Inflectious Language

Geneg raised this idea in the Translation thread. I think it's very interesting and warrants a wider discussion.

Why is English so poorly inflected and other languages are more heavily so. Does the lack of inflection (mostly) make English leaner and more flexible, or does it hinder it in some way. I took a minor in classical Greek in college so I'm familiar with inflection and how it dictates word and sentence construction and so on. Of course English uses inflections for verb tenses, but beyond that, well, not so much.

Is it an advantage, a disadvantage, or advantage neutral, to speak an inflected language?

Why is English so poorly inflected?

Note from Murr:

inflections are the bits added on to verbs and nouns to show gender, time, number, relationship and so on, such as -o and -a endings in Italian, all those whacky noun endings you have to remember in German, and the endings of French verbs that tortured us at school.

English has only three real infections sorry inflections no four: -ed, and -ing and -s on verbs; and -s on plural nouns. Other older inflections (eg -eth and the inflections of Anglo Saxon) have more or less vanished.

Other languages, such as Finnish (which I believe I am right in thinking is the most highly inflected language in the world, with something like 32 noun cases, resulting in those incredibly wonderful multi-syllable words) are more inflected.

My pet theory is that more inflected languages are capable of greater precision of thought.

Tomcat pet theory is RIGHT!

Greater precision of thought? Really? I don't know any Finnish, but I speak pretty good Japanese and I think English can do with periphrasis ("speakarounds" or prepositions, modals, etc., instead of inflections) anything Japanese does with inflection. Tomcat, what about Chinese, a notably uniflected language if I'm not mistaken?

I should also note that Old English is highly inflected--if we did lose some sensitivity in moving toward a periphrastic approach, we obviously felt that it was worth it. (I should also note that subjectively, I find inflections generally more aesthetically pleasing but periphrasis easier to use--which is possibly natural as an English speaker and a xenophile).

I find it difficult to judge "precision" between two languages' different ways of thinking about concepts.

for example, in English you have the words "aunt" and "uncle." There's no generic word for "sibling of parent".

In Arabic, you have an inflection to make words female (an "a" ending). So for "sibling of parent" you'd have the masculine word as a sort of root word, and use the "a" ending to feminize it. However, Arabic further differentiates between "sibling of mother" and "sibling of father" by having two entirely different sets:

Khal/Khala (uncle/aunt on mother's side)
a'am/a'ama (uncle/aunt on father's side).

They have no generic term for "sibling of parent" either and they have more specificity in the nouns but the inflections just categorize gender. We have specific nouns for gender but not for which side of the family it's from.

Then there are the problematic social issues about why you would need all this extra specificity - tends to be in more gender-segregated traditional societies where there are more of these familial categories, and one could fairly ask, in a society like ours, what use would it be to differentiate between paternal and maternal aunts/uncles? And might it be argued that our lack of need to distinguish them might be a good, rather than a bad, thing and a sign of progress, so to speak?

>4 MeditationesMartini: Which brings me to my second point: languages without inflections usually make up for this lack by an increased vocabulary (English has a huge vocabulary, between 600,000 and 1 million words) to maintain the potential for precision.

However, lexical precision and inflectional precision are subtly different. Lexical precision operates on the conceptual level (allowing more concepts to be expressed with discrete words); inflectional precision operates on a more categorical level (the categories within which words and synonyms can be grouped: masculine accusative nouns signifying object, neuter genetive nouns signifying possession, verb endings signifying subjunctivity and so on).

So to get back to Geneg's question: are there any advantages to either lexical or inflectional precision. I would argue that inflections allow greater subtlety within categories. An 'ideal' language (Saussure's 'langue', perhaps) would have an equal balance of both types. I feel it is no accident that languages with greater inflectional possibilities have given rise to very precise and analytical thought systems; law and philosophy: I'm thinking of French, Greek and German here.

Martin, Chinese with no inflections at all, is notoriously vague. The language allows for no precision whatever. instead of seeing this as a weakness, however, it's possible to see this is an advantage: its vagueness allows for greater movement of interpretation and misinterpretation. More on Chinese later perhaps.

>5 anna_in_pdx: Anna, your insights from Arabic are fascinating. Chinese also has the same wealth of familial words: younger brothers, older brothers, maternal aunts and paternal aunts and so on are all carefully disambiguated with separate words. Arabic does this with inflections, Chinese with lexis. is there a subtle difference? can we talk about this? I know nothing about Arabic at all so I'm dying to know more about it, and about what you think of it.

(Comparative grammar is really, really, really exciting, and I haven't even had my porridge yet! Jeeez no wonder I have no friends in the real world!)

You made an excellent point about why we need all this extra specificity. Arabic and Chinese both share a cultural investment in huge extended families, which are the basis of their social structures. it seems we are edging closer and closer to the Whorf Sapir hypothesis (WARNING: CONTROVERSY AHEAD) and an investigation into what different concept categories tell us about their cultures of origin.

I am utterly convinced that Gore Vidal is bang on when he says:

Languages do bend one morally to their grammatical requirements. and this kind of grammatical comparison has so much to reveal about the way different cultures see the world.

I have not done any research on this whatsoever and may well be shown to be wrong on many counts.

I have always had a sense, based only on anecdotal evidence, that the claims of English to be the richest language, with the 600,000 to 1,000,000 words which Murr quotes above, to be suspect.

One of the reasons is exactly the reasoning which I have been setting forth on the translation thread. If Slovak has forty dimunitive words for cat, dog, any and every noun which the language permits it to form, and they are not normally in a dictionary, and in English they will have to be expressed with a number of words, and similarly Slovak has a single word for becoming or turning into something else, or a different state, and English does not, well, I am uncomfortable with the claim of the great riches of English.

Perhaps a serious linguist has dealt with this. Or perhaps they would somehow dismiss the Slavic languages various formations as a single word, and English is still much richer. And I ask, "where"? "How?" Where are the riches which are not there in the Slavic languages?

Lola????

I have not done any research on this whatsoever and may well be shown to be wrong on many counts.

oh me too, but remember, we are all amateurs here! ;)

Just comparing line/paragraph/book lengths, i've had the impression that English manages to be more concise. In the simplest examples - when you buy a product made for various markets and there are instructions, whathaveyou in various languages, it appears that - at least in terms of space taken up - the English portions are usually shorter. Or, in a somewhat more sophisticated example - classical cds often have liner notes in (at least) French, German, English and sometimes Italian and/or Russian; again i'd guess that 90% of the time the English notes are shorter. Whether or not something vital is lost, i can't say.

Or in a sillier example: a feature that we especially enjoyed when watching the X-files on DVD were the segments dubbed in various major languages at little extras. Again..German, Italian, Japanese, French were the usual ones. While understanding nothing - it did seem that an awful lot more syllables were going into the same "action space" (especially in Italian) than in the English language version of the same scenes. For whatever reason, in the German dub, Scully also had a deeper and more commanding intonation than Mulder which amused us.

On my job, I switch constantly from Dutch, to English to French texts and back and indeed to say exactly the same in French will take 15 % more space on the paper than in English or Dutch

Ahem. Preamble: I am as close to being a native speaker of English without being ethnically Anglo as one can be. I estimate I spent some 70% of my existence, from early childhood, speaking, thinking, writing and dreaming in English; some 80% of my diaries (40 volumes and growing) is in English. The only time I tried to write "kr8tif", I chose English as my medium; most of the love letters I wrote and love speeches I gave were in English. Almost two thirds of my library are in English. I stand here before you and proudly exclaim: I love English!

So, when I say that the oft-encountered statement (by the Anglos) about the unique riches of English perplexes me, 'tis truly sincerely perplexing, not a cultural antipathy, and therefore an interesting problem, but one that is pretty much impossible to discuss objectively because people's feelings about language are so personal and intense. Yes--I know this from first hand experience (I mean specifically this English discussion), and I'll only mention two instances of it, one here on LT in which Tim Spalding appeared (truncated after few posts and the predictable meltdown--can't recall the group, "In Translation" maybe?), and another, years earlier one, on a different forum, where I heard the statement from a college professor of English who didn't speak any other language, but had no problem believing "English was the richest language".

I mention the latter instance because that's the only time when I did some quick research specifically on the topic (I don't usually spend my time judging who's fruitier, bananas or oranges), because I was curious about the source of this widespread (among English speakers) belief.

First, a general remark: I'm willing to bet any number of limbs that kids everywhere, from Albania to Zimbabwe, are raised with conviction that their country, language, culture are amazingly beautiful, unique, resplendently remarkable etc. So, some measure of feeling special goes without saying--everyone knows their reasons why they are special. That's the substratum, the base on which any conviction about superiority can grow. There is nothing people won't believe as long as it flatters them, nothing flattering they won't accept, and without checking on their own. With English, there is also the obvious global dominance of its pop culture and establishment as the lingua franca; while separate, these factors subtly mask and melt into observations of the language itself.

Now for what I remember of my "research": Murr, please correct and add as you see fit--I am guessing that your 600K-million count for words is derived from the number of entries in the OED. And that is misleading, because the entries in the OED include multiple word phrases (not just the entry "run", but separately also "run in", "run off" etc.), as well as huge numbers of archaic words and terms (being a historical dictionary with the purpose of encompassing "all" English).

Comparing a number of dictionaries of similar purpose, there is actually little difference between English, French, German and Spanish (which is how far I got then). It wasn't exact science, of course, and I don't know what the actual count of single words in 20th century English is--except that it is closer to 200K than 600K-million.

But even just on the face of it the claim that English is the "richest" language seems odd. What about languages such as German, which can infinitely generate new words?

#5

Slavic languages are highly gendered too, like Arabic. (And the ones I know also distinguish between familial relationships in dizzying ways--every possible permutation has a separate name, changing not just horizontally, but vertically, in time, as well.)

#8

I second Andrew's observation that dictionaries will typically underrepresent vocabularies of Slavic languages (important to know if you try to judge which language is "the richest" by counting dictionary entries). On a general level, the plasticity of the nouns is expressed in the possibilities of diminutives, augmentatives, pejoratives etc. so that almost any noun can transmogrify into a further dozen or more. Add to that the plural, or plurals, as the case may be. The verbs can be modified by prepositions, usually as prefixes. There are usually separate terms indicating an enduring or finished action etc.

#10

Bob

i've had the impression that English manages to be more concise.

I can't remember where I read it, but I think English words, on average, are shorter than many (other averages). As for the syntax, I'm not sure concision is a general feature of English--at least, I can think of many examples where it's less concise. Otoh, I simply don't know how to translate these observations into a general judgement. By the way, is concision something to praise in a language or is it a neutral feature?

Same question about "precision". Many languages are more precise than English--more nuanced. But these nuances CAN be expressed in English, although it takes more words. So, in the end, it is a neutral feature--aesthetically pleasing (to me, say), but not inherently speaking to some superiority of language.

This brings me back to the notion of "richness" of a language, what we mean by it, and how we'd measure it. To me the only meaningful measure is the power of expression. Can I convey idea X or describe concept Y in languages A, B, C...? People point out "untranslatable" terms and nuances--but they occur in every language.

>12 LolaWalser: Brava, brava, bravissima.

Thanks Lola -
i was thinking of concision as just being a "state" or characteristic - not a virtue*. And any statements i make in this forum are naught but ill-informed observations. Unfortunately i'm not adept at passing passing thoughts over in silence.
(I was counting syllables in the bits of Virgil and Caesar that i could recall and then counting the syllables in the translations, and doing the same w/ my ALM** French dialogues - not an high end analytical approach!)

*except, perhaps, in poetry.
**ALM - "audio lingual method" of teaching modern foreign languages, popular in the USA, along w/ the "new math" during the early 1960s. I suspect the only difference between ALM and the traditional "hat of my aunt" language dialogues was having the teacher listen in to the students via headsets and microphones in the language lab.

