response 101 of 111:

Jul 29 23:32 UTC 2001

I was just going to say that *I* say (rarely but with no linguistic pain) "It
will rain tomorrow."  Being the worrier that I am, I normally hedge, but 
that's just because I hate to make a flat statement like that when I can't
be absolutely sure.

response 103 of 111:

Jul 3 04:37 UTC 2002

I think, as a Spanish user from Argentina, that the English is a good language
but I like the Spanish because is more expresivve... When you are trying to
say something that you do or feel (for example) many times you cant say it
because there`s no words for that in English.. That`s what I think!...

response 105 of 111:

Jul 3 17:26 UTC 2002

Heh.  My Hebrew teacher (years ago), a native Israeli, complained that English
had too many words - specifically, too many words "for the same thing".  An
example that comes to mind was "silly", "funny", "crazy", & a couple of other
(approximate) synonyms that slip my mind.

response 107 of 111:

Sep 15 00:31 UTC 2002

No, not really.  English is just the kind of language (called "analytic" --
Chinese is another example) that has to have separate words for everything,
instead of using morphology to modify old or create new words on the spot
that everybody understands.  

That's part of why English always comes up high in "number of words" -- it
doesn't recycle its roots.  So you have to learn "chair" and "couch"
instead of just using "silla" and "sillon".  

Another reason is that English has ranked doublets or triplets in many
areas -- Germanic guts vs Latin intestines; Germanic foot-fall vs Latin
ped-estrian vs Greek pod-iatrist; English one-horn, Latin uni-corn, Greek
mono-ceros; Gmc swine vs Fr pork, Gmc cow vs Fr beef, Gmc calf vs Fr veal,
Gmc sheep vs Fr mutton; etc.  These either mean something different
(animal vs meat, for instance) or are appropriate in different registers
("guts" vs "intestines", for instance). 

In a language at the other end of the typological spectrum 
        (Synthetic --- Analytic) 
like West Greenlandic Eskimo, there aren't even words to count.

In a *really* synthetic language like Eskimo, there's no difference
between a word and a sentence.  Everything is done by inflection, endings,
paradigms, applied to a lot of roots.  A single word in Eskimo can mean
"Don't you think you really ought to consider going down to Inuvit this
winter?"  It's all done by hitching endings and paradigms to a particular
root with a very abstract meaning, at the same time paring it down
semantically and elaborating it in a number of referential dimensions. 

Finally, English is by far the best-studied and most thoroughly
lexicologized language in the world.  That means that we have such
resources as the Oxford English Dictionary and the American Heritage
Unabridged Dictionary, so we have much more of our vocabulary, even
passing nonce forms, written down for later study.  That makes a *big*
difference.

Anyway, the moral of this story is that "number of words" is not a good
measure of anything about a natural language except what kind of language
it is.  Since English is at one end of the spectrum, descriptions tend to
favor English.  But you shouldn't take them seriously unless they specify
their criteria for different wordhood and their data source (British
National Corpus vs Oxford English Dictionary, for instance). 

Just this once, my first response here, I'll use my Usenet .sig

-John Lawler  http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler  U Michigan Linguistics Dept
 -----------------------------------------------------------------------
"Language is the most massive and inclusive art we know, a  - Edward Sapir
 mountainous and anonymous work of unconscious generations."   'Language'

response 109 of 111:

Sep 15 18:10 UTC 2002

Thanks, Joe.  And hello to lots of other old friends.
I'm hoping to be able to use conferencing in my classes again,
but that's another matter.

response 111 of 111:

Jun 13 00:26 UTC 2007

Hi all, this is a nice conference