Yet strangly you seemed to have passed over the fact that the Romans came hundreds of years before the Saxons. http://www.great-britain.co.uk/history/romans.htm
Rome invades Britain in BC 43 and leave in AD 410. The germanic tribes didn’t come in mass until after the Romans left .
As far as thesauri go, I understand there are French and German versions of them. But I also understand they aren’t as useful as English ones are.
About the history of English, Derleth got a couple items wrong that haven’t been corrected.
The Romans were in England well before the Germanic tribes. Britannia was a Roman povince starting somewhere around the first century AD (I forget the exact date). But they pulled the legions out about 3 centuries later. The Germanic tribes came in afterward.
The other point is that before the Celts, the people living in Britain were not Germanic speakers. Rather they spoke some non-IndoEuropean language. Possibly it was related to Pictish, which we don’t know much about but is generally thought to be non-IndoEuropean.
As far as the OP, as others have pointed out, counting words in a language is difficult. One indication is to go by the size of the largest dictionaries. The largest in English is the OED which has some 600,000 words in the 2nd edition. That’s probably not the best one to go by for several reasons, the principal one being that it is a historical dictionary, having many obsolete words.
Webster’s Second (1932) also has some 600,000 words while the third edition (1961) only has 450,000 words. The reason for the shrinkage is that they were under more stringent space limitations, so the third edition only had words in use as recently as 1750 while the second went back to about 1500. The fourth edition is currently being compiled and it will be interesting to see how large it is once it’s published.
Oops! It took me so long to compose my message that two people got in there with corrections.
However, I’ll take the opportunity to correct TitoBenito who said
Julius Caesar who made sort of a reconnaissance in force in 43 BC, but really didn’t try to conquer the place. The serious conquering of Britain didn’t start until some 80 years later under Hadrian (I think).
Derleth, I might have come off a bit rough there, but it was all in good fun.
While I’m here - off my head I think it was Claudius, Son of Tiberitus, adoptive son of Augustus, sister-son of Julius Cesar who invaded Britain to settle. Claudius called his son Britanicus to celebrate the event – unfortunately Nero got the better of him.
No. However, English is the only language where one really needs a thesaurus. No other language has a many synonyms.
Sorry, But I know Japanese comes out ahead. They have 1 primary syllabllary, 2 minor syllablaries, and 2 identical character sets large enough to rival the Chinese. Actual, one of their character sets is Chinese, essentially! Then they (nutty people!) went back and made it so you could create every word twice (at least) over in Japanese with the CHinese character set!
But they have not nearly as many actual words as English.
Well, let me state that a “reconnaissance in force” is what the generals call their invasions when they fail! 
I remember reading somewhere that Sanskrit was the largest language ever.
Well, not quite true actually. Whilst the Japanese did go out and steal a number of the Chinese characters (“kanji”), only about 2000 are in common usage and there are approximately 6000 in all. The other two character sets comprise of approximately 40 characters each (katakana and hiragana). These are the only 3 character sets in Japanese.
As long as we’re correcting everybody else’s corrections, the only recon Julius could have been doing in 43 B.C. was six feet underground, because he was assassinated the previous year. His recon campaign took place in 55 B.C. The conquest of Britain began in A.D. 43, under Claudius, as noted by Winston. (What’s a Eurasian doing taking Winson’s name???)
> Did the Vikings not stay in England, but did stay in France?
A brief look at a map of Britain will pretty much reveal where the Vikings settled down, heavily concentrated in the north east counties. The towns and places with one of the following endings are very likely originally Viking::
There’re also a fair number of hybrid names; where only a part of the name is of Scandinavian origin: Grimston.
The Vikings also stayed on in France (Normandy) but were far fewer, and quicker assimilated.
(A quick google, there’re probably better sites: http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/lj/conquestlj/legacy_01.shtml?site=history_vikings)
I always thought York was named after some Viking called Jork, a common Scandinavian name; but it turns out the town precedes the Viking invasion.
My father, from Faeroe Island, sometimes calls The Shetland Islands (north Scotland) for Suduroy, the “South Islands”, since it’s so far south - this is also common in other Nordic languages I think. The Shetlands were colonized by Norwegian Vikings and remained Danish and Norwegian possessions through the late middle-ages.
Why stop at correcting everybody elses’ corrections when we can correct our own corrections; Claudius was not a son of Tiberitus, but of Drusus Claudius Nero, which was Augustus adopted son.
