Quote:
Originally Posted by Obelisk ze Tormentor
For vocabulary reason, I really doubt that. I would argue that Malay, Indian, Javanese and some other languages has a lot more vocabs than English. For example, Javanese has different terms for rice which is still grown (still a plant/crop), sown, still hard, already cooked, and leftovers while English Identify all of them simply as “rice”. Another example, English don’t have that many different names for animal off-springs. English does has “puppy” for dog’s offspring but does English has terms for the offspring of monkeys, ticks, termites, crocodiles, etc? One that is obvious is English language doesn't have that much "levels" of formality.
Also, English is pretty hard to learn (especially in speaking department) due to some inconsistency (in sound) in it. For example: the pronunciation of the letter “U” in words like “cut” and “put”. If English is consistent, how can they sound different?
|
Rather than focus on specific instances of a word or two, try writing a complicated sentence in different ways using new vocabulary each time. You'll see what I mean then. Also, direct comparisons of vocabulary volume is hard to do or outright pointless due to the idiosyncrasies of languages such as letting words be tacked onto each other to form new ones, letting nonsense be used as a perfectly fine part of vocabulary etc.
And while Indian, Malay etc. may have more ways to refer to a common object in Nature and have more layers of formality, they don't have as extensive a literature or anywhere near as extensive the scientific Jargon. English has a lot more words than most people use actively you know. And English assimilates words like crazy so a lot of "foreign" words that are used only in regional English are still part of the language. It's complicated but I stand by my claim that English offers a larger vocabulary than most languages. Perhaps I should say more ways to express yourself rather than use a technical term like vocabulary though.
Also, English isn't consistent and it doesn't need to be. It's inconsistency is part of its charm. And just because it isn't consistent doesn't mean it's hard to pick up. It's really easy to pick up functional English not only because the language doesn't punish you harshly even if you mess up (compared to languages like Chinese or Vietnamese or Sanskrit or Arabic) but also because our world is saturated with it.