7 ms·
Do the English Use More Words Than the French?
- tomcam 12y agoA model of presentation of data. Its clarity belies the variety of techniques used. Perfect use of word clouds. Thank you.
- danso 12y agoI have to strongly, strongly disagree. There is no "perfect use" of word clouds in the context of proper data visualization. The arrangement and colorization of the words are virtually on account of randomization (and the sizing of words based on frequency is of dubious value, given how difficult it is for the human eye to evaluate the size comparison)...this randomness is anathema to the proper presentation of data... the variability in interpretation is vast, and depends on each viewer's ability to see colors and read vertically.
- tramjoe_ 12y agoWhat about monochrome, single word-orientation word clouds? Font size is one axis, and I guess the only remaining noise is word placement.
- pcrh 12y agoGenerally, I find word clouds be be pretty useless anyway. They visually highlight the top few words (4 or 5 at most), but beyond that are obscure and uninformative.
- S4M 12y agoI notice that four of the seven authors with the smallest vocabulary are writing theater (Moliere, Shakespeare, Racine, Corneille). I think it's not a coincidence, because writing in rhymes must be a hard constraint in the choice of words one can use.
- pash 12y agoA keen observation, and Wilde really makes it four and a half. But Shakespeare wrote mostly blank verse, and rhyming is not as much of a constraint on vocabulary in French due to the high commonality of word endings. If it's true that works for the stage tend to use fewer words, it might be because dialogue dominates; I imagine narrative, which consists more of description, naturally draws on a bigger vocabulary than even very stylized dialogue.
- mc32 12y agoI'd be interested in philosophical tomes being analyzed. They seem to contain an oversized amount of low frequency words.
- pothibo 12y agoHow is french easier to rhyme than english? Do you have empirical evidence? Since I'm a french canadian who is lucky enough to speak the two languages, I find it difficult to believe. Remember that rap (rhyme and poetry) was popularized by poor english speaking people.
- pash 12y agoFor a discussion of the ease of rhyming in French versus English, see, e.g., this book [0]. Rhymes are widely considered to be easier to form in French; partly as a result, however, classical French poetry developed several additional stylistic constraints related to rhyming, such as the distinction between "feminine" and "masculine" rhymes of words with and without a final devoiced "e". I wonder what you would accept as "empirical evidence" of the relative ease of rhyming in different languages. The demand strikes me as typifying one of the obnoxious impulses of the Hacker News community (another of them on display elsewhere in this thread) to dress up a vapid criticism as scientific skepticism. You could, I suppose, try to do a combinatorial analysis of the ease of rhyming by writing a program to find rhyming pairs in a phonetic dictionary; just make sure your blog post about the results properly acknowledges the shortcomings of your analysis in its title. 0. https://books.google.com/books?id=ByVoAgAAQBAJ&lpg=PA60&ots=5MIVrQ-Dtw&dq=ease%20of%20rhyming%20in%20french%20and%20english&pg=PA60#v=onepage&q&f=false https://books.google.com/books?id=ByVoAgAAQBAJ&lpg=PA60&ots=...
- pcrh 12y agoThat's a surprising result. My previous view was that English vocabulary is based on Germanic as well as Latin roots, and so there there are often two terms with the same meaning, one which is subtly different in usage than the other. In contrast, French vocabulary is mostly Latin in origin.
- DaveMebs 12y agoJust because more words exist, does not mean the authors make use of these words. I think the author would agree that English has more words - he cites the dictionary sizes skewing heavily in favor of English. With that said, I am also surprised. I would like to see a similar analysis using more modern works, as well as a discussion around how texts are selected. It seems like the selection of authors and their novels will significantly impact the results. FWIW - Both English and French stem from the same original language (Proto-Indo-European). You are correct that English is a Germanic language (this does not mean it stems from German), and the French is a Romance language - with Romance being used in the sense of "came from Rome," not "sounds sexy." If you are interested in more details here, I highly recommend "The History of English" podcast: http://historyofenglishpodcast.com/ http://historyofenglishpodcast.com/ I'm still working my way through it, but it does a great job explaining the history of the English language, how it evolved, how it relates to other languages, etc. English contains words from many other languages. It is not just Latin words, but many more recent languages (such as French) as well.
- blumkvist 12y agoWow! That podcast seems awesome. Thanks a lot. This will be my bed time listening for a while.
- xacaxulu 12y agoOui.
- beloch 12y agoThe findings of this study are unrelated to the title of this post. First, the authors and books were not chosen randomly and the sample size is tiny, so the results are meaningless, although I do respect the effort that was put into this. The author is up-front and honest about this in the beginning, but unfortunately proceeds to draw unwarranted generalizations based on his study. Second, even if a similar, but much larger, study were conducted on randomly selected authors and books, the results would still conflate the vocabulary size in common usage with the vocabulary size of single authors. Hence, what the article is attempting to study is not the same thing as the title of this post.
- pash 12y agoI think the most unwarranted generalization is yours. The author clearly did not mean to do what you criticize him for failing to do. But I suppose we could ask the mods to change the submission title. How about this?—"One blogger's analysis of the size of the vocabularies employed by some of his favorite French- and English-language writers, neither claiming nor achieving statistically significant insights into the question of whether French- (on the one hand) or English-speaking peoples (on the other) use more words in common usage."
