The biggest vocabulary?

By R.L.G. | NEW YORK

STEPHEN FRY, whom I always enjoy, makes a claim (at about 6:10 of the video)

[English] certainly has the largest vocabulary ... by a long, long, long long, way. Rather as China is to the rest of the world in population, English is in the population of its words.

Is that true, a friend e-mails me to ask?

There's a longish answer. For the summary version, skip to the end. For the really short version, though, the answer is "Sorry, Mr Fry." English is certainly rich in vocabulary, but this claim is nearly always made by enthusiastic lovers of English who don't really know how the many varieties of language beyond English work. It's not that another language has more words. The comparison simply can't be made in any agreed apples-to-apples way.

The simplest problem is inflection. Do we count "run", "runs" and "ran" as separate? The next problem is multiple meanings. "Run" the verb and "run" the noun: one or two? What about "run" as in the long run of a play on Broadway? Different enough from a jog around the park for its own entry? Different enough from a run in cricket?

Do we count compounds? Is "home run" one word or two? Are the names of new chemical compounds, which could virtually infinite, words? What role does mere orthographic convention play? Is "home run" two words, but "homerun" (as it's often written) one? What sense does that make?

These may seem to be quibbles, but discussing other languages, they become fundamental. Some languages inflect much more than English. The Spanish verb has dozens of forms—estoy, estás, está, "I am," "you are," "he is" and so on. Some languages inflect much less. (Chinese is famously ending-free). So whether we count inflected forms will have a huge influence on final counts.

Moreover, many languages habitually build long words from short ones. German is obvious; it is a trifle to coin a new compound word for a new situation, as mentioned here. Are compounds new words? Is the German Unabhängigkeitserklärung, "declaration of independence", one word? It's certainly written that way in German. Given the possibilities for compounds, German would quickly outstrip English, with new legitimate German "words", which Germans would accept without blinking, coined every day. Just one quick glance at the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung's home-page finds Abschiedsvorstellung("leave-taking performance", about South Africa putting on a display for the departing French in the World Cup), Weltmarktführer ("world market leader"), Stromtarifrechner("electricity bill calculator") and so on. There's no reason to say "it's incredible how the Germans have a word for 'leave-taking performance'," because to create such words ad hoc is banal in German. This is even truer for Turkish, mentioned in that posting above. It not only crams words together but does so in ways that make whole, meaningful sentences. "Were you one of those people whom we could not make into a Czechoslovak?" translates as one word in Turkish. We write it without spaces, pronounce it in one breath in speaking, it can't be interrupted with digressions, and so forth.

So Turkish and German and a host of others like them have "more words" than English. And no fair disallowing Turkish and German's flexible word-coinage. If we do that, we have to throw out English compounds, too; no "shoelace", "windowsill", "phrasebook", "boatswain" and so on. We'd also have to throw out foreign-derived compounds like "television" and "geography". A mess.

What about a claim like "English has more basic words" or "word roots" or some such? Now we're in the territory of what linguists call "morphemes", usable roots or pieces of words. But in the domain of morphemes we also have to include "un-" as a morpheme, and "methyl-" and many other things that traditionalists wouldn't include under "words", and it's not at all clear English has the largest number of them either. Meanwhile, this disadvantages the Semitic languages like Arabic and Hebrew. They use a smallish number of three-letter roots to coin huge numbers of words. ktb has the basic "to write", but it generates at least 30 words (many of them, like verbs, inflecting into many more forms still). These take up two full pages in my dictionary, from katib, "writer", to istiktab, "dictation". So counting only "roots" or "basic words" gets us nowhere either, since counting ktb just once would be senseless.

What if we just asked "which language has the biggest dictionary?" Again, that will differ for many reasons unrelated to lexical richness. Which country has the best-developed dictionary industry? The best archives? Do you count obsolete words? Dialectal ones? How many scientific words are included? Going back to our foreign languages, Germans don't put Stromtarifrechner in the dictionary because its meaning is easily pieced together from its parts, and including every plausible compound would make the dictionary the size of the Encyclopedia Galactica. (I could coin a new word right now: Wortschatzprahlerei, "vocabulary boasting", to describe what Mr Fry was up to.) Spanish dictionaries won't have separate entries for "estoy" and "estás". Chinese people don't even deal primarily with our concept of "word"—their basic unit is the single one-syllable character, even though these are quite often combined into words. Zhongguo (中国) is "China". You can't just go looking for "Zhongguo" in the dictionary, though. You look up zhong (中, middle), and the entry will tell you what 中 combines with to get different meanings. Part of Chinese education is learning what characters mean when used together. They are printed with no spaces. Does that mean Zhongguo isn't a word?

We could go on in this vein for quite a while, but that will do for now. If I had to give a short answer to the question "does English have the biggest vocabulary?," I'd say "Who cares?" English is a rich and beautiful language, not least because England has been conquered by Vikings and Normans, and has happily been open to foreign influence through its history. We know more of its wonderful rare words because English has been written for over a thousand years, and its many dialects are well described. That's good enough for me. We shouldn't need it to have the biggest vocabulary—which can't be defined in any sensible way—to enjoy it.