Thread: In Defense of English
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Old 09-19-2011, 03:28 AM   #212
Billi
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Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT View Post
English has a far larger vocabulary than pretty much any other language in the world. Eg, French is estimated, according to an article I read recently, to have about 120,000 "root" words; German has about 150,000. English, by comparison, has at least 750,000.
Is this really true? Okay, this "recently" is now more than two years ago so that you most probably don't have this article at hand any longer.

But English has quite the opposite reputation: it is said to be one of the most economic languages in the world as it has - comparably - few grammar rules and also uses only - relatively - few words as many of its words have many (different) meanings. I would have thought that e.g. French and German had far more words.
Last edited by Billi; 09-19-2011 at 03:30 AM.
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