What are the languages with the most and the fewest words?
Very difficult question to answer, because trust me, linguists have been trying to come up with a consistent definition for ‘word’ since the dawn of time. You can’t count words if you can’t agree on what they are, and they have to stem from a consistent definition from language to language, otherwise any comparison is basically useless.For example, one might suppose that Mandarin is a language in which all ‘words’ are single syllables, but this does not appear to be the case; it’s estimated that about two-thirds of all ‘words’ in Mandarin are actually compound words. For example:zhuōzi 桌子 “table”; the characters mean “table” and “thing”, respectively.huǒchē 火車 “train”; the characters mean “fire” and “wagon”húdié 蝴蝶 “butterfly”; the two characters individually don’t mean anything (as far as I’m aware), but together comprise a two-syllable word in MandarinOn the other extreme, you get languages in which you can create new ‘words’ on the fly of seemingly unlimited length and complexity. Turkish, Russian, German, and Finnish are some of the more famous examples. Since I only know German well enough to make examples, I’ll use it, even though I know it’s not the best example of a language in which you can create new words at will:Vertrag “contract”Vetragsverlängerung “contract extension”Vertragsverlängerungsverhandlung “contract extension negotiation”These are extreme examples, to be sure; most Germans wouldn’t concatenate such compounds together in daily speech, but you sure see this a lot in bureaucratic and academic writing (because the Germans apparently hate space bars as much as they hate drafts and disorder). Shall we count all three as separate words, or compounds created by combining individual words? Should we also count the prefixes and suffixes as different words, too, since they change the meaning (for example, Handlung means “action” or “story line”, while Verhandlung means “negotiation”)? Hard to say.So, to make a long story short, we need to first define what a ‘word’ is, and then get to counting them. It may be more productive to count individual morphemes, which is an entirely different rabbit hole to fall down into, linguistically speaking.
Which natural, non artificial language has the fewest words? This is about the fifth time I have asked this and for some incomprehensible reason Q moderation keeps removing the key words which are natural, non artificial. So here it is again.
Toki Pona is the clear winner, being an artificial language whose vocabulary is deliberately limited to 120 words.In natural languages, the number of words in any given language is pretty much uncountable. What constitutes a word, in any case?Are a and an different words, even though they mean the same thing and are contextual variants of one another?What about cat and cats, or ride and rode?What about ‘words’ that nobody really uses, like pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis, or words that have gone out of style, like animalcule or kench, but have definitely occurred in English-language speech and text?What about words from other languages that are used in an English context, like kombucha or tzedakah or tchotchke?It may not be a satisfying answer, but there can be no real answer to any kind of ‘number of words’-type question. No dictionary will ever succeed to record every word ever used in a language. More importantly, no two speakers of a language will have an identical mental dictionary.
What is the history of English language?
English is an Anglo-Frisian language brought to southeastern Great Britain in the 5th century AD by Germanic settlers from various parts of northwest Germany (Saxons, Angles) as well as Denmark (Jutes). The original Old English language was subsequently influenced by two successive waves of invasion. The first was by speakers of languages in the Scandinavian branch of the Germanic family, who colonised parts of the British Isles in the eighth and ninth centuries. The second wave was of the Normans in the eleventh century, who spoke Norman (an oïl language closely related to French). While modern scholarship considers most of the story to be legendary and politically motivated, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle reported that around the year 449, Vortigern, a legendary king of the Brythons, invited the Angles to help him against the Picts (of modern-day Scotland). In return, the Angles were granted lands in the southeast and far north of England. Further aid was sought, and in response came Saxons, Angles, and Jutes. The Chronicle talks of a subsequent influx of settlers who eventually established seven kingdoms. These Germanic invaders dominated the original Celtic-speaking inhabitants, whose languages survive largely in Scotland, Wales, Brittany, Cornwall, and Ireland. The dialects spoken by the invaders dominated what is now modern England and formed what is today called the Old English language, which resembled some coastal dialects in what are now northwest Germany and the Netherlands (e.g. Frisia). Later, it was strongly influenced by the closely related North Germanic language Old Norse, spoken by the Vikings who settled mainly in the northeast and the east coast down to London (see Danelaw, Jórvík). For about 300 years following the Norman Conquest of England in 1066, the Norman kings and the high nobility spoke only Anglo-Norman. A large number of Norman words found their way into Old English, leaving an unusual parallel vocabulary which persists into modern times. The Norman influence strongly affected the evolution of the language over the following centuries, resulting in what is now referred to as Middle English. During the 15th century, Middle English was transformed by the Great Vowel Shift, the spread of a standardised London-based dialect in government and administration, and the standardising effect of printing. Modern English can be traced back to around the time of William Shakespeare.
What is the simplest language in the world?
