What the description of Sphacteria has to tell us

[Paralus]

English is certainly an "adventure" Paul. Just what state the universe would be in if it created laws which it then ignored in similar cavalier fashion does not bear contemplation. I shall keep an eye out for the show: it likely will run on BBC Knowledge on Fox at some stage.

I note that my son, who's just commenced high school, is to learn Latin and French. Paullus would probably agree that Mandarin might be better than French in our part of the world. The Latin will be good for history: the History Master loves his Roman history and likes the students to read sources in Latin. Sent him a copy of AW: perhaps he'll subscribe??

[Paullus Scipio]

Nope! Mandarin's too damned difficult!......though our esteemed Prime Minister speaks it fluently. Far easier and just as useful is Japanese......but nothing wrong with Latin and French.

[Paralus]

...there is an excellent BBC series "The Adventure of English" that examines this in detail.

Just noted (last night) that it commences on the History channel this Saturday night (Feb 7th). I shall boot the children from the lounge and apply my eyes and ears to it.

[PMBardunias]

Thanks for the heads up, I'll record them. Someplace I have some references saved showing the breakdown of English words by derivation. Less than half are from old Anglo-Saxon, and of those there is a distinct upper class/lower class split (House (A-S= Hus) for the poor and Mansions (Fr= Maison) for the rich. There is also a skew by length of words- more small words are Anglo-saxon, while larger words are foreign. Email if you'd like them and I'll try to find them.

[Paullus Scipio]

Boy,oh boy! ....are we off-topic.To those interested in that richest of languages, I recommend the huge "Shorter (!!) Oxford English Dictionary on Historical principles" ....all 2672 pages of it! hock: It gives the historical origins and derivation of each word as well as meaning.
Also according to Oxford:
"The English language is popularly believed to contain more words than any other but......... It is impossible to count the number of words in any given language, because it is so hard to decide what counts as a word. Is 'dog' one word, or two (a noun meaning 'a kind of animal', and a verb meaning 'to follow persistently')? If we count it as two, then do we count inflections separately too ('dogs' plural noun, 'dogs' present tense of the verb). Is dog-tired a word, or just two other words joined together? Is hot dog really two words, since we might also find hot-dog or even hotdog?

It is also difficult to decide what counts as 'English'. What about medical and scientific terms? Latin words used in law, French words used in cooking, German words used in academic writing, Japanese words used in martial arts? Do you count Scots dialect? Youth slang? Computing jargon?

The Second Edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary contains full entries for 171,476 words in current use, and 47,156 obsolete words. To this may be added around 9,500 derivative words included as subentries. Over half of these words are nouns, about a quarter adjectives, and about a seventh verbs; the rest is made up of interjections, conjunctions, prepositions, suffixes, etc. These figures take no account of entries with senses for different parts of speech (such as noun and adjective).

This suggests that there are, at the very least, a quarter of a million distinct English words, excluding inflections, and words from technical and regional vocabulary not covered by the OED, or words not yet added to the published dictionary, of which perhaps 20 per cent are no longer in current use. If distinct senses were counted, the total would probably approach three quarters of a million.

However, it seems quite probable that English has more words than most comparable world languages.

The reason for this is historical. English was originally a Germanic language, related to Dutch and German, and it shares much of its grammar and basic vocabulary with those languages. However, after the Norman Conquest in 1066 it was hugely influenced by Norman French, which became the language of the ruling class for a considerable period, and by Latin, which was the language of scholarship and of the Church. Very large numbers of French and Latin words entered the language. Consequently, English has a much larger vocabulary than either the Germanic languages or the members of the Romance language family to which French belongs.

English is also very ready to accommodate foreign words, and as it has become an international language, it has absorbed vocabulary from a large number of other sources. This does, of course, assume that you ignore 'agglutinative' languages such as Finnish, in which words can be stuck together in long strings of indefinite length, and which therefore have an almost infinite number of 'words'. "(which in English would be phrases or sentences).

By comparison, Chinese with it's long history and continuous development had during the Qin Dynasty altogether 3,300 characters/words at that time. During the Han Dynasty (206BC-220AD) there were 5,340 characters/words. During the Middle Ages, the Chinese language witnessed rapid development. In the dictionary Zilin (Collection of Characters) of the Jin Dynasty, there were over 12,824 characters/words. By the twentieth century the "Great Dictionary of China" had more than 48,000 characters/words. And, in 1971 Zhongwen Da Cidian (Great Dictionary of the Chinese Language), edited by Zhang Qiyun, had a vocabulary of 49,888 characters/words.

With the passage of time, dictionaries with more and more characters came into being. However, knowledge of about 4,000 characters is necessary for reading a newspaper and for most other common purposes.

But despite the huge expansion of Chinese over the centuries, it is still only roughly a tenth the size of English in terms of vocabulary !! hock: