Lexical Exuberance

In a post over on Language Log, Bill Poser discusses the recent claim in Daphne Bramham's column in the Vancouver Sun that English is "the most idiosyncratic and wordiest of languages".  I agree with a lot of what he has to say—that comparing languages by their idiosynraticity and wordiness is a tricky business that requires cross-linguistic definitions of concepts like word and content—but I think he misses a small point Bramham made, intentionally or unintentionally, by her use of the word wordy.

Poser writes in part:

The claim that English is the wordiest language has a fairly straightforward interpretation. "wordy" means "using or containing too many words", so the wordiest language would be the language that, on average, uses the most words to express the same content.  [Two paragraphs deleted.]  I suspect, however, in light of her remarks on "creative exuberance", that Bramham means something different, namely that the English lexicon contains more words than that of any other language. That may be true, if one can get past the very sticky problems of defining and counting words, but in my experience wordy when applied to a language cannot mean "having a large lexicon".

It's true enough that "wordy" doesn't usually have the meaning "having a large lexicon".  Turning (as I always seem to around this point in a post) to the OED, we find four senses of wordy.  Paraphrasing, they are 'containing many words' (of speech or writing), 'using many words' (of a person), 'skilled in the use of words' (obsolete), and 'consisting of words' (occurring in the new-to-me phrase wordy war).  None of these corresponds to the meaning Bramham seems to be using.

That, however, is just her point about English.  In this case, wordy clearly can't mean 'consisting of many words' in the same way it does when a sentence is described as wordy, because languages don't contain a fixed number of word-tokens like a sentence does.  Instead, it must refer to the number of word-types available in the language; that is, to the size of the lexicon.  It's a part of the culture of English that, even in formal writing, when encountering a circumstance where no sense of any existing word will do, a writer can simply coin a new word or a new sense for an existing word.  Bramham can assume that we readers will extend the existing meaning of the word to fit the new use—and in fact, neither the writer nor the reader need be conscious of having done so, because we do it all the time.

The permissibility of creating new words like this, on the fly and right in front of God and everyone, is exactly the feature of English (or, more precisely, of English-speaking culture) that leads to the vast number of words in the English lexicon.  English-speakers come from a wide variety of backgrounds and countries, and the laissez faire attitude of English culture towards new words, instead of some kind of Academy that tries (vainly) to act as a lexical gatekeeper, has allowed the influx of loan words from dozens (hundreds?) of languages, not to mention a seemingly bottomless well of technical terminology.  I certiainly don't mean to be some kind of English triumphalist—surely Spanish, Chinese, and Arabic have similarly enriched vocabularies, and I'd hate to have to try to decide which language was the most enriched—but I do think that Bramham has a point about the wordiness of English, and the way she expressed it provides us with another example of how it came about.

Comments

[polyglot conspiracy]

Yeah, I can see the -y in wordy as meaning something like, "characterized by an abundance of words," as distinct from "too many words." It's like people who flirt a lot are "flirty," full of flirt. Um, and that's the only other example I can think of. I just wanted to say, it basically makes ok sense to me.

[Rachel Shallit]

Exuberance. :)

[The Tensor]

Crap! I've fixed it in the title, but unfortunately the misspelling remains encoded forever in the URL of the post. Sigh.

[King Alfred]

I guess a corollary of the point she is trying to make about English vocabulary would be that for such a language, it is easier to be precise about more things through simple use of individual words (rather than context or tone or body language). It always seems to me that other languages (especially ancient ones) use words for so many related concepts, so that the lexicon has to list all sorts of English words that might be used to translate it in various situations, but none of which are complete translations.

This may mean that English, in being able to be more precise (if in fact it is), thereby misses out on the art involved in playing on the ambiguity of words, like in Old English poetry. But the sheer volume of words (and elements/potential words) we all feel we have available to us also may be related to the mistake people make in the notion that any time a word is used, say in the Old Testament or in Beowulf, it always carries the connotations of all of its meanings. Sometimes foreign words do simply mean the most obvious.

(Yes, it's a slight pet peeve I have had with commentators on ancient texts.)

[Anonymous]

Sigh... Anglophone Exceptionalism strikes again.

The most cursory research into foreign language lexicon sizes ought to make it obvious what a dimwitted idea this is. Not to mention the fact that other languages are no less able to naturalize Latin words than English is. And lets be honest, an embarrassingly large percentage of the English lexicon is simply that: (barely) Anglicized Latin.

- Anonymous