The English language's vocabulary: especially and outstandingly precise?

In My Humble Opinion
1

There’s an opinion on the part of a friend of mine – in the general area of language use – held and much touted by him. I wonder whether there is any substance to it at all, and would be grateful for comment from those who are knowledgeable about these matters.

My friend (like myself, British, birth-speech English) is a great enthusiast for the English language, which he praises above all, for what he sees as its great precision: a very large pool of words, each of which has (ideally) a particular sharply-defined meaning. He is IMO rather a born “grumpy old man”, very much given to deploring many aspects / developments in modern life (which he’s been doing throughout the half-a-lifetime in which I have known him – we are now in our late sixties). A great many “modern” abuses of English in Britain, which he perceives, annoy him acutely. (He is also no fan of American English; but that, I feel, is not relevant here.)

He is more interested in and observant of this kind of stuff, than me, who tend to use my language just sloppily and randomly, as the fancy takes me. Deviations which he perceives from the wonderful precision of “English English”, deeply anger him. Among others – in recent times, he has developed a hate for the expression “right now” – which he feels, muddles and devalues the language’s precision: the word “now”, is perfectly sufficient – how can there be degrees of more “now”, than simply “now”? Similarly: recent griping from him about the perceived misuse of the word “share”, as in “sharing” news or ideas with people. In his mind, “share” strictly means apportioning-out of material stuff, by which the sharer ends up with less of same, than he would have done had he not shared: any wider use of the word, vitiates and violates its primary and precise function, “as above”.

This guy (in personal terms, a good friend and an excellent fellow) has long struck me as one of those folk who get a considerable buzz out of “recreational outrage” on all manner of issues; and somewhat given to dreaming up “his own facts” to support his already-conceived opinions. His bee-in-bonnet about the invaluable, should-be-preserved-at-all-costs, great precision of the English language: strikes me as a narrow and sterile hyper-scientific take on the “language thing”, discounting and rejecting poetry and imaginative literature in general. However, I’d be interested in opinions from any comparative-linguists out there, as to whether my friend is onto anything at all, re English being especially precise and valuable re exact meanings of words; or whether he’s just being weird.

2

Just weird, and kind of annoying. Though it’s not necessarily an uncommonly held opinion.

English does have a rather large vocabulary, largely due to imperialism. Though it can be kind of hard to define “vocabulary size” when comparing with agglutinative languages (things like Japanese and Hungarian could be considered to have ridiculous amounts of words due to this property. Agglutination is how we get fun misguided factoids like “Eskimos have hundreds of words for snow” or whatever).

However, I don’t think English is particularly precise. Like most languages, it fails at precisely describing mathematical concepts without extra notation or intermediate defintions, for instance.

To be honest, I’m not sure how you’d adequately define the “precision” of a language. The common-use vocabulary has a large number of words with widely understood unique meanings and a minimal number of synonyms? Even then, what exactly does that mean. Does a word that means “a few days ago” overlap with a separate word that means precisely “three days ago”? (In which case, languages with dynamic counter words like Japanese or Chinese win because they have literally infinite words for precisely counting objects).
The most “precise” language is going to be a computer language, hands down, and even those have ambiguities. As for NOHLs (Naturally Occurring Human Languages), I really think the question is far too ill defined to answer.

3

Eh, let him have his pet peeves. The rest of us will use the language how we like. That’s one of the other nice things about English.

I suppose “unique” is another one that he gets a bee in his bonnet about, and in particular the use of “more unique”, “very unique”, etc. After all, either something is unique or it isn’t, right?

Well, that’s not the case. Or rather, the set of properties that comprise uniqueness is flexible and adaptable. Everything is unique to some extent–a million identical copies of some Mickey Mouse toy aren’t really identical; they all have a different number of atoms, for instance. We usually adopt a less strict set of physical properties for “unique” to cover.

Or take a bronze sculpture which was one of ten castings from an artist. Well, an individual instance is pretty unique. Most likely, it has some flaws and characteristics which the other nine don’t have. Maybe it was the very first one, and especially valued for that reason. It’s pretty distinctly unique in that sense. But it’s not as unique as a piece of art for which only one original instance ever existed.

So I don’t buy into this nonsense for unique, or now for that matter. Now could refer to today, or this week, or this year, or this millenium. But right now means immediately, and IMHO has a distinct meaning.

4

Imperialism? gimme a break. English starts out with a large vocabulary because they were a small island off the coast of something bigger and more powerful. The language expands to include the words of their conquerors, at the same time loosing it’s grammer to enable communication with their patrons.

English has a more precise vocabulary. It has a noticably lest precise grammer. The lack of grammatical precision * and the added vocabulary “precision”* means that you loose meaning when translating from another language.

It’s notable, and lovely, but few people would think it’s an advantage.

5

Exactly. It was imperialism that expanded the English language. England got colonized. Modern English is a combination of Old English and Norman French.