Lola I thought you was on holiday?

All excellent points. However, I hasten to add that if I gave the impression that I was arguing that English is the 'richest' language (what does 'rich' mean?) or trying to argue for the superiority of English over other languages, that was not my intention at all. I do not believe that, and I don't think any of my previous posts have said that. I agree with you, that Anglo monoglots who maintain this canard are just eye-rollingly silly. My point is that English - and other non-inflected languages- make up for lack of inflectional subtlety with a large vocabulary, and I stand by that claim. I'm trying to make more of a technical argument about how languages achieve subtlety and flexibiity- on the inflectional axis, or on the lexical axis-, than about value judgements of different languages. I hope that will be clear to everyone.

Your point about the words included in the OED puzzles me. I see no reason NOT to include archaic words in the total word count. If we are going to exclude words in the grounds of archaicness (noun inflection anyone?), then how are we going to decide what is archaic? To a 15 year old, some of the words I use might appear archaic. Moreover, phrasal verbs (run off, run on) are commonly classified by linguists as discrete words, so I see nothing wrong with including them in the total word count either: 'run', is substantially and substantively different in meaning and use from 'run on'.

P, your point about the riches of Slovak in some areas compared with the poverty of English in those areas is also very interesting. of course, each language has areas of relative 'wealth' and 'poverty' which reflect the concerns of their cultures, so while Slovak might be rich in diminutives, and English poor in them, English is rich in other areas where Slovak might be poor. English is particularly rich in words for rain, for example.

I also remind you that English has huge technical vocabularies: medicine, IT, finance, engineering, biochemistry, advanced nuclear physics and so on, vocabularies which are often not even familiar to native non-participants in those discourses, words which are usually 'borrowed' by speakers of other languages to make up for gaps in their own (of course this reflects English's global dominance as well, but let's leave that whole argument aside for the nonce.) These words also add to the total word count.

I think it's important to add that in comparing languages, I am always thinking in terms of comparison of kind, rather than comparison of degree.

Let me think about the concision argument a bit more and get back later.

Of course y'all know better, especially that 'bookspfallherbalpert' fellow but does any language deliver better than this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGWhjojt5dw&feature=related

Whatcha gonna dew with that left over stew?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Vc4JJ8C4N0&feature=related

You like "thread rot" well here it is 'books' old boy.

Dictionary size is maybe sub-optimal for the following reasons:
- the creators of different dictionaries may have had different targets
- per language, different amounts of historical material may be available (not everyone has a Beowulf)

Why not look at word frequencies? Murr's theory could then be reformulated as follows:

Less inflected languages have a less steep declining frequency count than inflected languages.

This means the average Englishman has a greater number of words in active usage that the average Russian, other things being equal (which they aren't, of course). How much greater? That is for the statisticians to find out.

Russian usage: from http://www.comp.leeds.ac.uk/ssharoff/frqlist/frqlist-en.html:
* The average word length is 5.28 characters.
* The average sentence length is 10.38 words.
* 1000 most frequent lemmas cover 64.0708% of word forms in texts.
* 2000 most frequent lemmas cover 71.9521% of word forms in texts.
* 3000 most frequent lemmas cover 76.6824% of word forms in texts.
* 5000 most frequent lemmas cover 82.0604% of word forms in texts.

I couldn't find comparable data for english right away, and I'm being called to Christmas breakfast...

Edit: indicate that the quoted numbers are for Russian

I'm quite certain that Porius's comments and links are not intended as 'dicking out' at anyone, Martin, but are a reminder to us all to revel in the more playful, and sensuous aspects of language when we get too involved in more intellectual enquiries. At least that's how I interpret them - and how I enjoy them. They are an essential part of the threads in this group. Porius, I know, also likes to indulge in Shakespeherian wordplay with LTnames.

I remind all amateurs that everyone's contributions are valid and precious, no matter how oblique they may seem to others.

Please be friendly to other amateurs and always give others the benefit of the doubt before lashing out, I implore you.

in re Finnish...I asked a good (Finnish) friend..professional philosopher, teaches @ UofMich and curse him, keeps beating me at boggle, about "inflection" and Finnish...Mika's take, fwiw:

"1. That person must be on crack or have a weird notion of inflection. I would argue that Finnish is probably the least inflected language. Inflection has zero semantic or grammatical role, and, for whatever reason, people speak it almost without any inflection. "

Oh Bobbly your news throws me into a pit of confusion, a vortex of grammatologicalicalogical angst!!!!!!

What am I make of this on Wiki:

Grammar

Main article: Finnish grammar
The morphosyntactic alignment is nominative-accusative; but there are two object cases: accusative and partitive. The contrast between the two is telic, where the accusative case denotes actions completed as intended (Ammuin hirven "I shot (killed) the elk"), and the partitive case denotes incomplete actions (Ammuin hirveä "I shot (at) the elk"). Often this is confused with perfectivity, but the only element of perfectivity that exists in Finnish is that there are some perfective verbs. Transitivity is distinguished by different verbs for transitive and intransitive, e.g. ratkaista "to solve something" vs. ratketa "to solve by itself"(Look at those examples: suffixes and inflections all over the place. There's more.)

B. There are several frequentative and momentane verb categories.
Verbs gain personal suffixes for each person; these suffixes are grammatically more important than pronouns, which are often not used at all in standard Finnish. The infinitive is not the uninflected form but has a suffix -ta or -da; the closest one to an uninflected form is the third person singular indicative. There are four persons, first ("I, we"), second ("you (singular), you (plural)"), third ("s/he, they"). Also, the passive voice (sometimes called impersonal or indefinite) resembles a "fourth person" similar to e.g. English "people say/do/…". There are four tenses, namely present, past, perfect and pluperfect; the system mirrors the Germanic system. The future tense is not needed due to context and the telic contrast. For example, luen kirjan "I read a book (completely)" indicates a future, when luen kirjaa "I read a book (not yet complete)" indicates present.More of the damn things.

