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That's (for better or worse) an almost defining characteristic of the English language. We take words from other languages and adopt them as English words. It d
by freehunter 7y ago
That's (for better or worse) an almost defining characteristic of the English language. We take words from other languages and adopt them as English words. It doesn't matter if the word in English means the same thing as the original word, it doesn't matter what language it came from, it doesn't matter if we're combining two words from different languages to make a new word (television is the Greek word 'tele' combined with the Latin word 'visio').
English is an incredibly dynamic language with very loose rules. If a loanword sounds exotic, well that's half the fun.
- paradoja 7y agoWell, that's not a defining characteristic of English but of most (all?) living, dynamic languages. I have seen it with the languages I speak or have tried to learn (Spanish, German, Portuguese, Chinese...).
- coldtea 7y agoMost of those languages though change the original words to suit the language (e.g. with gendered nouns, certain suffixes, changing the spelling, etc). English tends to just copy, at least from other latin-script languages...
- FabHK 7y agoMany languages adopt words, but English does so to an unusual degree. As a consequence, it is the language that has most words today, by far.
- laretluval 7y agoIs there a citation for that?
- rgossiaux 7y agoNo, because it's not scientific. There's no agreed upon definition of what counts as a unique word. Do you count every inflected form, like "dog" and "dogs"? Derivations from other words? Homonyms? Compound words? How do you deal with archaic or obsolete words? And so on...
- FabHK 7y agoYes, it is not trivial to define what a word is (I am well aware of that), but the fact that it is difficult does not make it impossible to make quantitative comparative statements about the number of words a language has. It is also difficult to exactly define and measure GDP, yet nobody raises that facile methodological objection when we say that Singapore has a higher GDP per capita than Swaziland. Now, one can basically create an infinite number of words in some languages with compound words (eg German) and agglutination (eg Turkic or Uralic languages); it makes sense to exclude those (to avoid counting infinities). Here's a source (from a collaboration between Dictionary.com and Oxford University Press) that basically concurs that English is the language with most words (excluding the results of agglutination): https://www.lexico.com/en/explore/does-english-have-most-words https://www.lexico.com/en/explore/does-english-have-most-wor... EDIT to add language (family) examples and this: Here is The Economist with the cop-out answer that it's difficult to count: https://www.economist.com/johnson/2010/06/23/the-biggest-vocabulary https://www.economist.com/johnson/2010/06/23/the-biggest-voc...