Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
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.
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Thats actually not accurate - you do know that some languages allow for the construction of new words (e.g. joining words (Donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaftskapitänsmütze, declination or conjugation, morphing between adjective, noun, verb, etc, etc, etc)? What you are counting is simply the base vocabulary - in English this is pretty much all you got, in French or German (even more so in German) you have many more flexibilities (I actually can't remember the official name for this stuff .. something with flex).
This "counting of words" is pretty much useless ... languages are simply different
--might it be "inflection" respectively fusional language?
Yes, I believe this is the (english) name .. (see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusional_language )