English has more words than any language on earth. People don't learn or use use most of them because they will be labeled pretentious.
replyI wonder if despite our large vocabulary, English speakers tend to use a small subsection of it because there are so many non-native speakers. It seems to me from reading and watching people from decades ago that the language was more complex. (I don't mean this as any knock on people who speak English as a second language.)
replyWe don't use most of them because no one could learn them all. There's more than 100,000 hanzi recorded in Chinese. Some quick googling suggests educated Chinese people know 8,000, and the average Chinese person knows around 3,500.
replySo 3–8%.
Nothing to do with pretention and everything to do with impossibility :D
> you almost never hear it said where English is that language
replyI'm willing to bet it's a combination of two factors:
1. you are consuming these things in English, and English natives are less likely to say "English has this word that those other people don't" because they fully understand English so it doesn't seem inscrutable, but some other language is kind of "magical an mysterious" to them. See, e.g., the urban legend that the Chinese word for crisis is "danger" and "opportunity." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_word_for_crisis There's a whole cottage industry around "that foreign language is so cool compared to English"
2. "this language can say X but another language cannot" is invariably wrong
English tends to just borrow/steal words from other languages if they're useful enough. It could also be something to do with the lack of consistency of english rules so it's not so easy to create new words.
replyYou can wordificate cromulent lexemes with abandon. The English language don't care.
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