a million words?

I recently read an interesting article in the "Independent" newspaper about the English language. According to the article, the language is about to generate its one millionth word. Apparently, at the moment, English has approximately 988,968 words. Stirring though this is to any true Englishman, I can't help but feel sceptical about the whole idea of how many words a language has. And what I really don't like is any underlying implication that this somehow relates to the inherent superiority of a language.

To begin with, coming up with any reliable definition of what a word is is in itself difficult. Is it a phoneme or set of phonemes that can be uttered individually and have meaning? Try saying the word "the" on its own and see how much meaning you convey, yet most people would agree it is a word.

Then there is English's admirable ability to absorb words from any language it comes into contact with. "My doppelganger's schadenfreude was evident at the barbecue I organised on my patio." 13 words, 7 of them probably etymologically English, but all of them now to be found in many good dictionaries of the English language. Can we really claim the other 6 words as our own to back up our argument we're about to hit the million word mark?

Then try looking at the words "give" and "up". 2 words. Put them together in the phrase "I gave up smoking last week" and the two words, when used together, take on a whole new meaning. Perhaps the phrasal verb "give up" should be recognised as a single third word in its own right. You may say this is not possible, because they are written as two words, but that only holds true, of course, in the written language - there is no gap between the two words when they are spoken. English also has the word "tooth", the word "brush" and the third word "toothbrush". It also has the word "scrubbing" and the word "brush", but lacks the third word "scrubbingbrush", but is there any logical reason to count "toothbrush" as a third word, but not "scrubbing brush"? It may seem unimportant, but when you come out with figures as precise as 988,968 words, it does make a difference.

German happily joins two or more words together as one to make a new word and so go one up in the numbers game. Germans have "Geburtstag" - birthday, "Kuchen" - cake, and the third word "Geburtstagskuchen". English misses out by having only two words, "birthday" and "cake", but we can still talk about a sweet thing decked with candles we cut on our birthday and are in no way disadvantaged by having one word less.

I live in Greece, a country whose people are rightly ferociously proud of their beautiful language. They will happily tell you their language has far more words than any other. However, this is partly because Greek, like German, can easily combine two or more words to produce a third, whereas other languages have to keep the two words separate and so immediately lose out in the word count game, but in no way lose out on the ability to express exactly the same idea. I also used to live in France - another place which is rightly proud of its language, and have recently read a scathing comment that French has a mere 100 000 or so words. How this figure was arrived at, I do not know, but even if we assume it is true, all we have to do is read a little French literature to understand that the number of words is no indication of the quality of a language.


Kalhnyxta se olous, nos da i chi gyd and good night each