Actually, this is flat out wrong (no offense intended whatsoever). Japanese has 2 syllabaries (neither of them are “primary,” and there is no third one) and a truncated set of Chinese characters. The government has officially sanctioned 1975 Chinese characters for “official use” and teaching in schools, but of course there are at least hundreds more that fall outside of this set but are nevertheless in common enough use that most literate Japanese recognize them (though they can’t alwasy quite remember how to write them).
Beyond that, there are technically hundreds, perhaps even thousands more characters that are technically “in use,” but pretty much unneeded for every day life. Many of these characters are used in place names or personal names (and thus only need to be understood by people living near the place or with the person). Others are individual characters for plants, animals, foods, etc. The most common of these are written with their original characters, but the less common ones are simply spelled out in the syllabary, though a Chinese character technically exists for most of them if you want to look it up.
However, it is a misleading to say that Japanese uses all the same characters as Chinese in addition to their own syllabaries. Chinese has far and away more characters than Japanese, though having never really studied Chinese, I cannot say how many of their characters they actually put to active use on a regular basis.
When you say they “went back and made it so you could create every word twice over in Japanese,” I assume you mean the separate “Chinese” and “Japanese” readings for many characters. Though true to an extent, this is an exaggeration. Very few non-general use characters commonly use more than one of their readings, and in fact many of them only have their “Chinese” readings, as Japanese readings were never assigned to them. So it is not a fully equal system. However, if you want to be shocked, there are a handful of characters that have mulitiple Japanese and Chinese readings. But not that many.
In a hyperbolic fit, many people (myself included) go on to include the Roman alphabet and arabic numerals in the the Japanese writing system, so that we can say sensational things like “In order to read their language, the Japanese have to learn 5 separate writing systems!!!” While it is true that Roman characters and arabic numerals are in common use, after learning all those Chinese characters these two paltry writing systems must seem like a lark. This is probably why most of my Japanese friends’ Roman lettering is much prettier than mine. It’s kind of like that old theory that Superman can “fly” because the gravity on his home planet was much greater.
This is probably true. However one characteristic Japanese shares with English is its ability to assimilate other languages. Just as they borrowed huge chunks of the Chinese language a thousand years ago, Japanese is appropriating foreign “loan words” (I use quote marks because they have shown no inclination to ever give them back) at breakneck speed. So Japanese is using the same dirty, backhanded techniques English used to increase its vocabulary.
Sorry to get so wanky, but all the knowledgable people on this board always make me so jealous, and this is the only thing I know anything about!
OK, after having my ass handed to me ( … thinly-sliced … on multiple platters … ), I’ll pose this as a question/anecdote:
A journalist friend of mine said that he dislikes thesauruses because they list words that are non-quite-synonyms. For example, gigantic' is not the same as large’ or `big’, even though the strict dictionary definition and thesaurus listing may lead you to believe they are. I like thesauruses for the same reason: I can look up a word I know to be fairly close to the word I want, and in moments get the word that conveys the precise shade of meaning I want.
Is this possible in most other languages? Do other languages, in general, have the same amount of near-synonyms as English has?
(Don’t you just hate it when you put effort into a long post only to find that it’s more or less crap? FTR, ignore my post until the Norman Conquest. Read what pravnik and others have written, instead.)
Pregunta a su bibliotecario para un “tesauro español.”
(Ou pour un thésaurus français.)
Then again, googling shows that the “thesuaruses” in these languages are mostly either multilingual or collections of technical terms.
<hijack>
If it’s any consolation, I think I’m developing a crush on you.
Ahh, linguistics! swoon</hijack>
I must point out I said invade not conquer. I used this date to show the first major contact with the island the Romans had.
> they list words that are non-quite-synonyms
If you mean words that not quite has the same meaning, Steven Pinker in his book, The Language Instinct, had something to say about this. The gist of his argumentation, I think, is that no two words ever has the exact same meaning, there are no perfect synonyms. Further this is instinctive in humans, children have an inborn abhorrence to classifying multiple words in the same meaning slot. Thus there are no other word, in English, that means the same as gigantic, and gigantic is not the same as big or large, great, immense etc. I may have misrepresented his idea, I didn’t find the book lived up to it’s widely acclaimed status.
English was the first language to have a thesaurus, a book solely to tell you other words which could be used in place of one.
I always found that fascinating.
you know, I got one question…do these numbers on how many english words there are…do they include words that are not really in use in modern times? for example, does anybody really say “Shalt” or “Thou” in common speech? That seems to be what the question was going towards…what language has the largest “common” vocabulary…or at least I felt it was. And every english speaking country has it’s own dialects and slang…but guess what…so does every other freaking language when it moves to another country…spanish(spain versus Mexico), French (France versus Lebanon), Arabic(Lebanon versus Morrocco), english (US versus Britain)…the list goes on and on. So how can there actually be an “accurate” count of what the largest language truly is? I think we need a criteria to really get to the bottom of such a question as this.
