Which Language Is Richest In Words?

Such claims rest on poor methodology. I will keep to the poor methodology and rely on unproven patterns (because we only have 5000 years of data in the best cases).

(Many) languages seem to evolve in a circular pattern where vowels disappear, increasing the proportion of consonants. Something like “vuh-kuh” turned into Russian волк and even Czech vlk.

Eventually many of those consonants disappear, so people attach more to the end to solve homophones. Mandarin words for things are now generally at least 2 syllables long, although their roots used to be individual roots. Compare boy, bow, buy, which have the same “baw” sound then another sound after. In Mandarin, most final consonants were lost, so they all sound the same. As a result they started to clarify like little baw, fight baw, money baw etc.

We are not sure why sound changes happen at different speeds in various situations or sometimes so strongly and utterly like in English’ great vowel shift.

These changes impact grammatical and lexical meaning carried through lost sounds (but sometimes they remain). So where German can turn most verbs into a noun with -ung, many with Ge- (Gebirge) etc… or Romance languages with -tion, in English we are at a stage where we often use the same form (lie -> lie) or change the stress (they procéss -> a prócess) not a processing nor a processtion (procession is from proceed!) -let like piglet, wavelet, booklet is no longer expected and each use finds its way into the dictionary! Yet in the past, English had many more methods of building words, mostly lost like -t like drive -> drift, see -> sight, thrive -> thrift or -k like stale -> stalk, tale->talk etc. Arabic’s been frozen at a point where it can derive a few dozen separate meanings from a single root. But in some languages the numbers of roots are higher. A good dictionary will only show unexpected meanings, so a root could produce library, desk, write, correspond, document, but only have 1 entry because those are expected forms of its lexeme just like write and writes are expected forms and not separate “words”. Theoretically, the total number of concepts suspended would stay the same, in isolation. They would just be encoded with different levels of systematization. We have somewhere, somehow, but not somewhy nor somewhen. Other language’s can be more or less consistent, Esperanto artificially systematizing the whole series. With increasing inventions and changing lives, many no longer know what a harrow is because we think about and describe other items.

But this “natural” process is blocked by modern techniques like mass literacy and the printing press or religious focus on a specific writing of a book (as with Classical Arabic, as all Romance speakers still wrote in Latin). Mass education did even more. These allow old roots to stay around longer, vocabularies really grow, both for the average person and the scientist discovering and describing more, creating novel terms!

But it’s easy enough to go through another language’s dictionary and make Hungarian versions of everything. That’s how most languages were modernized during 19th century nationalism in Europe and Asia. Translators of scientific documents may coin even newer words etc. But most people do not know them. I don’t know all the bones of the body, various tissues or really …biology. I do not know fancy woodworking terminology nor native English plants from our ancestral homeland, various brandles and burndlebushesand eeroughberries and what have you.

Holding uncouth, unnumbered unwords like amniocentesis as English vocabulary to call it richer is but a tawdry lie. (Indeed, the artificial medical vocabulary is a shared system used by many languages, with consistent prefixes, roots and suffixes.) While it is good and noble, that English speakers ventured around the world and named its bounties and wonders, perhaps a more interesting metric is how many given groups of speakers now, how many are used in day to day communication or literature etc.