Do the English Use More Words Than the French? • Hacker News Board

Re: Do the English Use More Words Than the French?

#21

Post by euphemize » Fri, Feb 20, 2015, 9:35 PM UTC

If anyone is interested in anecdotal data [0][1] regarding sentence length for equivalent meaning, I have to use both French and English every day, alternating between them (spoken and written) all the time. English is almost always shorter than French, which is more verbose. I am used to "thinking" in whatever language I'm using to talk/write and have noticed many times that I'm a bit slower in French, even if it's technically my native language. It might also be that French seems to have more alternatives to say the same thing in different ways, but that could just be just me.

[0] C'est presque toujours plus long en français qu'en anglais. [1] It's almost always shorter in English than in French.

Re: Do the English Use More Words Than the French?

#22

Post by pcrh » Fri, Feb 20, 2015, 9:41 PM UTC

danso wrote: post #6

tomcam wrote: post #2

A model of presentation of data. Its clarity belies the variety of techniques used. Perfect use of word clouds. Thank you.

I have to strongly, strongly disagree. There is no "perfect use" of word clouds in the context of proper data visualization. The arrangement and colorization of the words are virtually on account of randomization (and the sizing of words based on frequency is of dubious value, given how difficult it is for the human eye to evaluate the size comparison)...this randomness is anathema to the proper presentation of data.…

Generally, I find word clouds be be pretty useless anyway. They visually highlight the top few words (4 or 5 at most), but beyond that are obscure and uninformative.

Re: Do the English Use More Words Than the French?

#23

Post by oelmekki » Fri, Feb 20, 2015, 9:47 PM UTC

Being a french that always do EN and FR multi locale websites, I'm quite surprise of this question :) The french text is almost always longer than english one. Not sure if it's about word count, though.

Also, something very common for french people when learning english is to try to translate their french sentence exactly. It always seems over-complicated in english, and quite pedantic. With time, we learn to stop trying using the same words and try to express it directly in english. We realize at this point english sentences are always way more simple. But here again, vocabulary complexity says nothing about word count.

Re: Do the English Use More Words Than the French?

#24

Post by dredmorbius » Fri, Feb 20, 2015, 9:49 PM UTC

beloch wrote: post #11

The findings of this study are unrelated to the title of this post. First, the authors and books were not chosen randomly and the sample size is tiny, so the results are meaningless, although I do respect the effort that was put into this. The author is up-front and honest about this in the beginning, but unfortunately proceeds to draw unwarranted generalizations based on his study. Second, even if a similar, but muc…

Sampling is a complex topic of its own, but sample size has far less to do with research validity than sample selection.

In the case of literature, random sampling is arguably far less valid than selected sampling of, say, top authors.

The interactions here are complex. There are a finite set of published authors, they're selected by editors, works are bought by the public. So there's both nonrandom and popular selection. Works themselves typically contain many words either from the popular argot or not (e.g., Joyce).

And if you're going to sample from large sets of works, say, newspaper and magazine articles, you'll run into issues such as style guides which often dictate terms that must (or must not) be used.

It's a difficult field to research.

Re: Do the English Use More Words Than the French?

#25

Post by yellowapple » Fri, Feb 20, 2015, 9:49 PM UTC

I'm just going to assume Betteridge's law of headlines is in effect. If the answer to this was "yes", it would be phrased in a declarative rather than interrogative manner.

Re: Do the English Use More Words Than the French?

#26

Post by henriquemaia » Fri, Feb 20, 2015, 9:50 PM UTC

euphemize wrote: post #21

If anyone is interested in anecdotal data [0][1] regarding sentence length for equivalent meaning, I have to use both French and English every day, alternating between them (spoken and written) all the time. English is almost always shorter than French, which is more verbose. I am used to "thinking" in whatever language I'm using to talk/write and have noticed many times that I'm a bit slower in French, even if it's…

I have the same experience in Portuguese (my native language). Romance languages tend to be more verbose (also anecdotal personal evidence). But, in a way, my feeling is that modern English has substantially more words than Portuguese – which, I suppose, makes sense. English is under a much greater creative pressure due to its wider audience (English as a global language).

Using your example sentence (armchair laboratory):

[0] É quase sempre mais curto em inglês do que em português. [1] It's almost always shorter in English than in Portuguese.

11 vs. 9 words.

Re: Do the English Use More Words Than the French?

#27

Post by murbard2 » Fri, Feb 20, 2015, 9:57 PM UTC

I'm a native French speaker and fluent in English (and of course, as luck would have it, I'm going to stick grammar mistakes in this post)

Some have pointed out that French is almost always longer. It's a bit more complicated than that. French uses a wider vocabulary than English, and uses many different words to convey different connotations. Words, as a result, tend to be longer, because they carry more information.

English tends to be much more modular and flexible. Nouns can be made into adjectives, adverbs and verbs rather easily, and "prepositions" drastically alter the meaning of verbs.

The end result is that English can be much shorter than French when trying to be concise. A short UI message will always be much shorter in English than in French. However, when conveying nuanced ideas, I believe they will be much closer in length, with perhaps a small advantage for French.

Re: Do the English Use More Words Than the French?

#28

Post by Nursie » Fri, Feb 20, 2015, 10:01 PM UTC

murbard2 wrote: post #27

I'm a native French speaker and fluent in English (and of course, as luck would have it, I'm going to stick grammar mistakes in this post) Some have pointed out that French is almost always longer. It's a bit more complicated than that. French uses a wider vocabulary than English, and uses many different words to convey different connotations. Words, as a result, tend to be longer, because they carry more information…

>> French uses a wider vocabulary than English

This seems an extraordinary claim, given that English is generally considered to have the largest number of words of any modern language (mostly because we just steal them).

Re: Do the English Use More Words Than the French?

#29

Post by pash » Fri, Feb 20, 2015, 10:06 PM UTC

pothibo wrote: post #16

pash wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A keen observation, and Wilde really makes it four and a half. But Shakespeare wrote mostly blank verse, and rhyming is not as much of a constraint on vocabulary in French due to the high commonality of word endings. If it's true that works for the stage tend to use fewer words, it might be because dialogue dominates; I imagine narrative, which consists more of description, naturally draws on a bigger vocabulary than…

How is french easier to rhyme than english? Do you have empirical evidence? Since I'm a french canadian who is lucky enough to speak the two languages, I find it difficult to believe. Remember that rap (rhyme and poetry) was popularized by poor english speaking people.

For a discussion of the ease of rhyming in French versus English, see, e.g., this book [0]. Rhymes are widely considered to be easier to form in French; partly as a result, however, classical French poetry developed several additional stylistic constraints related to rhyming, such as the distinction between "feminine" and "masculine" rhymes of words with and without a final devoiced "e".

I wonder what you would accept as "empirical evidence" of the relative ease of rhyming in different languages. The demand strikes me as typifying one of the obnoxious impulses of the Hacker News community (another of them on display elsewhere in this thread) to dress up a vapid criticism as scientific skepticism.

You could, I suppose, try to do a combinatorial analysis of the ease of rhyming by writing a program to find rhyming pairs in a phonetic dictionary; just make sure your blog post about the results properly acknowledges the shortcomings of your analysis in its title.

0. https://books.google.com/books?id=ByVoAgAAQBAJ&lpg=PA60&ots=...

Re: Do the English Use More Words Than the French?

#30

Post by pavlov » Fri, Feb 20, 2015, 10:08 PM UTC

euphemize wrote: post #21

If anyone is interested in anecdotal data [0][1] regarding sentence length for equivalent meaning, I have to use both French and English every day, alternating between them (spoken and written) all the time. English is almost always shorter than French, which is more verbose. I am used to "thinking" in whatever language I'm using to talk/write and have noticed many times that I'm a bit slower in French, even if it's…

I think French spelling plays a part here, though. If I were to write your example phrase in French written as pronounced using Finnish language spelling rules, it would look like this:

"Se preskö tuzuur ply lon on franse kon angle."

This "phonetic compression" made the printed sentence about 25% shorter.