Which language has less vocabulary in everyday speech: Russian, Turkish, or Spanish?

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Which language has less vocabulary in everyday speech: Russian, Turkish, or Spanish?

Postby Hash » Tue Sep 21, 2021 6:07 pm

Compared with English, which is a verbose language even in everyday situations, which language has the least vocabulary?
As far as I know, most agglutinative languages use a small amount of "roots" to generate more words, but I have also heard that Russian is not as verbose as English. For example, it doesn't differentiate between "last", "latest", "latter", "final", "ultimate", etc. they are all "posledny"!
I have also noticed that Spanish-speaking people don't use much vocabulary and like to use the same words even when there are synonyms in their language.
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Re: Which language has less vocabulary in everyday speech: Russian, Turkish, or Spanish?

Postby Cavesa » Wed Sep 22, 2021 7:58 am

Does any? I don't think so. All these languages are used for absolutely everything, and it is highly unlikely they'd need significantly more or less words to do that. If you are asking to find out what language might be easier to learn thanks to a smaller vocabulary, I don't think you'll find any satisfactory answer.

I have also noticed that Spanish-speaking people don't use much vocabulary and like to use the same words even when there are synonyms in their language.


I cannot agree. It depends on the speaker, but many do use very rich vocabulary indeed. Our anecdotical experiences differ a lot. And btw even many English natives (or natives of anything) use rather basic and small vocabulary, it doesn't say anything about the language in general.

but I have also heard that Russian is not as verbose as English. For example, it doesn't differentiate between "last", "latest", "latter", "final", "ultimate", etc. they are all "posledny"!


I really doubt that. I am not a Russian speaker (and would love one responding to this) but a quick search in a dictionary gave me several equivalents of "last", with examples of their use. It really looks like one of the typical myths.
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Re: Which language has less vocabulary in everyday speech: Russian, Turkish, or Spanish?

Postby sfuqua » Wed Sep 22, 2021 1:07 pm

How many words a native speaker uses is a matter of style and culture.
Hemingway wrote novels in English which intentionally keep the vocabulary and sentence structure simple and punchy.
García-Márquez lways used exactly the right word, even if nobody else had used it for 50 years. :D
I assume that there are native speakers of Russian and Turkish who have similar differences in style.
I think it is very difficult to generalize.
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Re: Which language has less vocabulary in everyday speech: Russian, Turkish, or Spanish?

Postby Cavesa » Wed Sep 22, 2021 1:35 pm

The question is not really about the natives anyways. I assume OP meant something like "which language will require me to learn fewer words, without giving up my goal of speaking like a native in the everyday situations". None of them has such a "quality".

The only languages that are likely to have significantly less vocab used by natives are those, that are simply not used for everything. So, a minority language nobody gets education in. Or a language used by a tribe that never leaves one type of an environment. But that is definitely not the case of any of the three options.
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Re: Which language has less vocabulary in everyday speech: Russian, Turkish, or Spanish?

Postby smallwhite » Wed Sep 22, 2021 3:38 pm

I agree with the OP. I also feel that the Spanish I've read uses significantly fewer different words than my other languages, and often uses straightforward words. Like everything was a B2 reader. While French uses roundabout ways to say things, as in high word count, but the words themselves would be easy words.

Examples to illustrate my point, but not necessarily what's actually used in each language:
Spanish: to disappoint him
French: to cause disappointment to him
English: to let him down (those damn phrasal verbs)
Chinese: [one of those 4-word idioms where possible]

Agglutiv...ness would be a factor as well but I'm not familar with that.
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Re: Which language has less vocabulary in everyday speech: Russian, Turkish, or Spanish?

Postby einzelne » Wed Sep 22, 2021 4:09 pm

As a native Russian speaker, I can say that this is, to put it mildly, nonsese. First, there are lots of synonyms for the word 'posledniy' in Russian.
Second, and most importantly, depending on the context, you translate this word into English differently in order to sound idiomatic.
It has nothing to do with size. Look, I can easily come up with the same argument regarding English.

We were made of each other - in Russian it would translate something like "sozdani" (lit. created)
I made a list - Russian ('sostavil' lit. compiled)
I made a speech - Russian ('proiznes' lit. uttered)
He made a good impression ('произвел' lit. produced)
She made breakfast ('prigotovila' lit prepared)
etc.

Omg, English is such a primitive language in comparison to 'moguchi' (mighty) Russian! They use the same bland verb 'to make' for basically everything!

But of course, it's not the case. So don't buy into silly ideas.
Last edited by einzelne on Wed Sep 22, 2021 4:23 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: Which language has less vocabulary in everyday speech: Russian, Turkish, or Spanish?

Postby lusan » Wed Sep 22, 2021 4:15 pm

Cavesa wrote:The question is not really about the natives anyways. I assume OP meant something like "which language will require me to learn fewer words, without giving up my goal of speaking like a native in the everyday situations". None of them has such a "quality".

