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One Million Words? Really?
The idea behind The Global Language Monitor's Million Word March is certainly compelling, especially if you happen to be a proud native speaker of English. The English lexicon, it claims, has just grown to over 1,000,000 words, far surpassing other languages. There's a lot of fun in this idea, but from a linguistic perspective, there's probably more fun than substance. Believe it or not, something that seems as simple as word-counting is actually notoriously difficult. How do you go about defining a word? Is it a string of written letters on a page or screen that's not separated by a space? Most likely not, since there were obviously words before written language. And even if this were the case, what do you do with things like compounds, hyphenated compounds, or for that matter compounds that are written without hyphens? How many words are there in blackboard, merry-go-round and snow day? Does it even matter, or is all of this a non-issue created by orthographic convention rather than linguistic reality? Is a word something like an "atom of meaning," the smallest unit that conveys some sort of information? If so, then cat is one word but cats is two, because surely the -s of the plural conveys information. If this is the case, then words are really what linguists would call morphemes, so things like -ing, -ed, and so on would all count as words, as well as all the myriad suffixes and prefixes that alter basic meaning, like re-, dis-, -ness, -able, etc. But these things can't live on their own, without being bound to another, presumably different sort of word, so are they to be counted in the same way? What about idiomatic expressions? Is kick the bucket a single word, along with, of course, kick, the, and bucket? And what about ad hoc expressions that are created by a speech community to describe current events? The Global Language Monitor lists financial tsunami as word number 1,000,001, but is it really a word? Maybe, maybe not. It also lists examples such as octomom and Phelpsian. We certainly know what these things mean now, but will they be a part of the lexicon 25, 50, or 100 years from now? Does longevity matter? Borrowings from other languages count, at least at some point when enough speakers use them. Cul-de-sac is an English word, which incidentally is rarely used in French. English is known for being particularly hungry for borrowings from other languages, but a lot of languages (perhaps all) have this appetite to some degree or another, and the extent to which they gobble up new words depends on things like history, geography, economics, politics, etc. Given the history of English (Germanic, with a huge influx of Latin vocabulary thanks to the Normans in 1066) and its spread across the globe via colonialism and commerce, it's no surprise that English has taken on a lot of words from other languages. But it's probably safe to say that any language in English's position would have done the same. All languages exhibit all of these types of words and word-like phenomena, so depending on how you count words, it's hard to say how many of them exist in a given language. So, even if you pop the cork on the champagne and toast this milestone in the English lexicon, it's a good idea to sit back and try to come up with a definition of word. When you do, alert the linguists! (Chris) Tags: English, Global Language Monitor, lexicon, Million Word March, word
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