Some have pointed out that French is almost always longer. It's a bit more complicated than that. French uses a wider vocabulary than English, and uses many different words to convey different connotations. Words, as a result, tend to be longer, because they carry more information.
English tends to be much more modular and flexible. Nouns can be made into adjectives, adverbs and verbs rather easily, and "prepositions" drastically alter the meaning of verbs.
The end result is that English can be much shorter than French when trying to be concise. A short UI message will always be much shorter in English than in French. However, when conveying nuanced ideas, I believe they will be much closer in length, with perhaps a small advantage for French.
French definitely neither has nor uses a wider vocabulary than English, if only because English keeps growing while modern French stopped evolving a while ago. The only kind of French which does evolve is spoken French, which bears little resemblance to written French nowadays.
Now, for some reason, there's a widely propagated myth in France which is that English in particular is a <em> very poor </em> language : English is supposed to have a very limited vocabulary, and no possibility to express subtle ideas accurately. I have no idea where this myth comes from - maybe the old French-English rivalry - , but I guess it is the source of your belief.
Compare http://www.eupedia.com/europe/missing_words_english.shtml and http://www.eupedia.com/europe/missing_words_french.shtml I see many errors in the second list, do you see many in the first?
I do not consider English a poor language at all. I find it extremely flexible and expressive, whereas French just comes with a very large standard library.
This seems an extraordinary claim, given that English is generally considered to have the largest number of words of any modern language (mostly because we just steal them).
An analysis of English and French texts on Project Gutenburg shows that 93 words account for half of English usage, versus 89 for French [1]. English has fewer words in the middle of the distribution (696 versus 795 at 70%) and in the near tail (6,428 versus 9,050 at 90%, and 14,736 versus 21,231 at 95%), but more in the extreme tail.
I would think that literary French generally uses a wider vocabulary than English though, at least because repeating words in French is to be avoided at all costs, while it's more acceptable in English.
That said, I would interested if the grandparent could provide more info supporting their statement, as I don't know the truth one way or the other and would like to know more.
I've looked in bookstores at expert translations of French novels to English, and English novels to French, and in either case, the English is shorter. This seems contrary to your claim.
2) English words tend to be much shorter, which is reflected in the book's length.
But Shakespeare wrote mostly blank verse, and rhyming is not as much of a constraint on vocabulary in French due to the high commonality of word endings. If it's true that works for the stage tend to use fewer words, it might be because dialogue dominates; I imagine narrative, which consists more of description, naturally draws on a bigger vocabulary than even very stylized dialogue.
Since I'm a french canadian who is lucky enough to speak the two languages, I find it difficult to believe.
Remember that rap (rhyme and poetry) was popularized by poor english speaking people.
Even if so, I find the conclusion unexpected, as Shakespeare not only had a wide popularity in his day, but also coined many new words into the English language.
Also, the ones you mentioned lived in the 16th century, when languages were not very sophisticated.
The vocabularies might be bigger or smaller compared to today. Certainly no one was saying "bae" back then (for instance), but no one calls each other "thou" today, either.
EDIT: except for the older generations of Geordies, apparently.
First, the authors and books were not chosen randomly and the sample size is tiny, so the results are meaningless, although I do respect the effort that was put into this. The author is up-front and honest about this in the beginning, but unfortunately proceeds to draw unwarranted generalizations based on his study.
Second, even if a similar, but much larger, study were conducted on randomly selected authors and books, the results would still conflate the vocabulary size in common usage with the vocabulary size of single authors. Hence, what the article is attempting to study is not the same thing as the title of this post.
In the case of literature, random sampling is arguably far less valid than selected sampling of, say, top authors.
The interactions here are complex. There are a finite set of published authors, they're selected by editors, works are bought by the public. So there's both nonrandom and popular selection. Works themselves typically contain many words either from the popular argot or not (e.g., Joyce).
And if you're going to sample from large sets of works, say, newspaper and magazine articles, you'll run into issues such as style guides which often dictate terms that must (or must not) be used.
It's a difficult field to research.
But I suppose we could ask the mods to change the submission title. How about this?—"One blogger's analysis of the size of the vocabularies employed by some of his favorite French- and English-language writers, neither claiming nor achieving statistically significant insights into the question of whether French- (on the one hand) or English-speaking peoples (on the other) use more words in common usage."
"Do the English Use More Words Than the French? I don't know, and what I did to test it doesn't tell me anything concrete"
Ie if Dickens or Melville used certain words in their writing - if modern speakers don't know them, we can't really use them to gauge how many words English speakers use today.
I, for one, simply can't read Shakespeare - most of his vocabulary (anybody knows what a 'bodkin' is?) sounds foreign to me. And I scored 99 percentile on the verbal SAT.
However, American English, especially as is daily spoken in the more ethnically diverse areas of the US has a much reduced vocabulary due to the need to accommodate non-native speakers.
For an example of where Shakespeare's language become confusing consider
"Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo."
Modern speakers of English most often interpret "wherefore to mean "where", when it means "why".
This is wrong, most people in the UK don't know what a bodkin is. Many people would think it an item of clothing or something to do with alcohol.
About 16% of working age adults in the UK are functionally illiterate http://www.literacytrust.org.uk/adult_literacy/illiterate_ad... (have less literacy than is expected of an 11 year old child). http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2006/jan/24/books.politics
The average reading age in the UK is that of a 9 year old child. http://s-i-w.com/library/faqs/readability/what-average-readi... (although he doesn't give a source for this and it seems a bit low, even to me)
If music be the food of love, play on;
Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken, and so die.
That strain again! it had a dying fall:
O, it came o'er my ear like the sweet sound,
That breathes upon a bank of violets,
Stealing and giving odour! Enough; no more:
'Tis not so sweet now as it was before.
O spirit of love! how quick and fresh art thou,
That, notwithstanding thy capacity
Receiveth as the sea, nought enters there,
Of what validity and pitch soe'er,
But falls into abatement and low price,
Even in a minute: so full of shapes is fancy
That it alone is high fantastical.
[0] C'est presque toujours plus long en français qu'en anglais. [1] It's almost always shorter in English than in French.
"Se preskö tuzuur ply lon on franse kon angle."
This "phonetic compression" made the printed sentence about 25% shorter.
Using your example sentence (armchair laboratory):
[0] É quase sempre mais curto em inglês do que em português. [1] It's almost always shorter in English than in Portuguese.
11 vs. 9 words.
My previous view was that English vocabulary is based on Germanic as well as Latin roots, and so there there are often two terms with the same meaning, one which is subtly different in usage than the other. In contrast, French vocabulary is mostly Latin in origin.
With that said, I am also surprised. I would like to see a similar analysis using more modern works, as well as a discussion around how texts are selected. It seems like the selection of authors and their novels will significantly impact the results.
FWIW - Both English and French stem from the same original language (Proto-Indo-European). You are correct that English is a Germanic language (this does not mean it stems from German), and the French is a Romance language - with Romance being used in the sense of "came from Rome," not "sounds sexy." If you are interested in more details here, I highly recommend "The History of English" podcast: http://historyofenglishpodcast.com/ I'm still working my way through it, but it does a great job explaining the history of the English language, how it evolved, how it relates to other languages, etc.
English contains words from many other languages. It is not just Latin words, but many more recent languages (such as French) as well.
Also, something very common for french people when learning english is to try to translate their french sentence exactly. It always seems over-complicated in english, and quite pedantic. With time, we learn to stop trying using the same words and try to express it directly in english. We realize at this point english sentences are always way more simple. But here again, vocabulary complexity says nothing about word count.