Toki Pona.The Toki Pona symbol. From toki pona (website appears to be down indefinitely).As far as natural languages go, there are some very simple languages, as other answers have mentioned: Indonesian, Hawaiian, Esperanto, and so on; languages that anyone, no matter their native language, can learn simply and have little trouble with.Esperanto began as an artificially constructed language, but it has millions of speakers today, many of them native, and has been around so long that it’s safe to call it a fully living language. If we’re only counting by the category of living languages, then la lingvo internacia. (See more on it here.)But if we’re not, and if we’re simply including languages by the general definition of a human communication system with grammar, vocabulary, etc., then I vote toki pona.Toki Pona (literally “talk good”) was designed by conlanger (constructed language maker) Sonja Lang in the early 2000s as an attempt to make the simplest language possible. Here are some interesting features it has:124 words. Total.A word compounding system to get around its limit (eg. “alcohol” is “crazy water”)14 phonemes, or sounds, in the language (By comparison, English has as many as 40, depending on the accent)Consonant-vowel syllable structure - like Japanese or Hawaiian, but literally as restrictive as possibleNo verb tensesThree numbers: 1, 2, and 5 (eg. 9 is literally “5-2-2”)It can be learned in under a day of study.The language received a relative amount of popularity and today has around 200 fluent speakers - much, much more than the average conlang gets. A book on it was published in 2014.For more, see the official language website here: toki pona.Thanks for the A2A.
How old is the French language?
How old is the French language? And I also have a couple sub-questions to go along with that one for you to answer. 2.How old is the OLDEST language and WHAT is it? 3. How old is the YOUNGEST language and WHAT is it?
Are there languages where there are no words for colors?
As far as I know, there are no languages in which there are no words for colours. However, not every language has the same colours. Take the Himba tribe (below) who only have five basic words for colours. The Berinmo language also has only five words. The Nafana have even less, only three basic colour words.As these languages do have words for colours they are able to communicate the concept, however these people do have different conceptions of colours than someone who speaks English.From what I understand of how language influences thought and perception, if there were a language without any words for colours, it would seem to me that native speakers wouldn't conceptualise colour. I would guess that it would be like explaining colour to someone who was born blind.There is debate over the relationship between linguistic relativity and colour naming. I'm not well-versed enough to explain, but basically there are two schools of thought: the universalist and the relativist. Universalists use the universality of genetics as the basis for the development of colour terminology. The relativists use the variability of colour terms across human languages, maintaining that colour is more of a social construct than biological.
What is the European language with the least influence from Greek and Latin vocabulary?
It depends on how you measure “influence [on] vocabulary” (by percentage? by daily usage?), and also how you define “European”.A language like Icelandic that actively resists loanwords is a good first candidate to consider. I think there are some older borrowings due to Christianity, but relatively few modern borrowings compared to other Germanic languages (and European languages in general).But my guess is that the Caucasian languages probably have the fewest borrowings. They aren’t typically what you think of when someone says “European” but they are in Europe, and they’re relatively isolated, and their word structures (long complex words) would not quite as easily support lots of borrowing. So a language like Georgian might have less borrowed vocabulary, but Georgian itself as a major national language might have more. So one of the minority Caucasian languages, say Abkhaz or Kabardian, etc., might be good candidates. I’m not sure where any statistics about borrowing in those languages are available though.Some other languages you might consider probably are not the right answer: most of the Germanic and Slavic languages have substantial borrowing from Latin and/or Greek. I’m not so sure about Celtic, but I’d guess at least some religious words from Latin have been borrowed (and presumably more overall than Icelandic, because Celtic languages are more immediately in contact with English). The Uralic languages (Finnish, Hungarian, etc.) would also have Christian and formal/academic/traditional influence of Latin. Basque has substantial amount of vocabulary borrowed from Latin since original Roman contact but also many modern Spanish loans now. Maltese is an Arabic language, but much of its vocabulary is borrowed from southern Italian (especially Sicilian) so that’s not the answer either.The language with the most borrowing of this type is probably English, although of course the Romance languages have more inherited Latin vocabulary to begin with.
Why does the English language have different words that mean the same thing?
It is mainly because English words are derived from different sources. English is a Germanic language, and much of its vocabulary comes from older Tuetonic language.In addition, English has adopted words from many other languages – Arabic, Hindi, Chinese, Yiddish, Algonquian, etc. – as Britain colonized, traded with, and absorbed people from other parts of the world.Examples: “increase” (Old French), “augment” (Latin), and “grow” (Old Teutonic).And some very different words that sound alike also come from different sources ( for example “right” is from Latin and “write” is Germanic).Once words are absorbed into English, their meanings tend to shift with common usage. That’s why “cute,” which once meant sharp or shrewd, has now come to mean daintily attractive.That is also how negative words become positive and vice-versa: “awful” used to mean awe-inspiring, and “wonderful” used to mean wonder-producing (and was often negative).Thanks for reading. Hapyy time ahead.