🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <10182@amsaa-cleo.brl.mil>, matt@amsaa-cleo.brl.mil (Matt Rosenblatt)
:And thanks to all those French- and Latin-type Romance words,
:an Englishman often has two or three ways to say something that
:a German, Dutchman, or Afrikaner on the one hand or a Mexican,
:Brazilian or Frenchman on the other hand may have only one way
:to say.  We've got more words than any other Germanic language.
:We've got more words than any other Indo-European language.
:In fact, we've got more words than any other language, period.
:That's another of the special virtues that English has.

I'm not sure that this is really a virtue.  Most languages do without
our badly overburdened lexicon, and of those that have a very long list
ov available words, a number generate them in a systematic manner, so that
unfamiliar words are immediately meaningful.  I believe that classical
Arabic has a pretty sizeable lexicon.  English has borrowed fairly
freely from other languages, but Arabic has very powerful active
word generators working from existing roots within the language.

Al Moore