I recently read a “cool facts” list that stated that English has the largest known vocabulary of languages, and that is twice as large as the second largest.
True?
Probably. We have oodles of archaisms, technical terms, foreign borrowings, coinages, and other little words that we don’t know about. Our total vocabulary is in the area of about a million words. English is indeed, a monstrous language.
I don’t know about twice as large, though…
Here’s an interesting link in which a linguist states that the question of which language has the most words is pointless, because spelling conventions vary, there are differences in inflected forms, and that sort of thing. It’s interesting, although I wish the guy would have elaborated a little further. I think the idea is that it’s hard to decide exactly what you count, when you’re counting up words. Do “walk”, “walks”, and “walked” all count as one word? If not, then languages with more inflected verb forms are going to have way more words. What about languages like German, where you can essentially string together compound words on the fly? Do you count every word in the dictionary, or every possible word that you can construct in the language, or what? So the question of which language has the largest vocabulary is essentially unanswerable.
According to Mario Pei in The Story of English, English is indeed “the world’s largest vocabulary” and this linguist thinks he’s right. I maintain that it’s possible to give this definite answer to the question because, whatever range of permutations you allow for word building, English has a bigger base of lexemes to build upon. It’s no wonder why. English has always been voracious, one might say insatiable, at taking in new vocabulary from any language anywhere in the world.
I think Guinness credits English as the largest with 300,000 nontechnical terms and another 500,000 technical terms.
Interesting… thanks guys!
That makes a lot of sense, Jomo. (I’m putting that book on my “things to read” list, by the way.)
Don’t bother with Mario Pei’s The Story of English. It was published in 1953 and is way out of date. Even back when it was published, it wasn’t very accurate. Get some more recent, more accurate book about the history of English.