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How many words are used in the average small-talk? How many words would I have to learn of a foreign language to become fairly competent on an everyday basis? I’ve heard about 2000-3000?
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How many words does an average person know in his mother language?
I think you’d better define what you mean by a “word”. If “dog” is a word, for example, is “dogs” a separate word or just the same word with a -s ending? How about “doglike”? And what about what James Thurber once called “dogs other than the carnivorous mammal”? If you know the word “dog” as in “dog one’s footsteps”, is that a different unrelated word that just happens to be spelt the same way?
It’s impossible to count words without establishing some ground rules first.
This doesn’t directly answer the OP, but is a related and interesting topic. There’s an artificially-constructed language called Basic English which has a vocabulary of 850 core words, typically augmented ( by the addition of relevant ‘jargon’ terms) to 1000 or so in areas of specific usage.
Despite its limitations, it’s actually a surprisingly flexible and readable language.
Which is pretty startling when you remember that the Merriam-Webster International Dictionary and the OED both contain around 500,000 and say that there are many they didn’t include.
Obviously, there is no way to measure this accurately. Can you say how many words you know? Even a relatively concise dictionary like the Merriam-Webster Pocket Dictionary has 40,000 entries. I just opened mine to a random page in the “M” section and I was familiar with about half the entries on that page, so I’d guess 20,000 as an upper limit for me and probably considerably fewer in reality.
Here is a discussion about the number of words the average person knows with reference to the work of Martin Joos. You are basically using the technique he tried.
Well I’m not asking.
Does this “Basic English” cheat by counting words that are spelled the same(homographs) as a single word? Example: entrance/entrance
To become “fairly competent” in a language, vocabulary is the easy part. The hard part is things like grammar, verb tenses, declensions, genders, etc. Vocabulary alone will have you talking like Tarzan or Tonto, which isn’t exactly “fairly competent.”
I don’t think so, at least not when the variance in meaning is that broad - I’m not even sure it permits a variety of meanings for a sord such as like - i.e. “I like bananas” and “time flies like an arrow” - I think the latter of those would actually be something along the lines of “time moves as an arrow moves” (assuming that particular interpretation of this famously ambiguous statement).
If you mean things that have a separate (subsection in a) dictionary entry, then an average speaker of any language will know something like 20,000 to 40,000 words. A very literate person will know more than 50,000. To show what I mean by separate dictionary entry, consider the English phrases “look down on,” “look up to,” “look out for,” and “look up,” in the senses of “consider with contempt,” “consider with admiration,” “take care of,” and “find in a reference book.” Each of these has to be learned separate from the meaning of the individual words (in the sense of things separated by spaces). I think linguists would call these morphemes.
That’s not my experience at all. I speak pretty decent Spanish, and the limitation I face is most definitely vocabulary. It’s much easier, in my experience, to learn pretty decent grammar than to learn normal, native-level vocabulary in a foreign language.
I second that, although it heavily depends on the language. Spanish, which I think I speak decently, has a grammar that is not too complex, so what restricts me in speaking it is rather vocabulary. I also learned Latin and French, but my impression is that among the Romance languages, Spanish tend to be bit different in which meaning Latin roots adopted. You wouldn’t guess from Latin of French knowledge that to answer is contestar in Spanish, for example.
German, which must be a pain to learn for foreigners, has a vocabulay that isn’t too difficult, especially for native English speakers as both languages are of Germanic origin. But the grammar is unncessecarily complicated and wicked.
Arabic, which I never learned but was interested in some years ago, seems to have a rather simple grammar, although unconventional to speakers of Indoeuropean languages. But learning its vocabulary must be tedious because it lacks internationalisms, i.e. words that appear more or less the same in languages closely related to each other. Even if you never learned Spanish, for example, you know straightaway what a teléfono is. In Arabic the word is totally different.
Maybe a hijack, but something downed on me while reading this : did someone already try to learn the basics of a foreign language, not the usual way, but by learning first the 850 foreign equivalents of this basic vocabulary? If it works with english it should work with other languages too, right?
Would I be able to express myself (even in a grammatially widely uncorrect, but still understandable way) if I were to learn these 850 words in some language or another, adding some very basic grammar rules (say, word order and usual plural, but not declansions nor conjugations, etc…, something like “Tommorow me eat cake”) ? It seems to be a very achievable task.
