Synthetic and Analytic languages

How many words are there in English today?

By year 1000, the English language consisted ofapproximately 40 000 words. Nowadays, the number has grown to more than 500 000. The Oxford English dictionary has about 300,000 entries, not including scientific and technical words. This makes English a language with the largest vocabulary. If we calculate the average of words created per century, this comes to 46 000.An educated English speaker, however, only uses about 30,000 words.

Synthetic and Analytic languages

There are two kinds of languages: synthetic and analytic ones. Synthetic languages, such as Czech or German, use a lot of inflection (many different forms of one word in different situations: e.g. in Czech the noun PES has these forms psa, psovi, pse, psem, whereas English only has DOG. In synthetic languages, word order is not very important, since the different forms of words carry the meaning.

English, however, needs to distinguish the meaning with word order:

A dog is chasing a cat.

A cat is chasing a dog.

English is an analytic language. There is only very little inflection and word order is very important for understanding the meaning.

All languages, however, tend to move slowly from synthetic, to analytic. English started as a synthetic language with a lot of inflection. Slowly, it dropped the inflection and started using word order as a means of distinguishing the meaning.