How special is English?
As a native speaker, I like the language well enough. As someone who is at least borderline multilingual, I like other languages, too, though. Others, however, take their love of English a bit far. Notes The Language Log:
Having used both synonym dictionaries and word-by-theme books for French and Spanish (of the variety for natives, not language learners), I immediately rolled my eyes at the claim, which the poster at LL, for his part, took apart quite nicely. What's sad is that 20 seconds at Amazon is all it took for me to verify how far off the claim was. Still, it got me thinking of another language I know that, like English, uses words of Greek, Latin, Germanic and Romance stock. I refer, of course, to French:
bleu (blue) - German blau (Italian also has blu)
téléphone - Greek
télévision - Greek and Latin(!)
français - German Frank (France has a German name, from when the Franks ruled it)
In addition to drawing on multiple sources, French has lots of ways of interesting word families. These emerge because the same words get brought in from Latin in a formal sense or adapted from Old French for a more general sense. Whether related words were built on the Latin root or the Old French root has its effect. Whether prefixes and suffixes were added before or after the language was codifiel also has an impact. Look at this:
Royal refers to the roi, or king, régale refers to his rights or law; féodal refers to the feudal system, feudataire refers to a feudal lord, feudiste is a specialist in feudal law, the whole thing is about fiefs. The roots for all these is the Latin feudum.
Then there's féal, fidèle, foi, fidélité, fiduciaire, se fier, all connected to the Latin fidelis, meaning loyal or trustworthy, which also yields the French confiance, now that I think about it.
We've drifted far afield of our initial question, does the existence of Thesauri make English special, but the reasons are first that English is not, and second, that this offers an opportunity for learning. If you know a couple hundred words of a language, I'm not sure this exercise will do you much good. But if you know 1000 or 2000, it's worth a try: Get a dictionary for your language that includes etymologies and, that offers translations for the etymon (?) if it's not apparent. Look up words for basic civilizational concepts like law, trust, faith, money, government, power and justice. Start with your initial item, noting the word, its meaning and its origin. If the word came from a word that meant something else before, look that up. If the etymon (?) meant the same thing, but is rather different in form, look and see if there are more obscure words similar to the etymon (?). This will send you on a wild goose chase where you discover relationships between tons of words, shades of meaning and more. A good vocabulary building exercise. And now, if someone tells you (in French) that they've always been interested in feudal systems and how they actually functioned, you can ask if they are aspiring feudistes, or just have an unhealthy interest in the droit du seigneur (see Le Mariage de Figaro).
English is said to have a humongous vocabulary, as a result of several factors: the combination of Germanic and Romance sources; within the latter, layers of earlier borrowings and later ones, based more directly on Latin (and Greek); and the willingness of English speakers to take in loans from a great variety of languages. All this is commonplace, though annoying. Now it's taken to the next level, in Sol Steinmetz and Barbara Ann Kipfer's The Life of Language (2006), on English words. After a discussion of doublets like legal/loyal, regal/royal, and tradition/treason, Steinmetz and Kipfer conclude:Perhaps I'm ready to write my book on languages after all! I had thought a surer knowledge would be necessary, but apparently not.
This is partly why English is the only language that has books of synonyms like Roget's Thesaurus.
Whoa! English must be REALLY special, with so many words that it needs a special resource to catalogue them.
Having used both synonym dictionaries and word-by-theme books for French and Spanish (of the variety for natives, not language learners), I immediately rolled my eyes at the claim, which the poster at LL, for his part, took apart quite nicely. What's sad is that 20 seconds at Amazon is all it took for me to verify how far off the claim was. Still, it got me thinking of another language I know that, like English, uses words of Greek, Latin, Germanic and Romance stock. I refer, of course, to French:
bleu (blue) - German blau (Italian also has blu)
téléphone - Greek
télévision - Greek and Latin(!)
français - German Frank (France has a German name, from when the Franks ruled it)
In addition to drawing on multiple sources, French has lots of ways of interesting word families. These emerge because the same words get brought in from Latin in a formal sense or adapted from Old French for a more general sense. Whether related words were built on the Latin root or the Old French root has its effect. Whether prefixes and suffixes were added before or after the language was codifiel also has an impact. Look at this:
Royal refers to the roi, or king, régale refers to his rights or law; féodal refers to the feudal system, feudataire refers to a feudal lord, feudiste is a specialist in feudal law, the whole thing is about fiefs. The roots for all these is the Latin feudum.
Then there's féal, fidèle, foi, fidélité, fiduciaire, se fier, all connected to the Latin fidelis, meaning loyal or trustworthy, which also yields the French confiance, now that I think about it.
We've drifted far afield of our initial question, does the existence of Thesauri make English special, but the reasons are first that English is not, and second, that this offers an opportunity for learning. If you know a couple hundred words of a language, I'm not sure this exercise will do you much good. But if you know 1000 or 2000, it's worth a try: Get a dictionary for your language that includes etymologies and, that offers translations for the etymon (?) if it's not apparent. Look up words for basic civilizational concepts like law, trust, faith, money, government, power and justice. Start with your initial item, noting the word, its meaning and its origin. If the word came from a word that meant something else before, look that up. If the etymon (?) meant the same thing, but is rather different in form, look and see if there are more obscure words similar to the etymon (?). This will send you on a wild goose chase where you discover relationships between tons of words, shades of meaning and more. A good vocabulary building exercise. And now, if someone tells you (in French) that they've always been interested in feudal systems and how they actually functioned, you can ask if they are aspiring feudistes, or just have an unhealthy interest in the droit du seigneur (see Le Mariage de Figaro).
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