A question for non-native English speakers.

[Heretic_Cata]

I don't remember what it was like before i learned it. I was to little then.

 

[The Last Conformist]

You mean it has alot of words for the same thing, or that it incorporates words into the language willy nilly(also a strength IMO) I would say that makes it more expressive not mushy. I'm not sure what you mean by that, care to elaborate?

No, I mean it's poorly articulated; the sounds all run together.

(I take it you've never heard Danish!)

 

[Sidhe]

I see yes I've heard it? I would say if you have poor articulation then it all runs together, otherwise no I disagree, if you here English spoken by most Englishmen then it does not run together, maybe some dialects blur the sounds but most people who use the language, articulate it well enough to avoid the bluring? although that is from a purely English perspective.

 

[Heretic_Cata]

I could tell you what german sounds to me (i studied at school but forgot some of it), but there civilized people here .

 

[FredLC]

Hard to tell for sure. Even those who don't know a word of english are very used to it, specially in these last 15 years, when cable TV came around. So it never feel as unusual as, say, German.

Anyway, I begun studying it when I was seven, so in my adult life, there have never been a moment in which I did not spoke it...

Regards .

 

[Kyriakos]

I could tell you what german sounds to me (i studied at school but forgot some of it), but there civilized people here .

There is a funny french quote (i dont remember by whom; i think some french general of the mid 19th century) :
"i will adress my bakner in french,
my lover in italian,
and my horse in german"

 

[The Last Conformist]

There is a funny french quote (i dont remember by whom; i think some french general of the mid 19th century) :
"i will adress my bakner in french,
my lover in italian,
and my horse in german"

Emperor Charles V, in the 16th century, asserted, if memory serves, that he spoke French to men, Italian to women, Spanish to God, and German to his horse. I can find the exact quote when I get home.

 

[thetrooper]

What did English sound like to you, before you learned it?

I'm still learning English.

Elegant language.

 

[Bugfatty300]

Isn't this kind of a hard question to answer? I couldn't really describe how Spanish sounds to an English speaker and actually make sense to the other person.

It seems it would be like trying to describe a color to a blind person.

 

[Thorgalaeg]

985,955 words roughly in the English language only 300,000 in German and less than 100,000 in French

Oxford english dictionary has about 150,000 words...

 

[Sidhe]

No actually it's more like trying to describe depth perception to a man born with one eye. But I see what you mean.

In answer to my own question I believe Lappish has more words than any other spoken language(but that's mostly because it has millions of words for snow and trees and stuff, like icy snow, soft snow, fresh snow are lijke sno snoe snow and snoi. Something like that anyway.

http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2001/JohnnyLing.shtml

That is not true and it doesn't include a lot of scientific or slang words which are valid words in the language.

The number of words is taken from a different site, and it takes into account all words and scientific terms.

http://www.languagemonitor.com/wst_page7.html

 

[The Last Conformist]

Lappish? Apart from the fact that the politically correct name of the language is Sámi, that myth is usually told of Inuit.

 

[Sidhe]

Well I could be wrong about the reason but I believe it does have the most words of any language.

http://www.scandinavica.com/sami.htm

Nope I appear to be right they have 400 words for reindeer too apparently

Take a look at the wikopedia entry on eskimo or inuit, apparently there is alot of debunking of the debunkers on that one

 

[Grisu]

I can't really remember. What I do remember is that I liked it better than French.

Dito. It was too long ago. I just remember that I always liked it, but that may be due to the fact that I associated it with the USA, and back then everything from "Amerika" was automatically extremely cool ...

 

[Cilpot]

I don't remember at all.

 

[Thorgalaeg]

No actually it's more like trying to describe depth perception to a man born with one eye. But I see what you mean.

In answer to my own question I believe Lappish has more words than any other spoken language(but that's mostly because it has millions of words for snow and trees and stuff, like icy snow, soft snow, fresh snow are lijke sno snoe snow and snoi. Something like that anyway.

http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2001/JohnnyLing.shtml

That is not true and it doesn't include a lot of scientific or slang words which are valid words in the language.

