What is the official number of words in the Irish language? Spanish has 225,00 words, German 200,000 words and Russian 125,000 words.

I wonder how there can be an official number of words in a language, since all dialects have not been studied (even for German and Spanish)...

quote:

Russian 125,000 words

Where did you get this info?... There are 200,000 words in Vladimir Dal's "Explanatory Dictionary of the Live Great Russian language" alone, and we've got so many other modern dictionaries (Soviet era coinages, modern stuff), so add another 100,000 at least. And then there are huge volumes of slang, sub-dialect, etc. etc. vocabulary.

(Message edited by peter on July 18, 2008)

Source: http://www.askoxford.com/asktheexperts/faq/aboutenglish/numberwords

How many words are there in the English language?

There is no single sensible answer to this question. It is impossible to count the number of words in a 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?

[...]

There are about 50,000 headwords in Niall Ó Dónaill's Foclóir Gaeilge-Béarla, the standard Irish-English dictionary. Given that what is historically one word may be entered in a number of various dialect forms, and that high frequency inflected forms also appear as headwords, we'd be safe in subtracting about 5,000 from that total.

Not every word in the Irish language appears in FGB of course, and tens of thousands of new terms have been coined since it was published in 1977. Here's what Maolmhaodhóg Ó Ruairc had to say about other languages: 'Tá trí oiread focal ag an mBéarla ná teanga ar bith eile. Bíonn idir 400,000 agus 600,000 focal sa ghnáthfhoclóir Béarla agus gan ach 130,000 sa ghnáthfhoclóir Fraincise. Idir 40,000 agus 50,000 atá in FGB. Deirtear go bhfuil 50,000 focal i ngnáthúsáid sa Bhéarla agus 20,000 sa Fhraincis agus sa Ghearmáinis. Cá mhéad atá i nGaeilge?'
(Maolmhaodhóg Ó Ruairc, Dúchas na Gaeilge: BÁC, 1996)

Not every word in the Irish language appears in FGB of course

More to the point, not every dictionary entry represents "a word". For example, Irish--like English--has phrasal verbs (e.g. éirigh as, tabhair faoi, etc.) which are given subentries under the main verb. However, since their meaning isn't predictable from the meanings of the two components, they're really as semantically distinct as synthetic forms like (French) renoncer or remettre. And this is before we've even addressed the problem of polysemy!

When someone asks a question about the "number of words" (or "verbs" or whatever), my instinct is always to ask them What are you asking the question for? Often, they have a practical purpose which can be addressed without resorting to the false certainty of completely arbitrary numerical counts.

When I was an undergrad studying German, a student asked our professor how many words German had. Without missing a beat he said "about a million" and moved right on to the next part of the lesson. Much giggling ensued.

Interesting.This website puts a figure on the English language: http://www.languagemonitor.com/ Anyways, the figures for the other languages were located while looking for information on the native tongue: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/english-language-nears-the-one- millionword-milestone-473935.html

Sláinte

This question came about because of the continued growth in the English language which can checked out here:
http://www.languagemonitor.com/
The other language word counts were sourced from:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/english-language-nears-the-one- millionword-milestone-473935.html
It is a very interesting area. Sláinte.

For a solid debunking of the misinformation on that site and in the article discussing it, see the following entries in the highly-regarded linguistics blog Language Log:

<http:///~myl/languagelog/archives/002809.html>

<http:///~myl/languagelog/archives/003012.html>

The second of this contains a further link to an even more thorough article which appeared in Slate: <http://www.slate.com/id/2139611/>

And here is the debunking of the debunking:

http://fray.slate.com/discuss/forums/thread/1468277.aspx?View=Flat&ArticleID=213 9611

A Note on the Methodology of the Global Language Monitor
by PJJP

07/05/2008, 7:00 PM #

We have great respect for Jesse Sheidlower
however are less enamoured of his argument presented above. We hear arguments similar to this quite frequently -- about the insurmountable obstacles in the path of estimating the number of words in the English Language.

The argument is specious insofar as you can make the same argument for anything a human being can measure: the number of stars in the galaxy, the number of galaxies in the universe, the number of people on the planet, the depth of the oceans, fish in the sea, moves possible on a chessboard, throughput of the latest supercomputer, amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, even the number of planets in the Solar System ('Take that, Pluto!).

The answer to questions like these have been settled, from the beginning of the scientific revolution and the Enlightment, through a number of methodologies, including statistical analysis, and rigidly defining the subjects of study.

If you to take the time to research, study, or even casually glance at GLM's published methodology, you will find that many, if not all of Mr. Sheidlower's objections and questions have been answered. Of course, we count only headwords, so 'run' is counted only once, and the idea of counting the named numerals as separate words, e.g., two hundred twenty-four thousand one hundred ten ... one hundred twelve ... one hundred thirteen, or the 600,000 species of mold, or the tens millions of chemical substances -- is simply absurd.

World-wide media (as well as government and corporate institutions) that have utilized our research and methodology and have found it logically consistent and statistically significant.

In conclusion, there is no question that English has become the Global Language -- and is growing at a significant rate. Attempting to measure the extent and breadth of that phenomenon is, in itself, a worthy subject of speculation, study, and statistial analysis.

PS Mt Everest is estimated to be 29,028 ft tall, an estimated 100,000,000,000 galaxies in the universe, and some 304,523,798 people in the United States at 23:48 GMT, July 5, 2008.(according the the US Census Bureau, Population Division).

-- Paul JJ Payack, founding president of the Global Language Monitor (and yourDictionary.com).