There can’t be. I made that point before I shoved my foot so far into my mouth it took the rest of this thread to dig it out. C’est la vie. (Would you consider that an English phrase? Did you, as an English speaker, understand it?)
Why can’t there be? For the exact reasons you mentioned. Even if we developed good criteria for counting, how would we go about the process? Questioning everyone isn’t possible and, besides, how many words do you know? (Don’t waste your time. The question is almost impossible to answer.)
Some people (I’ve forgotten who. Having feet in the brain does absolute wonders for the memory.) claim that the whole notion of language' is a fiction. Those people propose isoglosses,’ or general approximations of how well two people can understand each other.
As an example, I might have an easier time understanding someone speaking slowly in simple German than I would have understanding someone who speaks fast Cockney, even though Cockney is nominally an English dialect.
Language is like all inventions of the illogical mind: Messy and impossible to describe mathematically. (Damn, now Language == Love. Good enough. ;))
Enough already.
I’m getting really, really tired of the stereotype of Vikings ‘pillaging, burning, raping, destroying’. On other forums, I wouldn’t bother, but we’re fighting ignorance here.
The Vikings where foremost traders and excellent explorers. The seamanship is still baffling. Anybody who’s seen the North Atlantic will agree. Especially after seeing the boats they used.
Why oh why would they cross thousands of miles of dangerous sea to destroy what they find. Look at the Vikings as the mafia of the day. They wanted trade, riches, women, respect, whatever. Bringing all the loot back in the boats was not very practical. Better to stay put and enjoy the riches.
Yes, they used violence, to put force behind the arguments and cut a good deal. They made offers the people of the British islans couldn’t refuse, so to say.
But these are guys that went as far as Istanbul and the Black Sea. By boat. Who came to the North American continent. Obviously by boat. Who had a rich and diversified culture.
To view them as beserks with horned helemets (there were no horns), is just ignorant.
Also - I must imagine the Swedish thesaurus sitting on my bookshelf here in the den, since no other but English excist,
Oh, and Winston. That thing about combining words is not unique to Danish. It goes for all the Scandinavian lanuages. You know, us which you call ‘Asia’ with a sneer.
Most things I’ve read and people I’ve talked to (academics, linuguists, teachers) on the topic say English has the largest vocabulary. There is, of course, no way to measure the absolute total number of words in the language - you could take the OED and Websters and combine them. If you added all accepted slang and dialect words - assuming this were possible - the total would increase immensely, but are they English words? Where I come from, we say “nowt” for “nothing”. Most English would understand this, I believe few North Americans or Australians would. So is it an English word or not? The American slang “buck” for dollar is also understood by the majority of English - we are much more familiar with US culture than they with ours - so is this an English word, even if “nowt” is not?
Then, adding all technical vocabulary from engineering, sciences, technology etc. would double the total again, even if you could find every term in every field.
Other languages pose similar problems, and have some of their own: as mentioned above (in relation to Danish) some languages prefer compound words to entirely new ones. For example, the German language has been (until the recent advent of IT) resistant to the integration of foreign words: a German feels more comfortable with a word he can analyse and take apart - a compound word made from existing German words, whereas the English language loves to integrate new foreign words that cannot be broken down into smaller, understandable pieces.
While English-speakers use Greek or Latin words daily, a German is more likely to use a German word, although the Latin/Greek word also exists in the German language. A German will know “Zwischenhölle”, literally middle-hell, but probably won’t know the word “Limbus” - both meaning “limbo”. Equally, although doctors use Latin and Greek terms for illnesses and ailments, most diseases also have a more common German name, usually graphically describing the problem.
It is this trait of English - to willingly accept foreign, strange words, even when we already have 10 perfectly good ones - which has made the language grow to its current size. When a new concept or object arises, we have no problem inventing or borrowing an entirely new word for it. A German will most likely stick between two and five existing words together, depending on the complexity of the object / concept.
Another factor in the huge size of English and the redundancy of vocabulary was the number of races living in England. As has been mentioned, the Danes, the Angles, the Romans and finally the Normans all invaded England and brought a language with them. What is now modern English grew through the influences of these languages. We still use expressions today, like “kith and kin”, “neat and tidy” with two words meaning the same thing. Why? Each word came from a different language. Equally, we have many concepts for which there are two (or more words), a common Germanic word and a more eloquent French one, thanks to our Norman rulers: start and commence, allow and permit.