I notice that four of the seven authors with the smallest vocabulary are writing theater (Moliere, Shakespeare, Racine, Corneille). I think it's not a coincidence, because writing in rhymes must be a hard constraint in the choice of words one can use.
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 much larger, study were conducted on randomly selected authors and books, the results would still conflate the vocabulary size in common usage with the vocabulary size of single authors. Hence, what the article is attempting to study is not the same thing as the title of this post.
Wouldn't analysis of top 3 contemporary newspapers / magazines in each language yield a more accurate result?
Ie if Dickens or Melville used certain words in their writing - if modern speakers don't know them, we can't really use them to gauge how many words English speakers use today.
I, for one, simply can't read Shakespeare - most of his vocabulary (anybody knows what a 'bodkin' is?) sounds foreign to me. And I scored 99 percentile on the verbal SAT.
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.
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.
That's a surprising result.
My previous view was that English vocabulary is based on Germanic as well as Latin roots, and so there there are often two terms with the same meaning, one which is subtly different in usage than the other. In contrast, French vocabulary is mostly Latin in origin.
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.
A model of presentation of data. Its clarity belies the variety of techniques used. Perfect use of word clouds. Thank you.
Oui.
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.