According to CNN, this past Wednesday, English added its millionth word. Academics argue that is not even possible to count the number of new words and that such announcements are more hype than substance. Nevertheless, everyone agrees that English contains more words than any other language on the planet and is growing rapidly each year. Chinese, for example, is estimated to have some 450,000 words—a distant second to English even with a conservative count. The Oxford English Dictionary has some 600,000 entries.

Today, some two billion people speak English. More documents, articles, and books are translated into English than any other language. One example, there are only about a dozen translations of Homer’s works into French. However, there are several hundred in English. English continues to be the language of business and the Internet.

One reason English is so pervasive is that it accepts new words. While many purists try to put walls around their language, English adopts and adapts words from around the world.

Another reason for its pervasiveness is the influence of the English Bible, which traces many of its words and phrases to translator William Tyndale. David Daniel, professor emeritus of English at University College London and Honorary Fellow of Hertford and St. Catherine’s colleges, Oxford, observes, “The English language, when Tyndale [1494–1536] began to write, was a poor thing, spoken only by a few in an island off the shelf of Europe, a language unknown in Europe” (The Bible in English [New Haven: Yale, 2003], 248).

Tyndale’s translation minted fresh words and phrases that still resonate with emotions. His command of English and the ancient biblical languages of Hebrew and Greek was remarkable, and his “gift to the English language is unmeasurable” (158). The King James Bible translators “adopted his style, and his words, for a good deal of their version” (158).

Several words or phrases he contributed include “atonement,” “Passover,” “Let there be light,” “I am the good shepherd” and “Give us this day our daily bread” (Matthew 6:11). Daniel notes the timelessness of this latter translation: “The simplicity of those seven words, in Saxon vocabulary and syntax, matching the original koiné (common) Greek, has continued since 1526, in almost all English Bible translations, in the twentieth century made in their scores, with only occasionally the substitution of ‘today’ for ‘this day’” (133).

Whether or not last Wednesday was a red-letter date for the English language, such an announcement draws our attention to this remarkably resilient language that is spreading to every nook and cranny around the globe.

3 Comments »

1. [...] you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. The English language now has one million words (maybe) and why it’s so pervasive. Hint: The Bible [...]

   Pingback by The English language now has one million words | A Soft Answer — June 17, 2009 @ 2:48 pm

2. 

   The main problem with all this is that it’s utterly not true.

   Neither the English language nor any other language has a certain number of words—and to report something like “everyone agrees that English contains more words than any other language on the planet and is growing rapidly each year” is to report absolute nonsense.

   In living languages, words are being created and abandoned all the time (just a couple days ago i had the need to come up with “noneffervescencingness”, a word that i suspect was created and abandoned in the same breath), so coming up with a specific number of words in living languages is hopeless.

   Similarly, dictionaries do a really bad job of recording what the words are in a language. What about a word like the pronoun yo which is in active use to mean ’s/he’ (that is, it’s a naturally occurring non-gendered third-person singular pronoun applied to animate entities), which appears in no printed dictionaries but is clearly a part of Baltimorean English? What about a word like welkin, which appears in lots of dictionaries and still occurs in performances of Shakespeare, but pretty much nowhere else nowadays?

   Not to mention that even the Oxford English Dictionary only has 650,000 (not 600,000) headwords, many tens of thousands of which are even more archaic than welkin. (If the person who started the “one million words” falsehood was talking about meanings, the number’s even more off—the OED has many, many millions of meanings for those words.)

   (Even in ostensibly dead languages, words are sometimes still created—Latin has a word for ‘airplane’, thanks to the editors of L’Osservatore—and in any event you have the problem of not knowing about words that people used but were never written down or otherwise recorded.)

   Finally, English also isn’t nearly as pervasive as a lot of English speakers like to think. If you added up all the native and non-native speakers of English, even the ones who can only ask how to find the washroom but might not be able to understand the answer, that number of speakers is absolutely dwarfed by the number of people who speak Mandarin as their native language, not even counting non-native speakers.

   Maybe we should credit Confucius?

   Comment by David B — June 18, 2009 @ 11:28 am

3. 

   Thanks for this post !

   Comment by türkçe sözlük — August 21, 2009 @ 7:02 pm

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