Talk:English as a second or foreign language/Archive 3

miscellaneous

I believe the claim that English has the most words of any language is untrue and shows that the article gives English some kind of superior quality to other languages.

Since I am pressed for time I will simply paste this bit of text which poignantly makes the point for me from http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/lang/vocab.html

If you pick up a large general dictionary of English, it will most probably contain the words “fiancé” and “sauna” and “vice versa”. Now are these actually English words, or French, Finnish, and Latin words (perhaps pronounced in a weird way by English-speaking people), which are just often used in writing and speech that is otherwise in English? If you say they’re English, well, I might say that similarly any English word that Germans often use (say, “computer”, perhaps spelled “Computer”) is a German word. You get the idea? Foreign words can be taken into temporary use at least, and there is a continuous spectrum from such usage to fully adapted and adopted loan words.

I will conclude with a proof that Finnish has an infinite number of words. In Finnish, there is a derived word for any numeral, corresponding in meaning the words in the sequence simple, double, triple, etc. You take the numeral, make it one word, and append the word -kertainen possibly after some changes to the stem. Thus from tuhat viisi ‘1005’ we get tuhatviisikertainen. And generally, there is the sequence of numerals yksinkertainen, kaksinkertainen, kolminkertainen and so on – literally ad infinitum.

Someone probably argues that I just proved a ‘potential’ infinity, not an actual one. But this is really irrelevant to answering the question under discussion. What matters is that if you make any quantified claim, saying that language X has N words, I can easily construct a set of Finnish words, containing surely more than N words. And this proves little about Finnish; there are similar examples in any sufficiently analytic language. What this proves is that the question “Which language has largest vocabulary?” is pointless.

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The leading expert in the world on teaching English vocabulary is probably Norbert Schmitt at the university of Nottignham, England. He has a book in press Italic textWhy is English Like that?Italic text (Schmitt and Marsden) in which he makes the claim that English has one of the largest vocabularies of any known language. In my opinion, the large number of scientific terms included as part of English may inflate that number, but I think even if we exclude things like numbers and names for drugs and bacteria and so forth, English still has an uncommonly large vocabulary. While students need not use but a fraction of this vocabulary, they may meet any of it in their reading.

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"Schmitt & Marsden"

The article states "Schmitt & Marsden claim that it has one of the largest vocabularies of any known language." but doesn't mention this "Schmitt & Marsden" anywhere else, and Google doesn't turn up any hits for it. Who are they? If there should be a reference of link by that sentence, put one there. --LakeHMM 00:47, 1 May 2006 (UTC)

That reference was easy enough to find through google and probably refers to "Why English is Like That". Norbert Schmitt is an American who graduated from the doctorate program in TESOL at Temple University Japan (Japan being one of the languages with a larger vocabulary than English a fact that I am sure he is familiar with), and is considered one of the top experts in the field of teaching vocabulary to second language learners of English. He has taught Applied Linguistics at Nottingham University in England for many years.

“Schmitt & Marsden” is simply the in-text standard form (APA style) (using the authors rather than title) that would be used in citing a source in a research paper or scholarly article. In such writing, a reference list appears at the end giving more information such as the title.

Whenever you see this form and would like do a search on the Internet to find the book someone was referring to, I would suggest entering something like “Schmitt, Mardsen” instead. Doing a search for “Schmitt & Marsden” is likely to give you only results in which the book or article by these authors is cited as a source to support some claim but won’t lead you to the book these writers (Schmitt and Marsden) wrote. Your search results of zero or no hits merely means the search engine could not find a work in which the authors were used as a source in a scholarly paper and not that the book they wrote could not be found under their names on the Internet as you had supposed. WC June 13, 2006.