6

Next time he asks you what’s on TV now, tell him “A man saying ‘th-’. Oh, it’s over. You missed it. Now it’s a woman saying 's-”. No, she’s done too. Now there’s a car. And it’s gone."

7

Not a comparative linguist but he’s so full of baloney he could be a ham sandwich. There is no concept that is expressible in one language that is not expressible in another. There just may not be a nice word or set phrase that sums it up.

8

By contrast, a French colleague of mine claims it is impossible to express a profound thought in the English language.

9

I agree. The OP’s friend seems pretty ignorant of the full complexity and depth of language, if he can’t understand, for example, why people say right now. But there are a lot of people who say things like this person does, and it’s more a reflection of chauvinism than any kind of understanding about how language works.

10

Q: What time is it, Yogi?
Yogi Berra: You mean now?

11

Thanks for responses. My essential feeling had been that on this issue, my friend was probably full of crap; but I’m not learned about linguistic matters. As it happened, random surfing of the Dope earlier today turned up a past thread, in which was discussed the seeming polar opposite of friend’s theory: the large number of quite different meanings which numerous English words – with no difference, even, in spelling – can have (as an example, the varied meanings of the word “check” were discoursed on). When the “English’s wonderful preciseness” topic next comes up in conversation with friend, I must raise this point – though it’s to be expected that he’ll extemporise some clever-seeming defence of his position.

I feel that – as aired by guizot and JWT Kottekoe – plain old nationalism plays a part here. My friend is, to a considerable extent, an old-fashioned patriot and chauvinist, with a strong belief that English-speaking – and particularly, English of England – civilisation and culture, are the world’s best in every aspect. Those who feel that way about their civilisation-and-culture often seem to have an attitude of “to hell with the facts, I’ll make up whatever I need to further my grinding of my axe about this issue”.

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And other things that came along. How does that go… “English doesn’t just borrow words; if follows other languages down dark alleys, mugs them and and riffles their pockets for loose vocabulary and valuable grammar”?

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I would say the contrary : English isn’t very precise. Maybe not regarding vocabulary, but regarding grammar and structure. It seems to me that it’s much easier to write an ambiguous sentence in English than in French or Spanish (the only other languages I know) . Even though I notice that often, I don’t have an example right now except the famous sentence “of occupied territories” in the UN resolution 242. It seems to me that the less constraining grammar allows for more flexibility and makes English less cumbersome, and as a result I often thought that English would be more fitting for poetry or litterature than for, say, business contracts.

14

James Nicoll:

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I’ve heard an extension of this theory. The theory is this :

English is different from many other languages in that (1) it has more words and (2) it has very sloppy spelling and grammar conventions, making it permissible to say the same thing many different ways

As a further note, IQ testing seems to show that the smartest people are asians, then whites, then blacks.

So, if asians are the smartest, why are their societies less successful than Western countries (many of whom use english or variants)?

Well, the asian languages have far fewer words, and a system of pictograms where to introduce another word to the language, all writers have to learn and accept a new pictogram. There are a finite number of possible pictograms that can be written with a reasonable number of brush strokes.

So, the people are smarter, but their language is flawed.

This is why Asian-Americans, where you take a person with a brain that is smarter on IQ tests and teach them English from birth, are one of the most successful subgroups in the entire world.

Is it true? The empirical evidence could be interpreted this way. It might not be true, it is very difficult to prove soft science theories like this as there are many confounding variables and you can’t conduct realistic controlled experiments. Of course, whether it is true or not, you cannot advance this as a theory because “political correctness” and modern ideas requires that you deny any and all racial differences exist at all, anywhere.

Even pointing out, say, that blacks seem to be pretty good at sports is enough to get you labeled a racist…

16

The most unnecessary sentence in the English language is “Here I am.” Of course you are. That’s what the word here means.

17

Brings to mind for me Kipling’s Captains Courageous, telling of the doings around the Grand Banks, of the fishing vessel We’re Here. One wonders what would be the reaction of said craft’s Captain Troop, to some smartass telling him that his ship’s name was unnecessary and stating-the-obvious…

18

Your friend is a crank. I don’t know him personally, but I suspect his opinions are based on a need to feel superior. Either that, or it’s a fear of disorder.

Mathematical notation and computer languages are precise. Natural languages like English are not. Even the most careful speakers and writers will sometimes lapse into ambiguity or vagueness. Legal systems attempt to introduce precision into written English, but we still need courts to interpret laws and contracts when it’s unclear what the words mean.

The fact that existing words acquire new meanings (semantic drift) is a strength of English and all other living languages. People have to be able to express new ideas, and sometimes the best way is to use an existing word in a new way. Sometimes a change catches on, and sometimes it doesn’t.

19

As an amateur etymologist I’m enjoying this thread.

Just sayin :smiley:

20

English is pretty middling IMO.

Punjabi is a language that is precise, typically colourfully so. Succinct.