The only languages that are likely to have significantly less vocab used by natives are those, that are simply not used for everything. So, a minority language nobody gets education in. Or a language used by a tribe that never leaves one type of an environment. But that is definitely not the case of any of the three options.


If so, the answer would depend of the student goals as well as his interests.
Tourism? Just a few.
Relatives? A little more.
etc....
University? Quite a lot.

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Re: Which language has less vocabulary in everyday speech: Russian, Turkish, or Spanish?

Postby Cavesa » Wed Sep 22, 2021 4:24 pm

smallwhite wrote:I agree with the OP. I also feel that the Spanish I've read uses significantly fewer different words than my other languages, and often uses straightforward words. Like everything was a B2 reader. While French uses roundabout ways to say things, as in high word count, but the words themselves would be easy words.

Examples to illustrate my point, but not necessarily what's actually used in each language:
Spanish: to disappoint him
French: to cause disappointment to him
English: to let him down (those damn phrasal verbs)
Chinese: [one of those 4-word idioms where possible]

Agglutiv...ness would be a factor as well but I'm not familar with that.


But isn't the English example actually showing English as the one with fewer words? The phrasal verbs reduce the vocabulary considerably, if one uses them instead of the "full" words :-D So, perhaps there are more words used, in the sense of more chunks of letters divided by spaces, but the vocabulary (which is the subject of this thread) is actually smaller, at least if we look at examples like this.

I remember a funny example of a Czech girl, who had gone abroad as an au-pair. And had troubles with the family, as her English was getting worse and worse, reducing itself to just four or five verbs.

It is an interesting perception though, that "Spanish is like a B2 reader", it may even be possible. I was never under such an impression, Spanish just felt a bit "easier" at first, but with an explosion in difficulty and new stuff at the intermediate level. Also, let's not forget that for every anecdotal example supporting one opinion, we'll get another for the opposite.

Even here, if we look at the real options and not just English translations (which are obscuring everything):
Spanish: deceptionarlo
French: décevoir le (would be nice to make a sentence, not just infinitives), no idea what is your long phrase supposed to be
English: to let him down, or to disappoint him
Czech: zklamat ho

Not much of a difference, and it also wouldn't tell us much. We are talking about the amount of vocab in the overall everyday language, I highly doubt any single phrase will be a good representation of any differences.

einzelne wrote:As a native Russian speaker, I can say that this is, to put it mildly, nonsese. First, there are lots of synonyms for the word 'posledniy' Russian.
Second, and most importantly, depending on the context, you translate this word into English differently in order to sound idiomatic.

Yes, thank you! This is very true and I'm usually a bit uncomfortable, when people start claiming stuff like "this or that language has less vocabulary". It is usually a projection of a prejudice or a myth. There is no reason, why the hundreds of millions of native Russian speakers wouldn't come up with tons of words to describe everything a native English speaker can.

lusan wrote: If so, the answer would depend of the student goals as well as his interests.
Tourism? Just a few.
Relatives? A little more.
etc....
University? Quite a lot.

There are no shortcuts. NONE.


I think the OP was weird exactly by trying to throw the limit on the natives. There is nothing wrong with admitting "I want to learn just the basics, how many words do I need?". But it becomes weird, when people start to argue "the natives don't really have much vocab anyways" :-D
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Re: Which language has less vocabulary in everyday speech: Russian, Turkish, or Spanish?

Postby Deinonysus » Wed Sep 22, 2021 4:34 pm

It isn't necessarily the case that an agglutinative language will not have a lot of synonyms. Inuktitut is about as agglutinative as it gets but it famously has many words for 'snow'. An Inuktitut dictionary in my possession lists sixteen different roots.

But still, I can't deny that Inuktitut can squeeze a lot out of usage out of a root. Arabic is just as economical and uses consonantal templates to derive a huge number of potential words from a given three-consonant root. I'm unfortunately not very familiar with Turkish yet so I can't say where that would fit in with English and Russian. However, it underwent a large vocabulary reform within the past century or so to replace a ton of Perso-Arabic vocabulary from Ottoman Turkish with Turkic roots, so I would imagine that because of that, there might be a bit less root redundancy than in your average language.

You might be interested in Ithkuil, a constructed language that was designed to be as precise as possible. One of the main design goals is that there is a limited number of roots and words relating to the same concept should be derived from the same root, so the set of roots that exists in the language is explicitly limited.
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Re: Which language has less vocabulary in everyday speech: Russian, Turkish, or Spanish?

Postby smallwhite » Wed Sep 22, 2021 9:22 pm

So we think that the size of English’s everyday vocabulary = that of some Amazon hunting tribe’s everyday vocabulary?
Last edited by smallwhite on Thu Sep 23, 2021 9:55 am, edited 1 time in total.
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