The number of words is taken from a different site, and it takes into account all words and scientific terms.

http://www.languagemonitor.com/wst_page7.html

That is true according to oxford dictionary itself:

http://www.askoxford.com/asktheexperts/faq/aboutenglish/numberwords?view=uk

The Second Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary contains full entries for 171,476 words in current use, and 47,156 obsolete words. To this may be added around 9,500 derivative words included as subentries. Over half of these words are nouns, about a quarter adjectives, and about a seventh verbs; the rest is made up of interjections, conjunctions, prepositions, suffixes, etc. These figures take no account of entries with senses for different parts of speech (such as noun and adjective).

Of course it is curious how you count the slang and thecnicism for English but not for French or German. For instance the spanish RAE dictionary has about 100,000 words in use. Adding technicism and americanisms (not counting slang) found in monographic dictionaries, spanish is about 600,000 words.

 

[Reno]

Before i learned English, well, it did sound a strange version of German to me. That was what i thought the very first time i heard it spoken. Which i remember was in Portugal in 1996.

Apart from the fact that the politically correct name of the language is Sámi,

Saami or Sami, without the dot on the a.

 

[Hitro]

Dito. It was too long ago. I just remember that I always liked it, but that may be due to the fact that I associated it with the USA, and back then everything from "Amerika" was automatically extremely cool ...

Yeah, the 80s...

I actually didn't speak any English except for words everyone knows until age 10. Not anywhere near fluently until 15 or later. But English was just so present, especially in pop music, that you can't really remember regarding it as "strange", like I would maybe do with Mandarin or Arabic.

I do however remember that close to my elementary school there was a gas station that had a car washing facility attached to it which for some odd reason had a sign saying "car wash" (in English) at it. We always pronounced that something like "care wush", i.e. the two sounds completely mixed up.

 

[The Last Conformist]

Saami or Sami, without the dot on the a.

Well, your Laps may not use the accent, but mine do.

Seriously, there are about a dozen different Sámi dialects or languages, and several different orthographies, but the one used by the webpage of the Sámi Thing - an elected body dealing with Sámi affairs in Sweden - does use the accent.

 

[Sidhe]

That is true according to oxford dictionary itself:

http://www.askoxford.com/asktheexperts/faq/aboutenglish/numberwords?view=uk


Of course it is curious how you count the slang and thecnicism for English but not for French or German. For instance the spanish RAE dictionary has about 100,000 words in use. Adding technicism and americanisms (not counting slang) found in monographic dictionaries, spanish is about 600,000 words.

From the same web site and the reason I said you're wrong, you should of read down further.

This suggests that there are, at the very least, a quarter of a million distinct English words, excluding inflections, and words from technical and regional vocabulary not covered by the OED, or words not yet added to the published dictionary, of which perhaps 20 per cent are no longer in current use. If distinct senses were counted, the total would probably approach three quarters of a million.

and from the non concise version or extended OED

"The OED2, the largest English-language dictionary, contains some 290,000 entries with some 616,500 word forms."

As such, writers of English have the good fortune of having hundreds of thousands of words from which to choose. When you think of it, the English language writer always has at least three words for any idea, each rooted in the Latin, the Germanic or Saxon tongues, and the Greek. Think of a word for human habitation: city, town, metropolis, and so on. And that's just the start. In the English-speaking world we also owe a heavy debt to Algonquin, and Hebrew, and Malay (ketchup anyone?) and Maori, and Zulu and Hmong among a multitude of others. I think you can spot the beginnings of a trend here.

And then there is the entire realm of ''jargon,'' scientific and otherwise, those specialized patois or vocabularies known only to those in specific fields. Computer-related jargon is multiplying at an extraordinary rate. And since English has become the lingua Franca of the Internet, English words are being created and non-English words co-opted at an ever-quickening pace.

This all being said, I now unequivocally state that as of 1:16 pm (Pacific) on the 16th day of January in the year 2006 AD (or CE, whatever your preference), there were approximately 985,955 words in the English Language, plus or minus a handful.

Technically that is correct, just using words from the dictionary french has 100,000 words, I would suspect you could probaly double that too or maybe triple it. But the fact remains English is attributed to have nearly 1 million words in its language, which is what I said originally, Man I didn't expect the Spanish Inqusition