Quote:
Originally Posted by beppe
The Global Language Monitor announced that the English language had crossed the 1,000,000-word threshold on 10 June 2009.[79] The announcement was met with strong scepticism by linguists and lexicographers,[80] though a number of non-specialist reports[81][82] accepted the figure uncritically. However, in December 2010 a joint Harvard/Google study found the language to contain 1,022,000 words and was expanding at the rate of 8,500 words per year.[83] The findings came from the computer analysis of 5,195,769 digitised books. The difference between the Google/Harvard estimate and that of the Global Language Monitor is about thirteen thousandth of one percent.
Comparisons of the vocabulary size of English to that of other languages are generally not taken very seriously by linguists and lexicographers. Besides the fact that dictionaries will vary in their policies for including and counting entries,[84] what is meant by a given language and what counts as a word do not have simple definitions. Also, a definition of word that works for one language may not work well in another,[85] with differences in morphology and orthography making cross-linguistic definitions and word-counting difficult, and potentially giving very different results.[86] Linguist Geoffrey K. Pullum has gone so far as to compare concerns over vocabulary size (and the notion that a supposedly larger lexicon leads to "greater richness and precision") to an obsession with penis length.[87]
The modern German scientific vocabulary has nine million words and word groups (based on the analysis of 35 million sentences of a corpus in Leipzig, which as of July 2003 included 500 million words in total).[38]
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Thank you very much, Beppe!