And more:

Nouns may be suffixed with the markers for the aforementioned accusative case and partitive case, the genitive case, eight (YAWKS!!!) different locatives, and a few other cases (just a few then,- mercy!). The case marker must be added not only to the main noun, but also to its modifiers; e.g. suure+ssa talo+ssa, literally "big-in house-in". Possession is marked with a possessive suffix; separate possessive pronouns are unknown. Pronouns gain suffixes just as nouns do. ENOUGH!!!!

Bob. Please advise. Before I thrash the Proctologist for slipping crack into the herring.

Pim: Excellent point about dictionaries. There's also always alas the publishing (i.e.commercial) angle to consider in the production of dictionaries.

Hey all--I have removed my comment, and in retrospect it was entirely inappropriate to move this from a private to a public forum, and for that I do apologize, to Porius and everyone. If there's anyone else who has a tendency to respond to attack with massive overreaction, hopefully they'll take a cue from my bad example an think before they write.

That said, I think posting unsolicited attacks on people's profile pages is not very cool either, and is in fact what started all this, so hopefully this will also dissuade anone who may be considering doing that. I absolutely would not have responded to comments above the way I did had they not been preceded with uglier comments in private. Again, bringing this into public was my mistake. And "bookspfallherbalpert" is kinda funny.

Merry Christmas to everyone, for real, and good luck.

#28 - language fans...i can't advise - all that my MLS has allowed me to do is often find appropriate people to query. I WILL point out the wiki posting to Mika..mayhaps he'll get into a discurssion (portmanteau - discourse + discussion, via a typo) w/ whoever contributed to the page.
sorry, i guess.

I think that Mika was referring in general to conversational Finnish.

btw should anyone have an interest in 60s 70s Finnish rock/pop i can (probably) find the cd Mika burned for me several yrs ago.

Martin,

Merry Christmas to you! And do know that you are in some very fine company....right, Porius? Remember, Porius, when the naughtyhottie ticked you off something fierce, and you went after "her"? Oh I'm laughing my hind off just thinking about it. And remember how I had to "intervene" and help "settle the dispute" between you two? We can laugh about it now, and someday perhaps we'll look back on this and laugh too over how very Christmas cheery this all went down.

The point is: I love both of you's guys, and I'm very pleased to see that you're both being stand-up about it, and moving on...

And keep in mind, perhaps partly because of the dispute, this thread is presently ranked #6 on Hot Topics (how 'bout that tomcat! - #6! - woo-hoo!) so really, while I'd never advise any sort of re-creation of this, it has nonetheless benefited Le Salon des Amateurs de la Langue's ratings. So thank you for that!

;-)

>32 absurdeist: Ha! That rating system is obviously deeply flawed.

So much wonderful commentary has been exchanged here that I felt I needed to cut and paste it into one place so that I could think about it better. In case that would help anyone else, here is my summary. I will comment a little later:

Does the lack of inflection (mostly) make English leaner and more flexible, or does it hinder it in some way?

Is it an advantage, a disadvantage, or advantage neutral, to speak an inflected language?

problematic social issues about why you would need all this extra specificity

our lack of need to distinguish them might be a good, rather than a bad, thing and a sign of progress, so to speak?

are there any advantages to either lexical or inflectional precision. I would argue that inflections allow greater subtlety within categories

Languages do bend one morally to their grammatical requirements. and this kind of grammatical comparison has so much to reveal about the way different cultures see the world.

With English, there is also the obvious global dominance of its pop culture and establishment as the lingua franca;

But even just on the face of it the claim that English is the "richest" language seems odd. What about languages such as German, which can infinitely generate new words?

Slavic languages are highly gendered too, like Arabic. (And the ones I know also distinguish between familial relationships in dizzying ways--every possible permutation has a separate name, changing not just horizontally, but vertically, in time, as well. I second Andrew's observation that dictionaries will typically underrepresent vocabularies of Slavic languages (important to know if you try to judge which language is "the richest" by counting dictionary entries). On a general level, the plasticity of the nouns is expressed in the possibilities of diminutives, augmentatives, pejoratives etc. so that almost any noun can transmogrify into a further dozen or more. Add to that the plural, or plurals, as the case may be. The verbs can be modified by prepositions, usually as prefixes. There are usually separate terms indicating an enduring or finished action etc.

is concision something to praise in a language or is it a neutral feature?

Many languages are more precise than English--more nuanced.

in the end, it is a neutral feature--aesthetically pleasing (to me, say), but not inherently speaking to some superiority of language.

This brings me back to the notion of "richness" of a language, what we mean by it, and how we'd measure it. To me the only meaningful measure is the power of expression. Can I convey idea X or describe concept Y in languages A, B, C...? People point out "untranslatable" terms and nuances--but they occur in every language.

English - and other non-inflected languages- make up for lack of inflectional subtlety with a large vocabulary, and I stand by that claim

English has huge technical vocabularies: medicine, IT, finance, engineering, biochemistry, advanced nuclear physics and so on, vocabularies which are often not even familiar to native non-participants in those discourses, words which are usually 'borrowed' by speakers of other languages to make up for gaps in their own

Oh good idea, P, thank you!

Can I add Pim's excellent observation to the summary?

Less inflected languages have a less steep declining frequency count than inflected languages.

This means the average Englishman has a greater number of words in active usage that the average Russian, other things being equal (which they aren't, of course). How much greater? That is for the statisticians to find out.

I think English is the most infected not inflected language. It is made up of French, German, Jiddish, Spanish, Italian and lot of Dutch.

And it is not a bad thing, it makes the language richer.

(this is said without any hostility, innuendos or frustrated vibes in the voice )

In fact, it has been debated whether English isn't really a creole. Saxon substrate and grammar, large French influence from 1066 on, with an initially French speaking ruling class (Ivanhoe!), then from the 16th century lots of world-wide trading.
But most experts seem to concur nowadays that for a real creole to appear you need to put more stress on the language users. The peasants had a hard time communicating with their masters, but at least they had each other. The people sold as slaves in the West-Indies would often come from completely different parts of Africa, so they all started as a stranger, and they had to create a new language together.

