I bet you didnt know that

mzungu

The language with the longest alphabet in the world is the Cambodian language Khmer with 74 letters (some are no longer used). It consists of 33 consonants, 23 vowels and 12 independent vowels. The shortest alphabet is 12 characters long, and belongs to Rotokas (Papua New Guinea). English is the language that has the most words (250,000).

New Home

mzungu wrote: »

The language with the longest alphabet in the world is the Cambodian language Khmer with 74 letters (some are no longer used). It consists of 33 consonants, 23 vowels and 12 independent vowels. The shortest alphabet is 12 characters long, and belongs to Rotokas (Papua New Guinea). English is the language that has the most words (250,000).

I've heard that said about French by French speakers, German by German speakers, Spanish, Italian, Chinese, etc. You see where I'm going. But none has been able to prove that definitively.

mzungu

New Home wrote: »

I've heard that said about French by French speakers, German by German speakers, Spanish, Italian, Chinese, etc. You see where I'm going. But none has been able to prove that definitevely.

Fair point.

The Oxford dictionary has weighed in on it and believes it's 'highly probable' but that we will never know for sure.

Short paragraph on it below...

This question is practically impossible to answer, for the reasons explained in the answer to How many words are there in the English language? However, it seems quite probable that English has more words than most comparable world languages.

The reason for this is historical. English was originally a Germanic language, related to Dutch and German, and it shares much of its grammar and basic vocabulary with those languages. However, after the Norman Conquest in 1066 it was hugely influenced by Norman French, which became the language of the ruling class for a considerable period, and by Latin, which was the language of scholarship and of the Church. Very large numbers of French and Latin words entered the language. Consequently, English has a much larger vocabulary than either the Germanic languages or the members of the Romance language family to which French belongs.

English is also very ready to accommodate foreign words, and as it has become an international language, it has absorbed vocabulary from a large number of other sources. This does, of course, assume that you ignore 'agglutinative' languages such as Finnish, in which words can be stuck together in long strings of indefinite length, and which therefore have an almost infinite number of 'words'.

Link:https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/explore/does-english-have-most-words/

New Home

Arabic has 90 to 500 million words if you count other forms of the original word a word but if you don't then is 12,300,000

Just pick a comparison of four major languages:


Somebody was also wondering whether the English words "Be, am, is, are, was, were, been, being" are supposed to be just one word and its variations or are they supposed to be counted individually. So yes, we can agree on the fact that it can be very difficult to determine.

Professor Moriarty

Gaelic or Irish Script was first printed in the 1500s. The typeface was used in a catechism ordered by Elizabeth I in an attempt to convert the Irish to Anglicanism.

retalivity

Blame it on the Boogie was written by an English songwriter called Mick Jackson (no relation).

The Roadrunner, the North American bird made famous by Looney Tunes, is a member of the Cuckoo family; unlike many Eurasian Cuckoos it is not a brood parasite.

Tell me how

There are several shortcut key strokes which can be used with YouTube.

Spacebar to pause/start the video, Shift and ',' to slow down or Shift and '.' to speed it up for example.
The number keys 0-9 will automatically jump to a location in the video with each number corresponding to a % decade value; 1 =10%, 2 = 20% etc.

However, I bet you didn't know that all numbers on the keyboard work in this way with the exception of the number 1 on the dedicated numeric pad which for some reason does not perform any short cut function.

ytpe2r5bxkn0c1

The Kookaburra is a Kingfisher yet eats mice, snakes, insects, & small reptiles. They wouldn't know what a fish was if they saw one.

Capt'n Midnight

Although Jesus was known as a carpenter, he never actually sang on any of their albums.

Water John

But Karen had the voice of an angel.

mzungu

A group of polar bears is called an aurora, a group of peacocks is called an ostentation and a group of pandas is called an embarrassment.

spacetweek

On the number of words in English: an odd feature of English due to its history is that there are often many words for the same thing, but from different sources. An example is "supervise".

Oversee (or watch over)
Surveil (surveillance)
Supervise

These 3 words mean the same thing but are German, French and Latin-derived respectively. However those 3 languages do not have 3 ways of saying it, only 1 (Modern German has Uberwachen). This is one of the main reasons English has so many words - the other being that it has a large amount of vocab specific to industry or science which is not used outside those domains. Other languages often use the English words when discussing those domains, not having their own.

Professor Moriarty wrote: »

Gaelic or Irish Script was first printed in the 1500s. The typeface was used in a catechism ordered by Elizabeth I in an attempt to convert the Irish to Anglicanism.

Due to a primary school teacher I had who tried to get us all to write in that script, I still have a lifelong hatred of it.

Ipso

In English some words (such as those related to the sea and royalty) are very different than other Indo European languages, there is a theory that the Germanic languages may have a sizeable portion of its vocabulary come from a non Indo European language.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanic_substrate_hypothesis

Capt'n Midnight

Water John wrote: »

But Karen had the voice of an angel.

And a good drummer too.

RiderOnTheStorm

Next time you are in a cinema or theatre etc, have a look at the letters that denote seating rows. There is usually no "i" as i and j can be easily confused (esp in poor lighting), so they skip it.

