sudanglo:Common sense suggests that the language with the largest vocabulary, or set of lexical expressions, will be the one in which more different things are talked or written about.

Officially the largest dictionary in the world is the Dutch dictionary (a sham assessment since both compounds and the words that make them are listed as separate entities), but still the everyday languages borrows from the English lexicon. My guess is that both cultures share a roughly identical reality that requires description, comprehension, communication, yet I'd assert that English still uses a more varied lexicon.

This is essentially a cultural hegemony issue.

Yes, Vestitor, I suppose that there are further factors that affect size of vocabulary when two cultures share 'a roughly identical reality that requires description, comprehension, communication'

You could imagine that in one culture they are content to make the same word cover different things and allow context to disambiguate, or distinguish the meanings with qualification of that single word, whilst in another culture they may feel the need to be more precise (at least on occasion) and make different words serve.

As an English-speaking Esperantist I have from time to time felt Esperanto to be impoverished because in English we have so many variations, for example, on the idea of walk, which in Esperanto have to be expressed by some adverbial qualification of marŝi.

I also imagine that a different attitude to the acquisition of words from other languages gets brought into play, facilitating vocabulary growth.

However, I am not sure that in modern English we use words from other languages to sound cool or trendy, or because they seem more sexy. Is that what is happening in Dutch?

Bruso:I just learned a new English word reading Esperanto. In "Vivo de Zamenhof" the words "litvo" and "litvano" both seemed to refer to Lithuanians, but not interchangeably.

I found that "litvano" translates as "Litvin", a word I didn't know. It's someone who lives under Lithuanian rule but isn't an ethnic Lithuanian.

The first three words in Pan Tadeusz (the *POLISH* national epic published in 1834 by Adam Mickiewicz) are "Litwo! Ojczyzno moja" (Lithuania, my homeland!).

At that time "Lithuania" referred to a much larger geographical area than the boundaries of the modern-day country by the same name. I'm not a historian, but I believe at one time Poland and Lithuania were a joint kingdom (królestwo).

Amike,

Paul

sudanglo:As an English-speaking Esperantist I have from time to time felt Esperanto to be impoverished because in English we have so many variations, for example, on the idea of walk, which in Esperanto have to be expressed by some adverbial qualification of marŝi.

I suppose in Esperanto the emphasis on communication still has to conform to the idea of manageability, and vocabulary size can easily get out of hand. Yet even in Esperanto there are sometimes several choices and for other things just the one, lonely word. No rhyme or reason.

sudanglo:However, I am not sure that in modern English we use words from other languages to sound cool or trendy, or because they seem more sexy. Is that what is happening in Dutch?

Yes, that's precisely what is happening. I've noticed it in German and French too, but the Netherlands is particularly prone to it.

English, to my limited experience anyway, is unique among languages in that when faced with a new concept or object we don't have a word for, we'll adopt a word from another language rather than try to make one out of the words we already have. I think this is a result of English at its base being a forced marriage of Old English and Norman French (whence we get both "cow" and "beef" ), and then becoming a language of empire whence we ended up with words like toboggan, panjorum and trek.

A vendor at the science fiction conventions I go to sells a T-shirt with a legend that says something like "English doesn't borrow words. English follows languages down dark alleys and mugs them, then rifles through their pockets for spare vocabulary."

creedelambard:..."English doesn't borrow words. English follows languages down dark alleys and mugs them, then rifles through their pockets for spare vocabulary."

It should be added "And then stuffs some of its own back into the mouth of the muggee.".

Yet even in Esperanto there are sometimes several choices and for other things just the one, lonely word. No rhyme or reason.

Yes I've noticed this. Sometimes you can sense that the explanation might be that there is a group of language with a common form and then another group has a different form.

This might be the explanation for the gazono/razeno duplicate - where as far as I know there is no difference in meaning.

In other cases it seems that differently sourced borrowings become differentiated in meaning. This seems to be the case with plaĝo and strando.

The trio aleo, avenuo, bulvardo seems a bafflingly rich cornucopia, by Esperanto's normal lexical standards.

And whilst Wells gives marŝi for both march and walk - to English speakers an important distinction - when it come to horses you have the subtle distinction between karakoli and pranci which even after reading the definitions in NPIV I am unsure about.

sudanglo:
And whilst Wells gives marŝi for both march and walk - to English speakers an important distinction

PIV gives us the "march" meaning first, and something like the "stroll" meaning second. To avoid the ambiguity, I tend to use PIEDIRI for the generic concept of walking.

T0dd:I tend to use PIEDIRI for the generic concept of walking.

Paŝi may be used in this meaning as well.

sudanglo:

All languages tend to develop until they coincide with the full mental capacity of their speakers.

Forgive me, but this seems nonsense. And what would be your evidence for this?

A much more plausible hypothesis is that a language develops as the communicative needs of the community that speaks that language grow.

I meant that languages tend to develop a complexity that matches the sophistication of their users. I thereby wanted to give an absolute upper limit to the difficulty to learn a language. That limit would be relevant only if you have an ambition to be perfect, so that no one of its users can feel superior in their language use. I said “tends” to develop, thereby leaving room for exceptions like pidgins, which are spoken only by people not yet in a position to put their whole souls to their new language. Theoretically one could also think about a people which doesn’t care so much about their language, and so use their mental capacity for some other purpose. But why would they not care about something that fills their whole days, the language they use for thinking, playing, surviving? Perhaps they do not care about let us say big vocabulary, but instead are highly aware of some other aspect, largely neglected by speakers of many other languages. Is it not part of the human nature to speak and listen, to be aware of distinctions and put meaning in them? I find it difficult to argue that some languages are really less complex than other.

I know about some rural dialects, spoken by a few thousands of persons, that researchers have devoted their lives to record. The researchers have published volume after volume, and left behind them huge amounts of unpublished data. That is an indication of complexity. In some way, all this must be learned by anyone who aspires to speak and understand the language perfectly. If something is missing, it will identify the speaker's language as non-perfect. I think the same complexity would be found in many language communities, if there were just enough resources to study them.

Exactly how to measure the complexity, or compare it with the complexity in other communities, is something I don’t know. So my claim is not really empirically based. I didn’t define “language“ either. If you for instance join two of these dialects and call them a language together, will then the complexity of the sum be greater than that of one part? And is it the same with the mental capacity?)

Concerning Esperanto, I believe there are ways we can use our creativity to develop the language to be extremely sophisticated, and at the same time very easy to learn up to a very high level. (N.b. not to perfection. And that is valid for all language learning: We learn the language to a certain level. The whole question about the mental capacity has very little to do with language learning).

I did not state clearly that I was talking about development of complexity, so the word "development" could easily be misinterpreted to mean what philologists normally let it mean. I am sorry about that.