I know English has largest number of vocabulary. How about smallest? I have heard it's Japanese but is it true?
2007-04-21 11:57:02 · 14 answers · asked by Anonymous in Society & Culture ➔ Languages
Most people have mentioned the number of phonemes, or sounds, some languages have, and its true languages like Hawaiian or Piraha have relatively small phoneme inventories but that doesn't mean they don't have large vocabularies. (and some African languages have the largest phoneme inventories on earth.)
English is Germanic in origin and has had a lot of influence from other languages like French and Latin. This has generated a lot of words with a close meaning but overall, word counting is kind of subjective.
Words are made of of morphemes (the smallest meaningful unit). The word "redoable" is made of of three parts, the root "do" and two derivational morphemes "re-" and "-able." Many other languages use morphemes like that more than English does. Most people have heard that Inuit languages have a very large number of words for snow but that's because they can combine morphemes to make an endless amount of "words" but have only a few roots.
But to answer your question, according to this site (http://www.vistawide.com/languages/language_statistics.htm) its an English based creole called Taki Taki
Toki Pona also has a very small number of roots but it is a constructed language and not a natural one.
2007-04-21 15:52:21 · answer #1 · answered by Khätije 2 · 2⤊ 0⤋
Among languages that are written with alphabets, the number of letters varies considerably. The smallest known alphabet is that of the Rotokas language (spoken in Bougainville, an island to the East of Papua New Guinea), which contains only eleven letters. The largest known alphabet is Armenian with 39 letters.
http://www.bellevuelinux.org/alphabet.html
2007-04-21 14:15:55 · answer #2 · answered by Martha P 7 · 2⤊ 0⤋
I've heard of the native language of Hawaii(USA) has the smallest alphabet.
12 letters=
A E I O U H K L M N P W
2007-04-21 12:23:52 · answer #3 · answered by Anonymous · 1⤊ 0⤋
Rotokas possesses one of the world's smallest phoneme inventories and its alphabet is perhaps the smallest in use. (The Pirahã language has been claimed to have fewer speech sounds, but it is not written.) The alphabet consists of twelve letters, representing eleven phonemes. The alphabet characters are A E G I K O P R S T U V. T and S
2007-04-21 12:01:04 · answer #4 · answered by Italian Medallion 3 · 2⤊ 0⤋
The smallest number of vocabulary has by a research Modern Nubian in Egypt/Sudan. You need 20 words to say e. g. jump into the motorboat.
2007-04-23 10:27:15 · answer #5 · answered by Lemmy Caution 3 · 0⤊ 1⤋
I would think that it would be the Mohawk Indian language. They use ideas to mean more then one thing. For instance, the Mohawk word "at ya tawi" means -"any piece of clothing that covers the upper body". The English equivolent could be shirt, blouse, vest, coat, jacket, parka... and then there are different types of shirts: tee, long sleeve, short sleeve, cap sleeve, button down... ect...ect...You get the idea.
2007-04-27 13:27:08 · answer #6 · answered by Leroy McCoy 2 · 1⤊ 0⤋
no, the english not has largest number of vocabulary
2007-04-22 07:25:33 · answer #7 · answered by Eloy Gamenó 4 · 0⤊ 0⤋
I don't know about vocabulary..but I believe Hawaiian only has 12 letters.
2007-04-21 13:06:27 · answer #8 · answered by Anonymous · 2⤊ 0⤋
I would have to say Hawaiian since the Hawaiian alphabet only contains 12 letters: 5 vowels (a, e, i, o, u) and 7 consonants (h, k, l, m, n, p, w).
2007-04-21 13:48:17 · answer #9 · answered by Kalikina 7 · 2⤊ 0⤋
Perhaps American Sign Language or another similar National Sign Language?
2007-04-21 13:35:36 · answer #10 · answered by ? 7 · 0⤊ 2⤋