English....No Loss for Words

I see the same figure in a few Google hits, but I find no explanation of how they counted. The OED (Oxford English Dictionary), universally regarded as the definitive authority on such things, contains fewer than 200,000 entries.

We usually refer to it as Anglo-Saxon today instead of "Old English." The demarcation is clear: 1066, when "Angle Land" was invaded and conquered by the Norman French. French became the language of government and business so English was relegated to vernacular status. Under the superstratum of French its complex German grammatical paradigms collapsed, it underwent wrenching phonetic changes, and it absorbed a colossal number of French words and Latin words filtered through French.

The transition from Middle English to Modern English is less clear but it's usually pegged around 1400. After a couple of hundred years the French occupiers assimilated into the Saxon population and adopted their language, which once again became the language of the court and commerce. Some time between Chaucer and Shakespeare it underwent another round of immense phonetic shifts (e.g., long A changed from AH to AY) and the result was Early Modern English that we can read easily, and an Englishman could probably understand in speech.

It has to include words like "molybdous"--which, by the way, is never included in the "four English words ending in DOUS" because you'll only find it by Googling chemistry papers, not by looking in a dictionary. Apparently that figure does not include inflected forms. Adding the plural form of every noun and the -S, -ED and -ING form of every verb would be a cheap and dirty way to inflate the count.

In addition to the words in current use, the OED lists almost 50,000 obsolete words.

That's a word that is still in use, merely an obsolete spelling, like "publick."

The Industrial Revolution was launched in England and leadership in engineering was later handed off to us. For a couple of centuries, English was the language that has had the first need for words to describe new technologies, so English is the language in which they have been coined.

I assume you mean "most technical words." Indeed we coin them from Latin and Greek roots. We often mix them with no regard for consistency, e.g., "television" starts off in Greek and ends in Latin.

It varies from one language to the next. The Germans are diligent about building their own compound words, which isn't hard because German is a largely analytic language. "Telephone" is Fernsprecher, "distant-speaker," and "automobile" is Kraftwagen, "power-wagon." The French once absorbed our words easily enough, but lately there has been a resistance movement. Unfortunately so many of our coinages are Latin that it's difficult for them to reject them, since if they tried to build their own words they'd come out pretty much the same. They try to avoid purely English compounds like "software," but they have become so internationalized that it's not easy to do. Spanish and Portuguese adopt our words without complaint, with only the necessary phonetic and grammatical modifications.

It's virtually impossible to assimilate foreign words into Chinese because of its unique phonetic structure, so they make up about 99.999% of their own, and they do a fine job of it, usually in fewer syllables. "Petroleum" is translated literally from the Latin and Greek as shi-you, "stone-oil," and "computer" is dian-nao, "lightning (electricity) brain."

English is a Germanic language but as I pointed out above, it has an enormous superstratum of French influence. Some of our essential daily-bread-and-butter words like very, use, question and second are French. Add to that the equally enormous vocabulary of the technologies of the past two centuries, and if you hand a page of printed English to a person who's not familiar with it, he'll assume it's a Romance language.

Winston Churchill is said to have had a vocabulary approaching a hundred thousand words. A really well-educated anglophone with exceptional language aptitude might have two-thirds of that.

My own powers-of-three logarithmic scale for measuring fluency in a language rates 10,000 words as 8 and 100,000 as 10. Most of us university graduates with a few years of real life who demonstrate our language skills on SciForums are probably around 9, with a vocabulary of 30,000 words. That exceptional person with 60,000 would be a 9.4 and Churchill was pushing 10.

 

The English language has always had the problem of multiple dialects with vast phonetic differences. In its early days, Angle Land was not a single kingdom and the various states vied for dominance. This only became worse after the Norman Invasion in 1066: English was no longer the language of government and business, so no standards were established.

By the time early Modern English once again became the official national language and London became the capital of the entire nation, the "standard" spelling of words for cultural or commercial concepts dominated by a particular region had already been established as the more-or-less phonetic spelling of the way the word was pronounced in that region. And the phonetics of the language continued to change over the last 600 years--differently in different places, including the new colonies in North America--so pronunciation slowly diverged from spelling. No official body was in charge of English spelling so different authorities would normalize the spelling of individual words according to the pronunciation of their own dialect and to their own ideas of proper spelling rules.

The result was chaos, even worse than you see today. If you picked documents at random by ten different writers, I'd wager that you'd encounter multiple spellings of at least ten percent of the complicated words. Eventually Oxford University emerged as the respected standard bearer for English spelling... with the emphasis on "English." Noah Webster did the same for American spelling, and he deliberately adopted a few key standards that differed from their British counterparts, such as traveler/traveller, jail/gaol, color/colour, theater/theatre and organize/organise.

No matter what we do, English spelling is hamstrung by our inadequate alphabet. In order to transcribe the language phonetically with accuracy and consistency--even one dialect such as the artificial British standard called "Received Pronunciation" or what we refer to as BBC English--we'd need to add at least ten new letters. Either that, or use a bewildering array of diacritical marks like Czech, or invent a whole bunch of new digraphs on the model of TH and CH. And many of them would be for vowels, since we have at least twice as many vowel phonemes as the five letters we have to represent them.

When we finished the job we'd still have a writing system that was "phonetic" for only a portion of the world's anglophone population. Americans and Brits will never agree on the spelling of "fortune" (forch'n versus faw-tyoon), and within both nations--especially the UK but even here--there are communities with strikingly different pronunciation standards. I say "park the car," Bostonians say "pack the kahh."

Actually literacy was surprisingly widespread in 19th-century England. I think the figure was something like 60%. I'm sure that except in the most remote hamlets, every Englishman knew someone who could show him how to spell his name. The problem of course would be that over the centuries names had developed alternate spellings in different locations just like words had, except no organization had the authority to establish standards over names as they had with words.

We have that problem to a much greater extent in America because we're a nation of immigrants. The Germans who founded one of our most prominent breweries spelled their name in proper German, Busch, but some distant relatives anglicized it to Bush long before two of them became presidents. Their competitors, the Kurz family, anglicized their own name to Coors. Former Arkansas governor Orville Faubus was a descendant of the Forbes family, and you see the French name Beauchamps spelled in a variety of ways including Beecham.

 

Then you'd better write a letter of protest to Oxford University, because, as I mentioned, the OED lists about forty thousand obsolete English words. It's not fair to count a word like "wassail," one that's still in the dictionary only because it pops up in a Christmas carol once a year and nobody has any idea what it means.

• Abatude: a clipped coin. In the old days when money was backed up by a gold or silver standard and coins were made of precious metals, you could cut a piece off of a coin to pay a debt of less than the full value of the coin. The remaining larger piece was the abatude.
• Burdalane: the last surviving child in a family. Fortunately plagues are rare these days.
• Evenhood: equality. A good old Anglo-Saxon word that has been eclipsed by its Latin equivalent.

There are entire websites devoted to only the interesting obsolete words!

From Dictionary.com:

"Wassail," pronounced "wossle," is an old greeting meaning "be healthy"--was hale in Anglo-Saxon. There's a Christmas carol titled "Here We Come a-Wassailing." You'd recognize the bridge if you heard it, even if you never noticed the lyrics:

Love and joy, come to you
And to you your wassail too.
And God bless you and send you
A happy new year.
And God send you a happy new year.