English, German, French

[hmpf]

(Sorry, it's a "post many short entries day" in Hmpf country.)

As a native speaker of German, a fairly good second-language speaker (or, more precisely, writer ;-)) of English and a sometime dabbler in French, I've always "felt" that English had a lot more words than German, whereas French seemed to have a much smaller vocabulary than either English or German. However, I never had any "official" confirmation of this impression. Today, inspired by the Bill Bryson text, I actually did some research about this, and while I'm aware of the difficulty of trying to estimate the number of words in any given language, the estimates I did find seem to confirm my impression to some degree: according to the German Duden dictionary's website,

- German has between 300,000 and 500,000 words;
- English has between 600,000 and 800,000 words (another website put the number somewhere closer to a million)
- French has a puny 100,000 words.

(I tend to describe the difference between French and English this way: English has ten different words for everything; in French, ten different things have to share one word.)

ETA:

Bill Bryson: http://f2.org/humour/quotes/lang/bill-bryson.html

A German powerpoint presentation about English's tendency to acquire more vocabulary all the time: http://www.lrz-muenchen.de/~sprachwiss/sprawineuiso/web-content/downloadfiles/schmid/antrittsvorlesung.pdf - this contains a quote that gives the estimated English vocabulary as approximately 1,000,000 by summer 2006. It also has estimates for the "passive vocabulary" of people of a variety of levels of education:

secretary: 31,500 words
university lecturer: 56,250 words
voracious reader: 63,000 words

Of course, those numbers refer to native speakers.

Another paper I found (http://nti.btk.pte.hu/dogitamas/BHF_FILES/pdf/39Knipf/Kapitel%201-2.pdf) gives the active vocabulary of a native speaker well-used to writing as around 10,000 words, and the average passive vocabulary as 50,000. The average active vocabulary of a person *not* used to writing a lot can be as low as 6,000, though.

So, the passive vocabulary of a reasonably educated person looks to be of a fairly similar size for speakers of the two languages - slightly above 50,000 seems a realistic estimate. And since I have no comparable number for writers of English, and the size of the passive vocabulary seems to be similar, I think it's reasonable to assume that the active vocabulary of a practiced writer would be in a similar range, too - 10,000+?

I wonder where on those scales I am. The situation is complicated somewhat by the weird fact that in English, I seem to have two different kinds of 'active' vocabulary. My speaking vocabulary is very small - based on the numbers given above I wouldn't be surprised to find it in the 6,000 words range; perhaps even less. My active *written* English vocabulary, however, is on par with that of (slightly?) above average native speakers, I'd say. (Notice I said vocabulary, not grammar. I can get very confused by grammar, but I know lots of words. *g*) In German I notice no such extreme difference between the vocabularly available to me when speaking and when writing.

So... 6,000 for speaking English, slightly above 10,000 for writing English, and slightly above 10,000 for writing German, with perhaps a *little* less for speaking - 9,000, maybe? I'm almost certain that my written English vocabularly is larger than my spoken German vocabulary. Which... is a bit bizarre, come to think of it!

As for passive vocabulary... well, I'm a voracious reader in both languages. I've been reading German since around age 8 (that would be 22 years ago now), and English since around age 16 (14 years ago), and been reading predominantly in English since I reached the necessary level of proficiency (at around 20, i.e. ten years ago). I know I don't encounter many words that are completely unknown to me anymore, neither in German nor in English, and I read some authors with fairly large vocabularies. So... 60,000 passive, for both languages? Maybe. Maybe even more?

Not that it matters. I'm just kind of amazed by those numbers. :-)

Comments

[ithildyn.livejournal.com]

Reminds me of one of my favourite quotes: English doesn't borrow from other languages. English follows other languages down dark alleys, knocks them over the head, and goes through their pockets for loose grammar.

That's everyone's favourite quote about English, I think. *g*

[hmpf.livejournal.com]

Someone on Making Light recently suggested that there should be something like Godwin's Law for it, because it gets quoted in every discussion of the English language, online or offline. (I quote it a lot, too, because it *really* is the best description of English I know of.)

*loves English with a hot passion*

[etrangere.livejournal.com]

English has ten different words for everything; French has one word that means ten different things.
So true!

You a native French speaker?

[hmpf.livejournal.com]

If so, I'm kind of gratified that apparently my impression of French isn't entirely wrong. ;-)

It actually makes French very difficult to read, for me. I was able to read fairly complex English novels after only a few years of learning the language - unknown words were easily identified because they were just that, unknown. I then tried to replicate the experience with French, wishing to give my French the same kind of boost that reading English had given my English skills, but I found reading French novels very tough going indeed. You could go for pages and pages without actually encountering a word that *looked* unknown and yet not really understand *anything*, because so many of the words would be used in an unfamiliar meaning or context. Very frustrating.

Plus, somehow, French literature seemed far more heavy on introspection and description, both of which is fairly difficult for a new reader. I've finally found a way around the problem, though: I'm reading comics in French now. Granted, this will mostly only give me the type of vocabulary needed to have conversations, but with the state my French is in (i.e.: nearly dead), even that will be a huge improvement.