TO TomCatMurr et al. :

I haven't thought much about the causes of richness of vocabulary in English. I'm inclined to think it's not to make up for the absence of inflections, but just through English speakers' long-term powers of observation and the need they feel to express something which the existing word-thesaurus doesn't supply.

The added words have been predominantly nouns, verbs and adjectives. Whereas making up for a lack of flections would mean that any added words would usually be prepositions, pronouns, or adverbs.

Of course, the additions can still leave the language impoverished IN certain areas. Tongan for example has over 100 possessive pronouns, and yet has no words that express what English expresses by "hers", "his" and "its"; you just have to know from the context which of those a pronoun is. And we English-speaker don't have any word for "you: the plural", which every other language I know of does have. (We don't have it for Standard English, that is -- for dialects, yes.) And Tongan has hundreds of words which don't have any exact English one-word equivalent.

Murr,

well, you can't pronounce a language "richer" without automatically assigning superiority to it. I totally agree that we haven't determined what is meant by "richness", but there's no avoiding the conclusion of superiority inherent in in it.

Your point about the words included in the OED puzzles me. I see no reason NOT to include archaic words in the total word count.

Wait, you don't think that someone has actually compared historical vocabularies of English and other languages and pronounced English the "winner"? Ha, no. That number is bandied about as if no other language on Earth has history, slangs etc. No, no, let's compare like with like, and you'll discover other languages easily going into the 600K region, and over. I'm astonished you didn't think of that.

I also remind you that English has huge technical vocabularies: medicine, IT, finance, engineering, biochemistry, advanced nuclear physics and so on

OK, this is a very odd remark. It's possible to talk science, medicine, finance and computers in other languages too. For some fields it's relevant, for some not at all. Technical vocabularies of science and medicine derive mostly from Latin and Greek, not English. There are Polish and Hindi and Spanish scientific journals too, you know. Are there loan words from English in these languages? Sure, why not. We never stop hearing about the ability of English to absorb foreign words, so why would the opposite be somehow different?

Finance may have a lot of English words deriving from Anglo business techniques, but then again it is rife with French, and German, depending what language we're talking about (in Croatian, banking language has more French than English loan words, for instance).

The one field that is very English is computer science. I don't think it is possible to ignore the history of the field and the IT business in explaining its spread.

Roland

through English speakers' long-term powers of observation and the need they feel to express something which the existing word-thesaurus doesn't supply.

Are you positing here some "long term powers of observation" specific to English speakers over everybody else?

In sum, I hold the statement that English is richer (whatever that may mean) than other languages to be false, and the statement that it has "more words" (for whatever that may be worth in the first place) completely unproven, and most probably false.

I admit that I personally won't sit down to create a Croatian, Greek, French etc. version of the OED, just knowing what I do from practical use of more than English is enough for me.

Lola,

Wait, you don't think that someone has actually compared historical vocabularies of English and other languages and pronounced English the "winner"? Ha, no.

This may alas, be true. However, it is not my position, and never has been. I'm somewhat disappointed (sniff) that you could attribute such views to me. It must be because I did not express myself accurately so far in the thread. I will try to explain myself better and write more clearly.

I'm striving to make it clear that my arguments about the richness of ENGLish vocabulary are not in comparison with vocabularies of other languages so much as in comparison with the other axis of English and all languages: the inflectional one. I'm trying to arrive at an understanding of the relationship between vocabulary size and frequency (Pim's point in 20 has been rather under commented upon but it is very important) and inflectional grammar.

These two poles make up any language system, and that's what I'm trying to understand.

Of course every language has huge vocabularies, but what particularly interests me at this point in the discussion is the relationship between the vocabularies and the inflectional grammar, and what that relationship tells us about the way language communicates meaning and enables (restricts?) its users in seeing the world.

I love, and marvel at the riches and complex beauties of all languages, at language itself. I am not proposing at all in any way a competition between them.

I'll enter the fray here. Unfortunately I cannot lay my hands on the research to back up my comments. I am summarizing notes from a graduate Shakespeare course I took over twenty years ago.

A working vocabulary for English is quite small (400 words). By working vocabulary, I mean the number of different words a person actually uses (which differs from the number one actually knows). So two interesting observations:

1.) We can establish some rough idea of the working vocabulary of famous writers by looking at the total number of different words used across all their written work – creative, personal or otherwise. (I remember some tedious days spent in computer labs back when all calculations were done by punch cards. I had to do a miniature study of two pages of an individual work). Based on calculations done at least twenty years ago by whom I know not, Shakespeare came in at the top of the then-English canon of writers with a working vocabulary exceeding 20,000 words. The next closest contender had (if I remember correctly) a working vocabulary of ~6,000 words. (We are talking about English working vocabulary here.) Of course, the number of words these authors understood was probably much higher. What their actual working vocabularies were we cannot determine because we do not know how many words they used when speaking English. They may for example have used more words than ever appeared in their written work. Again I do not know who did the research, etc. I do know that subsequent research about the OED has demonstrated that much of the earlier research about language was Shakespeare-centric.

2. Another piece of research I ran across, not from the aforementioned Shakespeare class but from a summary of research done on American school children, offered the following information. Based on a longitudinal study of sixth graders, the authors concluded that the working vocabularies of American sixth graders had shrunk by a fairly substantial rate over the course of the study. Let me emphasize that I was reading a summary. I never looked at the actual paper and data. I don't know the parameters the researchers used, whether they counted tenses as separate words or one word, nor do I know how they modeled this study. Whether or not, current research would validate this study, I do not know. So I leave it up to someone else to seek out data and/or critique methodology, etc. I make no claims for the validity of this material or the strength of my memory.

