LaPelirroja wrote:
What I like most about English (yes, I know, very original) is that we have more words than any other language, nearly 200,000. While one country may have one or two ways of saying a word, we may have 20.
This may very well be true nowadays, but I doubt there’s a universal agreement on the matter. Among Spanish speakers, Spanish is very often assumed to be, in fact, the language with the richest lexicon, and many people, when impugning the reckless adoption of words and structures from English, don’t fail to make it clear they take for granted English is quite poor, an assumption which usually goes unopposed. Unsurprisingly, these people seldom have a good command of the language they criticize, even if they are otherwise very learnèd. It’s not rare, either, in these environments, to disapprove of the comparatively large amount of recognizably onomatopoeic words in English—probably a consequence of it being much less inflected than Spanish—as though this somehow were a sign of a scarce vocabulary.
I greatly suspect something similar may happen with French, and perhaps with Chinese, Hindi or Arabic. I’ve
also read that Ottoman Turkish was the richest written language before it was abolished in favor of modern “purified” Turkish.
Advocates of less widely spoken, or historically prominent, languages would probably have a harder time making similar claims. I highly doubt Portuguese has ever been seriously considered richer than Spanish, at least for the last three centuries, but its speakers do often argue it isn’t really poorer, either, as it’s so easy for Spanish speakers to look down on Portuguese.
I’m pretty sure, though, that, English being by far the most widely studied language in the world, it’s much better documented than any other, so a lot of obscure words have been recorded and are still there for anyone curious enough to dig up, while in other languages they’d have been completely forgotten.
31 Oct 2012, 10:06 am
