as for the German article describing the French bridge, well, perhaps French people are the ones who have to look at this immense thing towering over their landscape each day…while the Germans are free to admire the architectural beauty of a construction that is not in their immediate environment. I mean the French are the same people who got stuck with an Eifel tower that we all love and they all hated. It was supposed to be temporary, but it stayed and stayed and they were stuck with it. Also, the strength of the French writer’s “bridge” and the beauty of the German writer’s “bridge” could also just be due to personal tastes and viewpoints. Either way, it would take more examples to show a pattern.

By the way, “vagin”, vagina, is masculine in French. Yes, I looked it up in the French-English dictionary in HS cause when you’re a kid that’s what you do ;p

http://www.askoxford.com/asktheexperts/faq/aboutenglish/mostwords?view=uk

@Becky: Glad you’re a language geek too, makes me less worried about boring you!

@rodriguez: The German word count is actually really hard to determine, because you can string words together at will to make a new one. The German wikipedia gives the example of “Kartoffelbrei”. In German, it is one word that means “mashed potato”. To get the same idea, you need two words in English, and 5 (purée de pommes de terre) in French. Anyway, Wikipedia says that officially, English has between 500,000 and 600,000 words, German a bit less, and French roughly 300,000 (the last statistic probably due to the fact that, as shown above, French uses a series of words to express what English or German could do in one).

I just don’t have an opinion about the gender bias. I think I’m gonna have to agree with rodriguez and Becky: I blame Catholic Church, and also patriarchy and other facts in History of Latin America over Language – which, in my case, is Portuguese (pretty similar to Spanish).

Regardless, this whole reading and thinking here made me go to one of my all-time favorite books, The Unbearable Lightness of Being. And I found and excerpt online that I think is poorly translated but it will suit nicely the whole idea of language defining our primary thoughts and feelings, as well as the way we perceive things.

“All languages that derive from Latin form the word compassion by combining the prefix
meaning with (corn-) and the root meaning suffering (Late Latin, passio). In other languages — Czech, Polish, German, and Swedish, for instance — this word is translated by a noun formed of an equivalent prefix combined with the word that means feeling(Czech, sou-cit; Polish, wspol-czucie; German, Mit-gefuhl; Swedish, med-kansia).

In languages that derive from Latin, compassion means: we cannot look on coolly as others suffer; or, we sympathize with those who suffer. Another word with
approximately the same meaning, pity (French, pitie; Italian, pietà; etc.), connotes a certain condescension towards the sufferer. To take pity on a woman means that we are better off than she is, that we stoop to her level, lower ourselves.

That is why the word compassion generally inspires suspicion; it designates what is
considered an inferior, second-rate sentiment that has little to do with love. To love someone out of compassion means not really to love.

In languages that form the word compassion not from the root suffering but from the
root feeling, the word is used in approximately the same way, but to contend that it designates a bad or inferior sentiment is difficult. The secret strength of its etymology floods the word with another light and gives it a broader meaning: to have compassion (co-feeling) means not only to be able to live with the other’s misfortune but also to feel
with him any emotion — joy, anxiety, happiness, pain. This kind of compassion (in the sense of souc/r, wspofczucie, Mitgefuhl, medkansia) therefore signifies the maximal capacity of affective imagination, the art of emotional telepathy. In the hierarchy of sentiments, then, it is supreme.”

I have to make a confession now: the first time I read that, I felt sorry for my Latin heritage.

English gets the massive word pool by borrowing so promiscuously from so many other languages and because it has roots in two separate language families (Germanic and Romantic), so it has double the vocab base.

/massive geek-out

Does German also have a small word count, @Endora? The way some people describe it to me, I am guessing yes, as in the words for shoes and gloves and stuff: Handschuh?

Mandel is also the Yiddish word for almond (which I know because my grandmother used to make mandelbrot to go with coffee).

@Endora: I know, I’m a language geek too, which is why I think all this stuff is so fascinating and all my friends are like…meh.