The management does not necessarily endorse of the claims of the aforementioned examples. ☺

fwiw - Shakespeare's concordance, including word variants, ~ 29.000 words.

One of the more interesting and tiring bits of code i had to come up with in a natural language processing course was a "word stemmer" - ie code that would strip (mostly suffixes, but some prefixes) off of words that were being used in queries AND words that were in the Harris poll data base. The survey questions were designed to be as straightforward as possible and still the problems of simplifying queries and losing information was painful (this was back when the data was running off of massive tape drives where the harris data was stored and mainframe IBM 360/370 was allocating a user 64bk of memory (iirc) to run a job (TSO - we'd at least gotten past punch cards) But we did have to link our modules, in whatever language it was in, mine was PL/1, w/ the Fortran, Algol, Cobol ....code that other grad students who'd worked on the program had installed into the larger program. And then come up w/ a discriminant analysis routine to pull out the most probable hits. This was a very brute force approach to early information retrieval to be sure!~ Later the prof. went off to OCLC and the system became a lot more sophisticated.

Yo Murrushka,

If you had a comment to make - even that the research I cited was complete and utter nonsense, I can take it - provide you back up your claims with evidence. I bow to your superior knowledge. ;-)

general question:
vocabularies - as used in analysis. Are they generally comprised of root words or all possible word variants?

I was thinking about English words that have no meaning in and of themselves, their meaning is tied to their preceding or following words. Not is a perfect example. By itself it would mean the negative of its object: not Henry, not going, not here. Inflected languages handle this situation by adding a prefix or suffix to the root indicating the negative. The concept of the negative is effectively passed on either way.

It seems to me that in English, the fact that a specific word is used for the negative might make the concept easier to grasp for non-native speakers of English than having to learn a set of suffixes or prefixes that infer meaning. For native speakers of the inflected language this would not be a problem, theist and atheist are two words, not one with different inflections (although in reality they are one, lexically), so a native speaker would learn the word by sound first and only later by spelling, at which point inflection becomes important. Prior to written language inflection wasn't an issue. They were different words and were learned separately, as different words.

I guess what this rambling is leading up to is do words like not in English serve the same purposes as inflection does in other languages? Is there then a real difference between inflected languages and non-inflected languages in the realm of speech, or does the difference only becomes apparent when written? Are inflections a function of literacy? Not created by it, but made real by it? Can a purely spoken language be inflected? I think I finally asked the question I was shooting for.

I just ran across another interesting thought. In another thread someone used neither/or, and thinking about this it occurred to me is either/neither or/nor another example of inflection in English? I suppose it must be, the "n" serves the same purpose as the "a" in my previous post as indicating the negative. Are there more usages of this sort in English. I just never thought about them being inflections. How about he/she? Inflection? Did English start as an inflected language and drift away? If so, why? I think someone may have mentioned something about this up thread or else thread.

BTW, for all you non-native English speakers out there, we Americans are proud of our linguistic narcissism.

Until some 3000 years ago all languages were purely spoken. And until 100 years ago, almost all speakers of Rusian were illiterate. Yet Russian is considered to be a very inflected language.

So when Tolstoy was takling with his peasants, was he using inflection while the peasants were using suffixes? Given the fact that they all must have thought they were speaking the same language, this idea sounds pretty weird to me.

Plus, there is not a simple set of suffixes. Each gender has its own inflexions, adjectives are inflected differently and there are lots of exceptions. F.e. for female words like 'book', книга, genitive plural is книг (remove the final a) but 'mistake', ошибка, has as genitive plural ошибок (remove the a but insert an o to deal with the two consonants that are hard to pronounce sequentially).

Inflections seem to me to be identifiable when languages are studied and parts of speech are categorized. something not easily done without the aid of writing for making and organizing lists. I suspect Tolstoy and his peasants were speaking Russian, not a highly inflected language, but just the language itself. So, is inflection a function of literacy, the need for tools that allow study and categorization? Did the concept of inflection grow out of language study, or was it a conscious effort built into the language itself. It seems to me it must be the former.

This looks a bit like the question about the tree falling unwitnessed in the forest.
The physicist says: yes, there is sound, because sound is the the propagation of energy through vibrations of air molecules.
The physiologist says: there is no sound, because sound is a phenomenon in a brain caused by a stimulus in the ear.

Urania, I may just be confused here, but if you're defining Shakespeare's "working vocabulary" as all the words contained in his works (~29,000, per above) and a typical "working vocabulary" as the 400 or so words an average person uses in daily life (a figure that seems intuitively reasonable), isn't that a mismatch? Like, surely Shakespeare didn't use all those words on a regular basis, and conversely, if you took your average moderately literate modern Westerner and set them to writing thirty plays, wouldn't the vocabulary for which there is evidence grow significantly--if nothing else due to the broader lexical set and greater precision writing allows as compared to speech?

>51 MeditationesMartini: books,

Well . . . either Keats or Shelley was the next closest contender at ~6000 words if memory serves me correctly. Both Keats and Shelley were at least moderately literate. I do take your point that nonwriters do not have as much written material to analyse. However, I would point to the study on sixth graders. I think all were writing the same amount; however, over time sixth grade "written" working vocabularies shrank. If this data is correct and we assume that at least some of the sixth graders were moderately literate for their age, then it would seem to indicate that "working" written vocabularies were shrinking relative to earlier scores. Remember, the children were not being compared to Shakespeare; they were being compared to other sixth graders across a number of years. Now the interesting question is this: How did sixth graders in the upper percentile of their classes perform? Did their working vocabularies shrink and were the scores of the other sixth graders sufficiently low to bring overall averages down.

I wonder if anyone has done work to correlate this drop in working vocabulary with the rise of television as our most prominent means of communication.

I privately suspect humanity would have been much, much better off without the discovery of radio waves and how to use them.

>52 urania1: I do see what you mean re Keats and Shelley--does anyone know how other Elizabethan writers compare to Shakespeare? Like, the languageplay is so exuberant in other ways--I can imagine wordsmithing being a macho pastime, a totally awesome auxiliary pursuit for the writer about town in Elizabethan London.

