On the bright side, English could easily adopt them, as it repeatedly has done with foreign words for a long time.
Does English have more words than any other language?
https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/explor...most-words
. . . 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 [and German], in which words can be stuck together in long strings of indefinite length, and which therefore have an almost infinite number of 'words'.
Which Language Is Richest In Words?: Steven Frank, the author of The Pen Commandments claims that English has 500,000 words with German having about 135,000 and French having fewer than 100,000. But wait...
There's no meaningful way to show that "English has the most words of any language
https://www.economist.com/johnson/2010/0...vocabulary
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Mar 26, 2019 07:38 PM
(This post was last modified: Mar 26, 2019 07:39 PM by Magical Realist.)
