[Ti] English & French word Counts [OT]

[Paul Russell]

>
>http://www.askoxford.com/asktheexperts/faq/aboutenglish/mostwords
>
>
>    Is it true that English has the most words of any language?
>
>This question is practically impossible to answer, for the reasons 
>set out in the answer to How many words are there in the English 
>language? 
><http://www.askoxford.com/asktheexperts/faq/aboutwords/numberwords> 
>However, it seems quite probable that English has more words than 
>most comparable world languages. The reason for this is historical. 
>English was originally a Germanic language, related to Dutch and 
>German, and it shares much of its grammar and basic vocabulary with 
>those languages. However, after the Norman Conquest in 1066 it was 
>hugely influenced by Norman French, which became the language of the 
>ruling class for a considerable period, and by Latin, which was the 
>language of scholarship and of the Church. Very large numbers of 
>French and Latin words entered the language. Consequently, English 
>has a much larger vocabulary than either the Germanic languages or 
>the members of the Romance language family to which French belongs. 
>English is also very ready to accommodate foreign words, and as it 
>has become an international language, it has absorbed vocabulary 
>from a large number of other sources. This does, of course, assume 
>that you ignore `agglutinative' languages such as Finnish, in which 
>words can be stuck together in long strings of indefinite length, 
>and which therefore have an almost infinite number of `words'.
>

It is important to note, however, that "American English" is a 
bastardised subset of the English language and Americans generally 
have a much smaller vocabulary than their English forebears.

Paul

--