Opinion of a Polish guy: In my eyes, English is pretty bloated, when seemingly almost every concept can have three or more alternative words, each from a different source. It is all matter of perspective, I suppose. :)
I think such feeling can be caused by languages that rely strongly on creating compound words rather than borrowing a new ones (example from the site: Dictionary > Wordbook).
The counterargument is that lots of words allow for precise concision. wordbook can be ambiguous, as almost all books are filled with words. Is wordbook specifying that this book is a word book as opposed to a picture book? wordkenbook might be less ambiguous, but maybe this referring to all nonfiction books using words?
all that being said, I think uncleftish[0] beholding is an amazing piece of text and a good exercise for young physicists
As a native English speaker, I think the multiple choices of word are a strength. They usually have subtle differences of style (if not meaning), which can affect the tone of the sentence. In my opinion, this is where English achieves its precision - at the phrase or sentence level, rather than the level of individual words.
Depends on what part of vocabulary you look at. Some words, on the contrary, have many names: "nut", "beam", "housing", "tell", "well", etc. I used to think it's the contrary to Slavic languages, where borrowed words in professions get exact meaning (marine industry, or IT).
Having a Polish wife an knowing something about Polish through a few failed attempts to learn some, Polish is a lot more "bloated" to an English eye. The moods and aspects make learning Polish super hard. If you learn the morphology of the individual elements I guess you can guess what a verb means, but it all seems a bit alien. An needing to know if a verb is in one aspect or another, and that sometimes the aspect is "past" and sometimes "future" in tense... it is hard unless you are a native speaker or really dedicated.
As for English and bloated - I'm probably a high A2/low B1 Swedish speaker. I can read a lot better than I speak. I also dabbled in Norwegian out of fascination of how absolutely similar and yet different the two languages are. (It's like Czech and Polish.) So much looks the same, just spelt differently, but you also have a large corpus of vocabulary that is on the surface different - but in reality a native speaker would know there is a word that is equivilent (maybe just not used as much or archaic.) The one I found today, which blew my mind was "trenge". This means "need" in Norwegian. It is one of those odd "Norwegian seems to prefer another word". Swedish seems to mostly use "behöva" and Norwegian does also have "behøve", but I see trenge way more. Today I saw some Swedish song lyrics with "tränga" (which is basically a Swedish equivalent of the Norwegian spelling.) Synonyms happen in all languages. Even if languages that are purely Germanic with minimal Latin influence. Caveat: this is obviously my own observations. Not claiming any thing other than casual knowledge and no actual expertise.
More examples, from a Swedish speaking point of view, are jente/jänta (latter is archaic, flicka is more contemporary), snakke/snacka (the latter is normally tala or prata), bruke/bruka (bruka in Swedish is seeminly used to mean "usually" rather than "use", and änvenda is used for "use")... the list goes on. I find this really interesting. I think the Hanseatic league and Low German it brought explains an least some of these synonyms.
Is that mainly due to it being based upon a historical snapshot of English? that by definition never evolved further. If it had the same huge population of English speakers over hundreds of years (i.e was a living language) then it may also have evolved a diverse range of words without the need to absorb other languages - not that I care for it.
On a slight tangent, I've noticed when translating from English to Chinese (mandarin) many of the equivalent literal translations do not have a unique single purpose word where English does. So it can sound much like this Anglish e.g the literal translation of "thigh" is just "big leg", and this is not a one off. I have no idea why this is.
In Dutch, as an example we have a word called zoetwater - which if you translate it literally, is "sweet water". But it is the word for 'freshwater' in English [as opposed to saltwater], not some kind of sweet water. Even though zoetwater could be literally translated, no one really knows it means freshwater in English. There is advertisement for 'fris water' or 'vers water', which means fresh water correctly.
Compared to what? German is a rich language with a wealth of literature from novels to philosophy and science/technology, utilizing a much smaller set of root words.
English is a very bloated language compared to its European neighbours - it's almost two languages in one. That doesn't make English bad per se, but it makes it more challenging for foreigners to learn.
There are lots of languages that are more insular than English. Do you consider them to be impoverished, why so? All a language needs is to provide the ability to communicate to its speakers.
mkotowski|3 years ago
I think such feeling can be caused by languages that rely strongly on creating compound words rather than borrowing a new ones (example from the site: Dictionary > Wordbook).
wolfram74|3 years ago
all that being said, I think uncleftish[0] beholding is an amazing piece of text and a good exercise for young physicists
[0]https://groups.google.com/g/alt.language.artificial/c/ZL4e3f...
taylorius|3 years ago
culebron21|3 years ago
memsom|3 years ago
As for English and bloated - I'm probably a high A2/low B1 Swedish speaker. I can read a lot better than I speak. I also dabbled in Norwegian out of fascination of how absolutely similar and yet different the two languages are. (It's like Czech and Polish.) So much looks the same, just spelt differently, but you also have a large corpus of vocabulary that is on the surface different - but in reality a native speaker would know there is a word that is equivilent (maybe just not used as much or archaic.) The one I found today, which blew my mind was "trenge". This means "need" in Norwegian. It is one of those odd "Norwegian seems to prefer another word". Swedish seems to mostly use "behöva" and Norwegian does also have "behøve", but I see trenge way more. Today I saw some Swedish song lyrics with "tränga" (which is basically a Swedish equivalent of the Norwegian spelling.) Synonyms happen in all languages. Even if languages that are purely Germanic with minimal Latin influence. Caveat: this is obviously my own observations. Not claiming any thing other than casual knowledge and no actual expertise.
More examples, from a Swedish speaking point of view, are jente/jänta (latter is archaic, flicka is more contemporary), snakke/snacka (the latter is normally tala or prata), bruke/bruka (bruka in Swedish is seeminly used to mean "usually" rather than "use", and änvenda is used for "use")... the list goes on. I find this really interesting. I think the Hanseatic league and Low German it brought explains an least some of these synonyms.
nine_k|3 years ago
Wait until you start studying Sanskrit ;)
ithkuil|3 years ago
LeonB|3 years ago
pantalaimon|3 years ago
tomxor|3 years ago
On a slight tangent, I've noticed when translating from English to Chinese (mandarin) many of the equivalent literal translations do not have a unique single purpose word where English does. So it can sound much like this Anglish e.g the literal translation of "thigh" is just "big leg", and this is not a one off. I have no idea why this is.
deafpolygon|3 years ago
gfaure|3 years ago
This is exactly analogous to "little finger" in English.
danjac|3 years ago
English is a very bloated language compared to its European neighbours - it's almost two languages in one. That doesn't make English bad per se, but it makes it more challenging for foreigners to learn.
mc32|3 years ago