Whistling in a theatre is considered bad luck or bad form. Because in times passed, set crew & backstage crew used to whistle (in code?) to each other when it was time to change set, drop curtains, backdrops etc. If you walked backstage while whistling you might get a sandbag dropped on you!

"Break a leg" means good luck in some circles. It comes from the theatre world, where they used a long pole to raise the curtain for encores etc. This pole was called "a leg". So break a leg means "I hope you get so many encores that they break the leg"

RiderOnTheStorm

RiderOnTheStorm wrote: »

"Break a leg" means good luck in some circles. It comes from the theatre world, where they used a long pole to raise the curtain for encores etc. This pole was called "a leg". So break a leg means "I hope you get so many encores that they break the leg"

Not 100% true.

No one knows for certain where it comes from. One idea of where it comes from is that "a leg" is the black curtain that hangs from lighting rig to floor, usually stage right and stage left. We still call them legs today.

Understudies would get paid more if they got on the stage, aka breaking a leg, so wishing someone, "to break a leg" originally meant, "I hope you have a good show by getting on the stage!"

BaZmO*

In the English language the word “set” has the most amount of different definitions for a given word.

Cookie_Monster

Kiwis have the shortest beak of any bird, despite it looking otherwise

New Home

If you mean kiwi as the fruit, then I definitely agree.

Cookie_Monster

New Home wrote: »

If you mean kiwi as the fruit, then I definitely agree.

the fruit should actually be called kiwifruit, not kiwi fruit.. or even more correctly called Chinese gooseberry. Kiwifruit came about for marketing purposes and in fact most of them are grown in China(55%+) rather than NZ

aoh

BaZmO* wrote: »

In the English language the word “set” has the most amount of different definitions for a given word.

I remember when Channel 4 launched in the UK. Back then, you had to get someone out to tune your TV, and they would leave a sticker on the TV saying "I've joined the I've had my set set set"

Badly Drunk Boy

Water John wrote: »

But Karen had the voice of an angel.

Sonic Youth did a tribute to Karen Carpenter called 'Tunic (Song for Karen)' and in the video, Karen is in Heaven playing in a band called The Angels (with Elvis, Janis Joplin and Dennis Wilson from The Beach Boys). The name 'The Angels' is on her drum kit).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=reSOp1domrU

LLewellen Farquarson

RiderOnTheStorm wrote: »

Whistling in a theatre is considered bad luck or bad form. Because in times passed, set crew & backstage crew used to whistle (in code?) to each other when it was time to change set, drop curtains, backdrops etc. If you walked backstage while whistling you might get a sandbag dropped on you!

I thought it was because a lot of backstage crew were ex sailors (good at ropework) and whistling was used to give commands regarding the sail handling.

Edit: sorry, we're both saying the same thing . The sailors gave whistled commands both on ship and backstage.

EndaHonesty

Cookie_Monster wrote: »

Kiwis have the shortest beak of any bird, despite it looking otherwise

Not true.

The only unique fact about a Kiwi bird beak is;

The kiwi is the only bird in the world with external nostrils at the tip of its long beak.

https://www.kiwisforkiwi.org/about-kiwi/kiwi-facts-characteristics/an-unusual-beak/

Zadkiel

EndaHonesty wrote: »

Not true.

The only unique fact about a Kiwi bird beak is;



https://www.kiwisforkiwi.org/about-kiwi/kiwi-facts-characteristics/an-unusual-beak/

I think this came from the different measurement for the beak.
Some measure from the tip of the beak to the nostrils and others from the tip of the beak to the feathers.

If measuring from the tip of the beak to the nostrils then a Kiwi would have a very short beak indeed.

EndaHonesty

Zadkiel wrote: »

I think this came from the different measurement for the beak.
Some measure from the tip of the beak to the nostrils and others from the tip of the beak to the feathers.

If measuring from the tip of the beak to the nostrils then a Kiwi would have a very short beak indeed.

The simple fact is; the nostrils are at the end of the beak, not the start of the beak.

Any other characterization is incorrect.

New Home

So, if the beak is only the part from the nostrils to the tip, what's the rest called?

Zadkiel

EndaHonesty wrote: »

People "thinking" is the problem here.

The simple fact is; the nostrils are at the end of the beak, not the start of the beak.

Any other description is incorrect.

I'm not disagreeing with where the Kiwi's nostrils are.
Historically some measurements would be taken form the end of the beak to the nostrils and other times the measurement would be take from the end of the beak to the feathers of the face. This would provide a different measurement.

'Unlike other birds, the nostrils end on the tip of this beak rather than at the base. (Because a bird's beak is generally measured from the tip to the nostril, this (technically) gives the kiwi the shortest beak of any bird.) While birds generally have hollow bones to save weight and make flight practicable, the flightless kiwi have marrow, in the style of mammals.'
- http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Kiwi

Skylinehead

New Home wrote: »

So, if the beak is only the part from the nostrils to the tip, what's the rest called?

Pre-beak