Plus, it opens vast new expanses of graphic storytelling for discovery... ;-) And not even just 'genuinely' French and Belgian stuff - some of the more interesting manga are only available in French (out of all the languages I know well enough to read, that is), too.

[etrangere.livejournal.com]

Yeah, Native French speaker. Of course these days when I read and write it's mostly in English.

Hmm, interesting, I'd never had thought of it that way. Makes sense, it would make things hard to read. It's one of the things I like in English, too, the precision and elegance of it. French however is all nuances and hints. Works great in poetry at least.

I'm not the biggest fan of French novels so I can agree with annoyance at introspective stuff. Comics sound like a great way to go round it, besides there's plenty of very good SFF French comics ♥
And I'm very happy we've go so many translated mangas ^^

French comics

[hmpf.livejournal.com]

Would you like to recommend me some? I actually know quite a few already - I worked in a library that had every comic published in Germany since 1945 for two years, and read hundreds of comics there - but I'm always eager to discover something new! (Some favourite series of mine so far are Donjon, Julius Corentin Acquefacques, les Cités Obscures, M. Mardi-Gras Descendres, Cyann, Aldebaran.)

You know, regarding French literature - I've always been struck by how most paperbacks in France seemed to have white spines, at least back in the 90s, which was the time when all my trips to France happened. You walked into a library and every wall (except for the "J'ai lu" shelf and the "Points" shelf) was white... It was like the tasteful moderation of the interior of most/many of those books was being mirrored by that of their outward design.

But then, I haven't really read widely enough to *really* judge if my impression was correct. Maybe I just chose the wrong books. French literature may well be more exciting than my few forays into it made it appear.

Then again, maybe your comics scene is so great because everyone who wants to tell a more 'exciting' kind of story does it in comics instead of in novels in France? ;-)

(In Germany, neither comics *nor* literature seems to have much space for the kind of story I'd like to read, though. This is the main reason why I switched nearly completely to reading English and American literature.)

Heh. French contaminating my English!

[hmpf.livejournal.com]

>You walked into a library

That was supposed to read "You walked into a book shop", of course. I was getting 'librairie' and 'library' mixed up. *g*

Re: Heh. French contaminating my English!

[etrangere.livejournal.com]

I do that mistake all the bloody time.

Re: French comics

[etrangere.livejournal.com]

I'm not a great reader of BD so I'm afraid you've already read more than what I could rec, but here's my favourite in case it's of any use to you :
Corto Maltese by Hugo Pratt, a very big classic serie full of beautiful atmosphere, adventures, esoterism, travels, treasure hunting, pirates, revolutionnaries, and lot of corners of the world in the first half of the 20th century.
Candélabre by Algesiras, intriguing and beautiful story of fantastique with canon slash.
Peter Pan by Loisel, a prequel story of Peter, at turns wonderful, gritty, gruesome, dark, imaginative and fey.
De Cape et de Croc, swashbuckling furries, very funny and fun and plotty, dozens of references to the great French classics of theatre & poetry
Garulfo, a very funny fucked up fairy tale; where being a frog might be better than being a prince
Légendes des Contrées Oubliées by Chevalier, read these a long time ago but it left me with a striking memory. Heroic fantasy, of a rather dark and macabre kind.
Fées et Trendres Automates, poetic steampunk.

You know, regarding French literature - I've always been struck by how most paperbacks in France seemed to have white spines
LOL, that's certainly true. Actually within the French SFF fandom we often refer to mainstream lit as "litérature blanche", which I always felt was rather fitting as pointing out the lack of diversity of the literary elites :p
SF books are usually silver, purple or with big, flashy illustration thankfully. I like the flashy
(And the romans noirs are either indeed black, or sometimes yellow-ish - go figure)

I read very few French books outside of SF (actually even there...), but I ooccasionnaly like historical novels, so there I can recommend Aamin Maalouf's books.

France's lit scene is certainly snobbish, so it makes sense it would drive the people intent on telling exotic, epic, weird stories to other media, yes.

I mostly read in English as well nowadays. Sometimes I feel guilty of it because I know there's still at least some good French books around, and I feel out of touch with these. But there's always so many books to read and so little time... >_>;;

[mmapmaker.livejournal.com]

Now there's a thought - French manga to help with my mostly nonexistent French. Wonder if I can find that in my local comic shop?

Well, there's always amazon.fr!

[hmpf.livejournal.com]

Though unfortunately you need a credit card for that. I don't have one either, which is why I tend to ask for French comics and manga for Christmas and birthday presents from people who *do* have a credit card (i.e. my parents). *g*

The great thing about French manga is that there's a much greater selection of the slightly less 'mainstream' stuff there. I'm not much into most mainstream manga but like some of the more unusual authors, and although there is one author who fits that description who's actually available in German but not in French (Mohiro Kitoh, one of my favourites), in general the selection in France is much better than in Germany (or Britain/America, for that matter). In Germany manga seems to be very much directed either at the female, teenage 'cute & romantic' crowd or the slightly older, male teenage 'gore & boobs' crowd.

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