And yes on the sixth graders too. We need a synchronic as well as a diachronic analysis!

Urania, I was just going to remark that people's written vocabularies are usually much bigger than their spoken ones, rather than vice versa as you suggested in >41 urania1:. This is logical if you think about it. We write about a much greater range of topics than we talk about.

48> Pim, I'm sure Tolstoy's peasants thought the whole thing was weird: the barin wearing peasant clothes and talking to peasants, working with them and living with them. I imagine they thought he was a bit nuts. Hah!

I want to make one thing clear at this point about the relationship between inflections and roots, as I think we are in danger of falling into the kind of error that Bob's Finnish prof made. Inflection is NOT something separate from the rest of the language, that one can drop and take up again at will. it is an integral part of the language. The prof's incredibly absurd remark that 'we don't use inflection in conversation' is indicative of a wider misunderstanding of the role of inflection. One might as well say "I don't use grammar when I talk; I just talk." I have heard well educated speakers of many languages say this: totally absurd. What they mean is: "I talk without conscious knowledge of the grammar", but the grammar is there, it is a systemic requirement of the language, and the language cannot exist as a useful tool without it. Grammar is how the language systematizes meaning.

So Gene, in >49 geneg:, when you say that T and his peasants were talking Russian not a highly inflected language, but just the language itself. this is not possible. one cannot divorce language from its grammar. It's like saying: "I breathe, but I don't bother with the oxygen part." Inflection is not something that exists only in writing, but has a crucial role at the phonetic level. Does that make sense?

(After my recent savaging from Lola, I am very worried that I am not communicating well....I have spent 20 years studying this stuff and teaching it, but I am suddenly conscious that what seems so obvious and crystal clear to me might be obscure and cloudy to others. Oh dear. I need another herring.)

regarding neither/either, it's an interesting and excellent example. I suspect that neither originated from 'not either' which was gradually, phonetically elided over time to become n'either, in the way that do not has become don't. This elision is a typical feature of negatives in many languages.

He and she are not inflections, but discrete lexical items.

my recent savaging from Lola

Uh oh. U iz still my favrit tokin kat.

(I am currently entertaining a delightful five- and seven-year old. We enjoy savaging English. Savages R Us. :))

Russian: inflected throughout for centuries. The peasants might have been illiterate, but there's plenty of evidence about their language in song and folk lore.

I didn't mean to imply that spoken language doesn't use inflection, even if that is what I said. what I mean is two words with the same root inflected differently are two different words. In speaking this implies that the inflections themselves render the words different from one another. People don't speak in inflections, they speak words. An inflected word conveys the entire meaning of the word including shadings of place, time, persons, gender and (my wife will be proud) whatnot. Speakers don't think in terms of "now I must add the past participle ending", they think in terms of the word that carries the past participle meaning. The words are different. When spelling and literacy came along, we had the tools required to analyze the language and during this analysis it was determined that a particular prefix or suffix worked in such a way to convey a particular shade of meaning. My contention is that without the tools of literacy, it would be impossible to make this discovery.

This from a speaker of only one language with not enough inflections to matter.

Wow, geneg, we are really clarifying the clarifications here! Speakers don't think in terms of "now I must add the past participle ending", they think in terms of the word that carries the past participle meaning. my position exactly.

Geneg, do you think the development of literacy aided in the development of abstract, analytical thought?

I see this thread is about inflectious languages, and quite interesting, I find it. But where would a person go in this Le Salon des Amateurs de la Langue to find a conversation on slang, in English, American, and other tongues. A place where a guy with a Brooklyn accent might speak out without feeling self-conscious.

certainly advances in maths often required completely new notational forms. And, in some wise, the more abstract the math, the more additions to existing formal notation were invented (or discovered, depending on one's pov). Something similar could be asserted for the development of western music, though not nearly as extensive as in math. (Possibly true in other musical traditions, but i know nothing about the notation systems they've developed).

/(bb|^b{2})/ - stolen from thinkgeek.com

#58 "Geneg, do you think the development of literacy aided in the development of abstract, analytical thought?"

I don't know, Tomcat, I'm just puzzling my way through this stuff. I expect it probably did. The analytical, probably, abstract not so much. I expect the rise of the ability to think in the abstract created literacy. I can't imagine that being able to hold all the information needed for a thorough analysis of something in one's head was common before writing. Some macro things may be noticed, like when the leaves fall, better dig out those cold weather furs, but to do a thorough analysis over a large amount of data would require a means of storing information to be reviewed over and over in light of changes that occur as one delves ever deeper into the minutiae. Isn't that what the earliest writings we have are: lists of goods for commercial purposes, tables for analysis?

Bob, the thing about needing new math notations for more complex math strikes me as creating new words to represent new concepts.

What is it makes life so interesting? The more we learn, the less we know!

In the beginning was the list...

</i>The more we learn, the less we know! AKA Socrates's PARADOX OF ENQUIRY.

excellent point about data storage to aid in analysis. I had not thought of that.

Copyedit: do please feel free to start your own thread devoted to slang, Brooklynese or other exotica. I'm sure it will be very interesting. I myself am an ardent devotee of American youth speak, as many of the amateurs know. It is AWESOME DUDE!

I'd be interested in a slang thread too. Partuclarly one broad enough to look at meaning and function as well as specifics.

First, tomcat, I must dig into that slang thing youths in France were doing a while ago, and maybe still do today. Basically it amounted to making up their own language. I mean, no one else could understand them. Sacre bleu!

Slang. What is it? To me it's the talk of those who are horrified by the 'squares'.
The talk that cats like Stan Getz and co. used to talk at each other. If they didn't want to play with someone they might ask the voter to "take a cab" or a "stroll" or something as warm as that. They might do a number after the gig. They might get together of a Sunday and play a few sides. They might light up a fag, or a coffin nail, or sip a screwdriver, or grab some suds. Just some of the talk appropriate for polite company.