What do you think???
As a Mormon missionaries, we concentrated on learning just a relatively few rules of grammar and a lot of vocabulary words. From my experience learning Japanese, if you know 2,000 words or so, you can do fairly well.
When I was in med school >cough-cough< years ago, they held a Parent’s Day in October to explain where all the money was going, and they told the parents that in the first two years of med school, we would learn about ninety thousand words.
So we could talk like “The percentage of liveborn neonates with pulmonary hemorrhage (PH), pulmonary interstitial emphysema (PIE), hyaline membrane disease (HMD), acute bronchopneumonia (ABP), congenital malformations (CM), and surgery (SUR) were analyzed according to weeks of estimated gestational age (EGA).”
They didn’t tell our parents how many abbreviations came with the territory.
I’ve always wondered if that was more words than I knew at the time (I was twenty-four, but well-read and might have known a hundred thousand English words before I started. Or not).
This is why I hate the internet – I read an article about word count a while back, and now of course when the citation and content would come in handy, I can’t find it. It’s hard to search on things like English and word and count, as I just discovered.
Anyway, the gist of the artitcle said that English has a higher average word usage count than many other languages, looking at how many words the average educated adult English speaker trots out in his everyday speech, I want to say somewhere in the neighborhood of 5,000. The author went on to say that the average English speaker knows the meaning of even more English words, and also that for a person whose profession is tied to vocabulary, say a literature professor, the count goes up higher from there. The example given by way of contrast was Italian, where the average speaker might have 2,000 words in play, while Umberto Eco is running at about 4,000 – Umberto Eco being the example of a Italian speaker who is using a lot more words than the average bear.
So the point is that it depends on the language. English is high (if I understood the article correctly) because of the number of synonyms that entered the language from different sources, and also you can’t really compare the word count across different languages to get a sense of the competency or sophistication of the speaker.
(btw, I posted that not because I think you should listen to someone on the internet who vaguely remembers reading some article somewhere, but more in hopes that a more erudite poster might recognize the concept being pushed in the article, and provide more info. I think I only remembered it because I am a big Umberto Eco fan, and that example stuck with me.)
My understanding is that Basic English relies a lot upon idioms to replace lost vocabulary. So you don’t need the word “succeed” if you can say “make good” - but then, “make good” in that particular sense really has to be memorized as a separate lexical item anyway, so you’re not saving anything in the end.
delphica writes:
> Anyway, the gist of the artitcle said that English has a higher average word
> usage count than many other languages, looking at how many words the
> average educated adult English speaker trots out in his everyday speech, I
> want to say somewhere in the neighborhood of 5,000. The author went on to
> say that the average English speaker knows the meaning of even more English
> words, and also that for a person whose profession is tied to vocabulary, say a
> literature professor, the count goes up higher from there. The example given by
> way of contrast was Italian, where the average speaker might have 2,000
> words in play, while Umberto Eco is running at about 4,000 – Umberto Eco
> being the example of a Italian speaker who is using a lot more words than the
> average bear.
I don’t know about the average word usage for a speaker. I don’t even know how one would define that term. Surely for all of us there are words that we have used only a few times in our lives. We had to talk about something and we looked up the term and used it. Or we repeated something someone else said and used the term. Does the average word usage only count the words one would use at least once a year? Once a month? Once a week? Once a day?
However, in the vocabulary of an average adult native speaker of any language, there are always about 20,000 to 40,000 “words,” where the term “words” mean vocabulary entries. In other words, things that would get a separate entry (or subentry) in a dictionary. In the terms of linguists, these are morphemes. This is all the words that such a speaker would recognize in speech.
This is part of something that’s emphasized whenever you learn the basics of linguistics. There are no primitive languages. All languages are equally complicated. The grammar of the language may be complicated in one aspect or another, but there’s no average difference in the amount of complication. Average speakers always know about the same amount of vocabulary, although the speakers of one language may make more distinctions about certain subjects than other subjects.
Of course, there are always speakers who know much more vocabulary than the average speaker. In a highly literate culture (like the one that most English speakers live in), some speakers can become well-read and learn much more vocabulary than other speakers. This is no different than someone who learns to speak a lot of languages.