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When I was talking about English as one of the most economic languages of the world I had cases like this in mind:
- read: no matter who (how many, which sex, I or they) or when (past, present, future) English knows only three words - read, reads, reading - whereas German has eight words and languages like Russian or Hungarian a lot more. And if you take regular verbs then you would still get only four words in English.
- book or work (or many others): English uses one and the same word for the verb and the noun, German uses different words for the verb and the noun - again German has double as much words as English here.
Okay, this is only one part of the language, for many other things there are different words for verb and noun, but these cases are no exception and occur often enough that I'm wondering how they counted the words to get the figures mentioned in this thread.
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