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In English the words "mathematics professor" are 2:

mathematics professor

We get 3 meanings from these 2 words: Mathematics, professor and mathematics professor. In Swedish the words are

  • matematik
  • professor

but "mathematics professor" is a 3rd word on its own i.e. matematikprofessor. So in Swedish we have 3 words for 3 meanings while in English the building blocks are just the 2 words. So in this case Swedish has more words than English. But on the whole, English has many more words than Swedish. Why when we in Swedish make new words in a way that English doesn't? Are there so many words in English that simply aren't translated?

JSBձոգչ
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Niklas Rosencrantz
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  • Not every language is the same, and "mathematics professor" would count as one noun, apart from either "mathematics" or "professor". That being said, I think this may possible be better on Linguistics.SE--I'm going to ask them. –  Nov 08 '12 at 04:05
  • Headmaster ⊃ {head, master, head master, headmaster, head-master}? – coleopterist Nov 08 '12 at 05:19
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    I reject your premise that "English grammar doesn't allow for concatenating". The English mathematics professor is exactly the same as the Swedish matematikprofessor, and control flow graph visualization software is exactly the same as the German Kontrollflußgraphvisualisierungssoftware. Some languages opt for writing compounds as single words, others use whitespaces. But they are still compounds. Spoken language is primary, and orthography is a random approximation. We could start putting whitespaces before all suffixes, but that would not affect their function in the least. – RegDwigнt Nov 08 '12 at 10:25
  • You could have raised this interesting question on linguisticsSE. Linguistics-specific questions may be off-topic on ELU. – Kris Nov 08 '12 at 11:22
  • @RegDwighт "control flow graph visualization software" does not mean Kontrollflußgraphvisualisierungssoftware in the phrase "How to control flow graph visualization software" -- English is that way different from Swedish, German and similar other languages. We struggle to parse sentences and detect word forms in English far too often. – Kris Nov 08 '12 at 11:26
  • Related http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/2998/do-most-languages-need-more-space-than-english – Kris Nov 08 '12 at 11:29
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    I suspect it's the same reason that German philosophers wrote long, intricate, incomprehensible sentences—they were showing off their erudition to one another (one of my German professors in college confessed he never understood Kant until he read him in English). Most English speakers don't use all that many words, but as long as a few intellectuals did, the words remained in the language. And different regions have different vocabularies. How many people distinguish between a skillet and a frying pan? But both words remain in the language because skillet is still used in some places. – Peter Shor Nov 08 '12 at 12:20
  • @Kris true, but that is irrelevant to the point in question, i.e. the number of lexical units. Once you've parsed control as a verb and not part of the compound, you again have the exact same situation as in German: a verb and a compound. That in English the verb looks exactly like a noun or an adjective is a separate issue altogether. Plus English typically does resolve such ambiguity for short compounds, by getting rid of whitespaces just like German does (black board vs. blackboard etc.), but of course I've chosen on purpose an extremely long example where this doesn't happen. – RegDwigнt Nov 08 '12 at 12:54
  • There is a bit in Sophie's Choice on this ... only one word in Polish, but in English fast, quick, rapid, speedy, and so on. – GEdgar Nov 08 '12 at 13:40
  • Fascinating question, but too open to discussion, which this site is not particularly well suited for. – Mitch Nov 08 '12 at 14:19

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