- dsp1234 12y agoOr maybe: "Do the English Use More Words Than the French? I don't know, and what I did to test it doesn't tell me anything concrete"
- pash 12y agoOr: "Once again, the intent of this blog post is clear from its opening paragraphs (some readers' abiding dissatisfaction with its title notwithstanding), aforementioned intent being not to analyze patterns of general usage of the French and English languages in a statistically rigorous way but to offer an entertaining and well presented disquisition on some really quite insignificant but nonetheless amusing points related to the vocabularies of selected French and English writers of the author's own choosing (aforementioned dissatisfied readers nevertheless succeeding in cluttering up the comments on Hacker News with their whinging)"?
- euphemize 12y agoIf anyone is interested in anecdotal data [0][1] regarding sentence length for equivalent meaning, I have to use both French and English every day, alternating between them (spoken and written) all the time. English is almost always shorter than French, which is more verbose. I am used to "thinking" in whatever language I'm using to talk/write and have noticed many times that I'm a bit slower in French, even if it's technically my native language. It might also be that French seems to have more alternatives to say the same thing in different ways, but that could just be just me. [0] C'est presque toujours plus long en français qu'en anglais. [1] It's almost always shorter in English than in French.
- henriquemaia 12y agoI have the same experience in Portuguese (my native language). Romance languages tend to be more verbose (also anecdotal personal evidence). But, in a way, my feeling is that modern English has substantially more words than Portuguese – which, I suppose, makes sense. English is under a much greater creative pressure due to its wider audience (English as a global language). Using your example sentence (armchair laboratory): [0] É quase sempre mais curto em inglês do que em português. [1] It's almost always shorter in English than in Portuguese. 11 vs. 9 words.
- pavlov 12y agoI think French spelling plays a part here, though. If I were to write your example phrase in French written as pronounced using Finnish language spelling rules, it would look like this: "Se preskö tuzuur ply lon on franse kon angle." This "phonetic compression" made the printed sentence about 25% shorter.
- oelmekki 12y agoBeing a french that always do EN and FR multi locale websites, I'm quite surprise of this question :) The french text is almost always longer than english one. Not sure if it's about word count, though. Also, something very common for french people when learning english is to try to translate their french sentence exactly. It always seems over-complicated in english, and quite pedantic. With time, we learn to stop trying using the same words and try to express it directly in english. We realize at this point english sentences are always way more simple. But here again, vocabulary complexity says nothing about word count.
- yellowapple 12y agoI'm just going to assume Betteridge's law of headlines is in effect. If the answer to this was "yes", it would be phrased in a declarative rather than interrogative manner.
- murbard2 12y agoI'm a native French speaker and fluent in English (and of course, as luck would have it, I'm going to stick grammar mistakes in this post) Some have pointed out that French is almost always longer. It's a bit more complicated than that. French uses a wider vocabulary than English, and uses many different words to convey different connotations. Words, as a result, tend to be longer, because they carry more information. English tends to be much more modular and flexible. Nouns can be made into adjectives, adverbs and verbs rather easily, and "prepositions" drastically alter the meaning of verbs. The end result is that English can be much shorter than French when trying to be concise. A short UI message will always be much shorter in English than in French. However, when conveying nuanced ideas, I believe they will be much closer in length, with perhaps a small advantage for French.
- Nursie 12y ago>> French uses a wider vocabulary than English This seems an extraordinary claim, given that English is generally considered to have the largest number of words of any modern language (mostly because we just steal them).
- seszett 12y agoI believe that's the difference between "uses a wider vocabulary" and "has a wider vocabulary". I would think that literary French generally uses a wider vocabulary than English though, at least because repeating words in French is to be avoided at all costs, while it's more acceptable in English.
- zizee 12y agoAfter a point, having more words in a dictionary does not necessarily result in the average person using more words in their communication. I would think that education/environment would have a bigger effect. That said, I would interested if the grandparent could provide more info supporting their statement, as I don't know the truth one way or the other and would like to know more.
- murbard2 12y ago
- omonra 12y agoWouldn't analysis of top 3 contemporary newspapers / magazines in each language yield a more accurate result? Ie if Dickens or Melville used certain words in their writing - if modern speakers don't know them, we can't really use them to gauge how many words English speakers use today. I, for one, simply can't read Shakespeare - most of his vocabulary (anybody knows what a 'bodkin' is?) sounds foreign to me. And I scored 99 percentile on the verbal SAT.
- pcrh 12y agoMost of Shakespeare's language is accessible to English speakers in England, Ireland, Australia, etc. There might be a few word here or there that are not widely understood ("bodkin" is not one of these, its meaning is generally known in the UK). However, American English, especially as is daily spoken in the more ethnically diverse areas of the US has a much reduced vocabulary due to the need to accommodate non-native speakers. For an example of where Shakespeare's language become confusing consider "Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo." Modern speakers of English most often interpret "wherefore to mean "where", when it means "why".
- omonra 12y agoSeriously? What % of the English do you think will understand this (random start of first Shakespeare play that popped into my head): If music be the food of love, play on; Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting, The appetite may sicken, and so die. That strain again! it had a dying fall: O, it came o'er my ear like the sweet sound, That breathes upon a bank of violets, Stealing and giving odour! Enough; no more: 'Tis not so sweet now as it was before. O spirit of love! how quick and fresh art thou, That, notwithstanding thy capacity Receiveth as the sea, nought enters there, Of what validity and pitch soe'er, But falls into abatement and low price, Even in a minute: so full of shapes is fancy That it alone is high fantastical.
- pcrh 12y agoWhich words in that passage are not easily understandable? The most "obscure" one that I can identify is "notwithstanding" (Google gives 48,000,000 results for "notwithstanding", so it is not exactly an obscure word). A failure to understand that passage is a failure of comprehension, not of vocabulary.