darkweasel:

Bruso:In "Vivo de Zamenhof" the words "litvo" and "litvano" both seemed to refer to Lithuanians, but not interchangeably.

That is strange, as:
1. the root is LITOV/
2. the "Litvin" should be a litovujano (or, my brain protesting against my fingers typing this, a litoviano)
3. litovano doesn't make a lot of sense, it's a member/supporter of a Lithuanian.

Sorry, it's "litovo" (not "litvo" ) and "litvano":

The resolution I found here:

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/litovo

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 read somewhere that the size of English's vocabulary has doubled in the last 100 or so years. Whether this is true or not it is obvious that there are many more ideas that need to be expressed (and distinctions made) by the 21st century citizen than by his Edwardian counterpart.

Yet no one would seriously imagine that the populations of the English speaking countries have greater mental capacity now than they did - though, of course, they may well be better educated now.

They say English has around a million words these days. I can't confirm or deny it, so I just say "yeah, sure, a million".

But I can certainly opine* that the number of commonly used English words isn't any larger than would be used in any other "developed world" language. The total English stock of words is enormous, sure, but the majority of those words are known or used by so few that they may as well not even exist for most people. If and when they're used, it's either in truly niche situations (professional jargon, slang, technical and scientific terms, etc), or people just stare blankly at you. In practical terms, a word the audience doesn't know is a word that isn't a word.

I seem to remember reading somewhere that the "average" American - the real middle of the road, publicly educated, maybe some college maybe not, who they used to call "Joe Sixpack" a few election cycles back, kind of American, commonly uses around 8000 words. From there, as the education level increases, so does the vocabulary count, upwards to around 25000 words for people with PhD's. These numbers may be off somewhat; this is just from memory - maybe the bottom was 12000 and the top was 40000; whatever - but they aren't off by orders of magnitude. One million minus (say, a generous) forty thousand words may as well not even be there for even the most educated people.

Although I might be wrong, I would expect that all majority languages would have roughly equal functional word stocks. Because it's not how many words you have, it's how many words you use. I'd be interested in hearing from people who actually know about these things as to how right I am (or not - I'm totally into hearing that I don't know what I'm talking about from people who actually do, because make no mistake: everything I'm saying here is being pulled right out of my, well, you know, family site and all).

So I claim that not only aren't our mental capacities any larger these days, I'm saying our practical language - the one we actually use rather than the total count of words in the dictionary - isn't any bigger either. It's just a different set of words than it used to be. Fewer words about carriages, more words about computers, but all in all, about the same number of words, and about the same in any language.

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* How's that for a word you rarely ever see? In English, that is. "Mi opinias..." is exactly the same thing, and you see that all the time in Esperanto. Of course, really this is more a hypothesis than an opinion. I just wanted to use "opine".

edit: post content removed, it seems that Litvo for some historic Lithuanian state does actually exist.

I always assumed Zamenhof called himself a "litvo" in the sense of what we call a Litvak in English - that's a loanword from Yiddish. A Litvak is a member of a Jewish ethnic group with its roots in parts of the old Lithuanian empire, so a Litvak is not necessarily a Lithuanian (and their family doesn't necessarily come from anywhere *near* Lithuania's modern borders).

I've seen a few translations that have Zamenhof calling himself a Lithuanian. It's a misleading translation, because he didn't mean Lithuanian, he meant Litvak. He wasn't Lithuanian at all, in terms of the modern state and the modern people.

I am not sure about the term "Litvak" being used outside of a Jewish context but in the modern day, I believe that Jews are the only group today talking about Litvaks. It's still relevant to which Jewish customs someone might follow, and it's also accompanied by a specific dialect of Yiddish, "Litvish". At any rate, since Zamenhof was Jewish, calling himself a Litvak makes perfect sense.

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.

Given that a lot of stuff was invented in, or that pre-eminence in certain fields of activity is enjoyed in, the countries where English is spoken, it is no surprise that English should have a large vocabulary.

Of course other languages may subsequently borrow terms from English (as they do). (Incidentally if they already had their own words or expressions, they wouldn't need to borrow from English.)

You can add to that, that English has never been hesitant about picking up words from other languages and that the British Empire once extended over a quarter of the planet. We also in our history got invaded quite a bit until we turned the tables, and this left its mark.

All that has resulted in near duplicates for pretty ordinary ideas - quick, fast, speedy, rapid, express - person (man), fellow, bloke, chap, wallah, individual, character, party, mother::::er

Such near synonyms are well-known to the man in the street, even if he may only actively use a subset.

Since I teach teachers how to teach foreign language and particularly English to non-English speakers, I will add this comment from the field: the huge number of synonyms in English makes it hard on the English Language Learners (ELLs) and i suppose that this is what a lot of Esperantists fear concerning Esperanto. But as Sudanglo points out - most of us do not use all of those synoyms - I for one, never say "bloke" though I have an idea what it means. We now have the word "dude" for that which lets us here in the US feel that we somehow are part of the Californian scene.
Well, gotta go, surf's up! (hehehe)

I think the notion of language development to match the mental capacity of speakers isn't just, or even mainly, about vocabulary. Pidgin languages are "immature" in the sense that they lack the grammatical complexity of other languages, so some kinds of things are unsayable. As they mature and creolize, they acquire the same set of grammatical resources as other languages. Beyond that, they add vocabulary as needed, which has nothing to do with mental capacity; it's purely situational.

The vast vocabulary of English makes possible some very fine distinctions that most speakers will never need or even recognize. How many people could explain the difference between doing something inadvertently versus doing it unintentionally or accidentally. Many "official" English words are archaic, but for some reason never get dropped from dictionaries. When's the last time you heard anyone use the word "fain"? It's still listed in dictionaries.

You can't go from an inability to produce a satisfactory definition to the conclusion that this word or expression or grammatical distinction is not part of the speaker's language skills.

If that were they case then you would have to say that most English speakers don't have the difference between 'Have you seen Susan?' and 'Did you see Susan?' as part of their language competence, as few native speakers of English (including many teachers) can give a satisfactory definition of the meaning of the present perfect.

I would have thought most can recognize the difference between inadvertently, unintentionally, and accidentally and would use them correctly.

As I was rounding the bend I accidentally ran over Mr. Jones who had unintentionally stepped off the pavement. I did this inadvertently M'Lud.

We can all see this as funny.

Edit: translation for our American friends (pavement = sidewalk, M'Lud = Your honor)

Whilst you can see that humans cannot acquire a language that is beyond their mental capacity and that this provides an ultimate limit to the complexity of language, this does not provide support for the hypothesis that all languages are equally complex.

To make this true you have to add the idea that languages will naturally develop up to this limit. But why would this be so?

Would 500 years of development bring Esperanto to this point? I don't think so.

The actual main driving force in the development of any language, whether we are talking about grammatical complexity or the lexicon, is pretty obviously communicative need.

There is no obvious causal influence beyond this which would make the grammatical resources of all languages equal.

Human societies exist and have existed in all stages of development. At different stages of development, they have greater or lesser need to talk about certain things. This will naturally be reflected in the development of the language they use.

If certain things at a certain point are unsayable, then if the need to make those things sayable arises, at that point the language will start to develop to meet that need.

We don't have to imagine some mysterious mechanism beyond this which guarantees that all languages are automatically equal. To imagine that they are all equal is political correctness gone mad.