>65 copyedit52: Le Verlan ?

http://www.upi.com/Odd_News/2010/01/12/Company-creates-sarcasm-punctuation/UPI-5...

New punctuation mark suggested to indicate sarcasm. I'd call it a stylized wink. Or maybe an A-hole. Hmm.

67. Yes, that's it. Le Verlan.

Sarcasm Inc. of Washington Township said the SarcMark, which resembles an open circle with a dot in the center, can be installed on computers via a program that can be downloaded from sarcmark.com for $1.99.

You mean I gotta pay to be sarcastic? Jeeesh!

Le Verlan (is it in fact capped?), a made-up language by French youths, from what I can gather, brings to mind thoughts of Yiddish, an historical artifact that some Jews have been trying to resurrect, with what seems little success.

My grandmother's uncle, I discovered a few years ago, was one of the three "founding" writers--that is, those who wrote in Yiddish--along with I.L. Peretz and Sholem Aleichem. His name was Abromovich--my grandmother's maiden name--but he called himself Mendele Mocher Sforim (Mendele the Bookseller), perhaps because Yiddish was considered outside the Pale (there's that expression again), and looked down upon by the PCers of the time.

At any rate, one sort of language, an insider's code, alive and dynamic (or was that a fad, already dead?), and the other with no real reason for being, now fodder for academic university courses.

>sarcasm mark

Wow, that mark is in no way intuitive to me. I can't think of how I would choose to represent sarcasm myself, though. It's such a mercurial sentiment.

On the topic of sarcasm, I am often a little tongue in cheek when I speak (I know, hard to tell with my overly earnest professions on LT!), which doesn't usually cause any problems. But lately I've noticed that nobody picks up on this sarcasm/humor when I'm speaking in foreign languages. Arabic class is troublesome every day when I inevitably try to crack a joke. Yesterday it was "Allah yel3nuha" in a play on "Allah yirhamuha" (my classmates and teacher are relaxed jedan so this wasn't offensive... any strict Muslims out there, I apologize if you're annoyed at my use of Allah), and everyone understood the reference as the we had just covered the first and the latter is introductory-level material at my university. But nobody even smiled!!! I constantly seek validation so this is very frustrating to me, because the needy part of my brain thinks I must be doing something wrong. But no, it's just the way it is!

Well, my teacher did chuckle a little but, he also chuckles when I tell him that I'd be nervous about visiting Iraq right now (silly Americans! Everyone knows the entire Middle East is completely safe!), so who knows. This happens in conversations with native speakers too, not just fellow language learner. And in Chinese, although I am MUCH more fluent in Mandarin than MSA.

Amaranthic, perhaps it's just that Muslims have no sense of humour at all?

You forgot your deformed boob/winking eye mark!!! ;)

*If you're referring to the artificial distinction between "relaxed" classmates (mostly non-Muslim) and "annoyed" strict Muslims in my post - I'm not trying to make that argument; it's just that the joke may have been a little borderline for those who are religious:

Allah yirhamuha - "Allah spare her," a little like "may she rest in peace," something you would say in reference to the dead (any Arabic speakers to back up? this is gleaned from textbooks)

Allah yel3nuha - "Allah curse her" and apparently a pretty common swearing construction

I think the context was something like we were discussing Hitler and the Holocaust, and I said, "Hitler, who is now dead, Allah yel3nuhu (HUGE WINK), thought that the Jews..."

Anyway, it doesn't matter because that situation happens to me all the time with jokes that are much less risky. Perhaps common sarcastic intonation in Arabic is very different than for English, so I'm using the wrong cultural reference here when I try to express myself in Arabic with English sarcasm.

75: Yirham comes from rahma which means mercy, may God have mercy on her. Allah yel3anha - I have not heard that particular way of saying it but it is definitely understandable, just not standard. Usually in MSA they translate "Damn you" and other swear words in subtitles as "el la3ana 3laik." You need to get access to Arabic subtitles of English movies and you will learn a lot of MSA! :)

Now actual things people say: Allah yekhrib baytuk (may God destroy your house) (it can also get fancier, may God destroy your house and the house of your father or mother, etc.) Allah yehraq deen abuk (this is May God burn the religion of your father and it is actually a really strong thing to say, all swearing to do with deen /religion are considered really over the top) Of course I also know less literary sounding stuff - I lived in a working class Cairo neighborhood for 5 years after all. :) I understand everything those taxi drivers yell at those minibus drivers.

THANK YOU!!!!! This is what I need but don't know how to get. My teachers don't have enough time to answer all my minor questions about cultural usage, and also I'm afraid that sometimes they do not understand me, because I make no sense when I speak in Arabic and the class is total immersion.

MSA subtitles is a GREAT idea. I'll definitely do that. It's hard because right now we are mostly reading texts, so I'm getting all these things from various literary sources and on occasion haphazard teacherly explanation, and it is SO NOT USEFUL FOR REALITY! I'm not sure where else I can look to colloquial Arabic, other than ringing up my Arab friends (which I'm hesitant about, as most of them are totally Americanized and mix all their dialects; but I'm guessing that using a mix of dialects > not knowing any dialect at all?).

ETA 2/1/10: One of my teachers has mentioned the "Allah yel3n X" construction a few more times now (unprompted), so maybe this is a regional thing? He is from Palestine.

La Débâcle, Enrique? You read books in French? I didn't know you had that talent.

77: If your teacher has used it several times it is possible that it's standard in his dialect. I am not that familiar with the Palestinian dialect (which is similar to Jordanian, Lebanese and Syrian - Egyptians call the whole region's dialect "shammi"). Also, I will never be a native speaker, and it's possible I just never heard it.

79: It's probably just his dialect - I trust your experience with Egypt. I've been trying to decide which dialect to learn, actually. Most of the Arabic speakers I know are American and speak some sort of a mishmash of various dialects, but I don't know how well that would work in the Middle East!

78> Oui, Pierre.