have hair growing out of my hands” and also say “I have hairs growing out of my hands”.
When I visited Arkansas, and the truckers spoke to me I could understand them. When the spoke to each other it sounded (to me) like:
“Yu’aw gow yo truck re’ay”
“Ah caih’ ge’ neaow fuwha’ gih’mah nai’”
“boo’shaih. Gee’yamm braw’wuh dohng’iv a foohn sheeah”
I listened for minutes on end trying to hear a word that I could understand. They were definitely speaking English, but I couldn’t (with my accent) understand a word.
I don’t know about other languages, but spanish has irregular past tenses too. If the verb “ser” translated normally it’d be something like Yo si, Tu siste, El sio. But instead it’s Yo fui, Tu fuiste, El fue (all of those of course should have accents but I can’t be bothered to go to the character map). That’s another thing, English just has one set of letters. No tildes or accents or other addendums to its letters. Of course, the different pronounciations for “c” and all the vowels could count, as well as double letters like “ch” and “ph.”
English is an amalgamation of practically every Western European language (because nearly every Western European linguistic group has conquered the British Isles at some point) and has borrowed from most (nearly all) language families around the world. It’s said that other languages borrow words: English chases languages down dark alleys to rifle their pockets for vocabulary. 
English also has one of the most expressive vocabularies with its use of near-synonyms,' what **Zagadka** protests. I think those not-quite-similar words make English the perfect language for saying ``It's a house, but not a home.'' when you encounter a domicile that just isn't homey. (Impossible in French.) English can also distinguish between gigantic’, immense', and the merely large’ or `big’, not to mention between the vastness of space compared to the immensity of Jupiter. What trips up neophytes, veterans can use. A fine language is a finely-honed instrument, nice for making nice distinctions.