Contrary to a common belief, the French language has been actually surveyed
with over 1.2 million words so far and the count is not over. Source below.
This is news for me too, I must admit. I had seen in books written in
English (never in books written in French had I seen such limitative
statistics) that French only had about 100,000 words (these figures always
served as a comparison to say that the Oxford English Dictionary [OED] had
325,000 words while the most complete French dictionary had only 100,000 or
so -- that said when I speak/write English I often use words present in the
OED that are French but have disappeared from most contemporary French
dictionaries [our dictionaries show new words every year and obsolete
others too, unfortunately], and English speakers in general don't
understand, except scholars -- in this way the OED is my most complete
French dictionary for historical research (; ). That said, words are not
the ultimate indication of the power and nature of a language, of course.
French, like English, is infinitely more powerful and rich than the list of
its words. But these statistics are interesting.
Alain LaBonté
Tel Aviv Ben Gurion airport
______________________________
[Question sur france_langue] :
>>Lors d'une discussion sur un forum avec des américains, on a
>>essayé de me faire croire qu'il existait moins de mots dans notre chère
>>langue que dans celle de l'oncle Sam. J'aimerais, s'il vous plait, et si
>>possible, avoir les chiffres exacts du nombre de mots dans la Langue
>>française et, pour pouvoir comparer, le nombre de mots anglais.
[Réponse] :
>Selon Henriette Walter, «Le français dans tous les sens», p. 283, au
>sujet du répertoire lexical Trésor de la Langue française (Nancy) :
>«on arrive aujourd'hui à un total stupéfiant de plus de 1.200.000 mots
>différents.» LE TLF fait 23.000 pages, 10.000 FF la collection.
>
>Notez que ce dictionnaire ne recense même pas tous les mots de la
>Francophonie, une initiative indépendante, appelée Trésor de la langue
>française au Québec, est d'ailleurs en cours à Université Laval
>(Québec) pour y remédier.
>
>Patrick Andries
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