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The thing that makes English so easy to speak badly is that it has very loose grammar. In English we use different words to do what grammar does in other langua

The thing that makes English so easy to speak badly is that it has very loose grammar. In English we use different words to do what grammar does in other languages. No other language has anywhere near as many words as English so I doubt there is another language that is as loose as English.

bonoboTP 11y ago
This is always brought up but I'd like to see some concrete study about this, like taking a major English-language daily newspaper and a, say, Hungarian one and compare them for number of words used. First you'd need a definition for "word". Is "daily" the same as "day"? Should "newspaper" be counted as an extra word on its own or is it just "news" and "paper"? Is "definition" the same as "define"? Or will you just count the "roots"? It's not simple. I think everyone thinks the same about their native language, that there is so much nuance and variability expressible in it, compared to the more monotonish, dry foreign languages. We have this myth in Hungary as well, that our language has so many synonyms for stuff, while English is always neutral and cold. This stuff gets shared around on Facebook a lot. Mostly by people who only speak very rudimentary English. So it's no wonder you think English has many words, if you're a native English speaker.
- douche 11y ago
  If you're going to take compound words built from multiple roots out of the equation, then approximately 98% of German words would evaporate... \s If English has more words than other languages, it's probably because we took them from all those other languages, bastardized them, and grafted them into our own.
xxpor 11y ago
To be more precise, English uses word order to do what most other Indo-European languages do with declination and conjugation. The hardest part of learning German was getting used to V2 verb order (or similarly, verbs with separable prefixes). I can understand the rule perfectly fine, but parsing sentences in real time is extremely challenging.

bonoboTP 11y ago

This is always brought up but I'd like to see some concrete study about this, like taking a major English-language daily newspaper and a, say, Hungarian one and compare them for number of words used. First you'd need a definition for "word". Is "daily" the same as "day"? Should "newspaper" be counted as an extra word on its own or is it just "news" and "paper"? Is "definition" the same as "define"? Or will you just count the "roots"? It's not simple. I think everyone thinks the same about their native language, that there is so much nuance and variability expressible in it, compared to the more monotonish, dry foreign languages. We have this myth in Hungary as well, that our language has so many synonyms for stuff, while English is always neutral and cold. This stuff gets shared around on Facebook a lot. Mostly by people who only speak very rudimentary English. So it's no wonder you think English has many words, if you're a native English speaker.

douche 11y ago
If you're going to take compound words built from multiple roots out of the equation, then approximately 98% of German words would evaporate... \s If English has more words than other languages, it's probably because we took them from all those other languages, bastardized them, and grafted them into our own.

xxpor 11y ago

To be more precise, English uses word order to do what most other Indo-European languages do with declination and conjugation. The hardest part of learning German was getting used to V2 verb order (or similarly, verbs with separable prefixes). I can understand the rule perfectly fine, but parsing sentences in real time is extremely challenging.