[cherrylemonsoda]

Spanish is one of the smallest languages in the world at ~93k words.

Most languages have hundreds of thousands, English has over a million.

Spanish is also nearly phonetic. It's very simple, there's only a few ways to express yourself in Spanish compared to other languages.

Overall, it's one of the easiest languages to master.

[ctoa]

The only thing you're right about here is that Spanish is "nearly phonetic" by which you mean that the writing system is orthographically transparent and very standardized. That's true and a huge benefit for learners.

The rest is not right, the word counts in particular is just a reflection of why counting words in a language is hard:

93k comes from the number headwords listed in the core RAE dictionary. The RAE's dictionary of Americanism adds another 70k entries. When you include historical and technical terminology, more comprehensive dictionaries will have well over 300k words.

Counting "over a million" from English comes from way, way more inclusive counting methods that throw in technical jargon, acronyms, global slang, etc. The OED, which would compare to the RAE dictionary numbers, lists only 171k words.

Beyond this, counting is complicated by the fact that compounding and morphological changes work differently, English will use different words in cases where Spanish would use suffixes, and will count compounds as words that in Spanish would be phrases.

"there's only a few ways to express yourself in Spanish compared to other languages." is very wrong. Spanish word order is massively more flexible than English, grammar and morphology more nuanced, they do things in different ways but this is a deep misunderstanding.

[limecherrysoda]

Using your figures:

93k (Spanish) to 171k English

or

300k+ (Spanish) to 1M+ English

the original point still stands.

> "there's only a few ways to express yourself in Spanish compared to other languages." is very wrong. Spanish word order is massively more flexible than English

I remain unconvinced here. Spanish love song lyrics have no choice but to invoke "corazon" and "amor" so often because there are so few other words that convey that precise emotion. There are other ways (thinking of the song "Amor de Loca Juventud" by Buena Vista Social Club - beautiful song), but not many other ways like there are in say French, Swedish, or English, to use a few examples. This is mathematically proven to be true by word count alone - which you admit is a far lower figure in Spanish vs other languages.

It doesn't diminish anything about the Spanish language to point this out either, if anything, it makes it more quaint.

[ctoa]

You are mixing numbers that don't go together.

OED (171k) is comparable in content to RAE + RAE Americanisms (93k + 70k = 163k) because OED is pan dialect. RAE core dictionary by itself is not the same type of coverage as OED.

The 1M+ English number is essentially a garbage number from a media tracking company called Global Language Monitor and includes things no serious dictionary would include. 300k+ is for a very comprehensive legit Spanish dictionary with technical and historical words. Those two numbers aren't comparable.

"which you admit is a far lower figure in Spanish vs other languages." no you just misunderstood, the numbers are very comparable.

Looking to your perceptions of ngrams in pop lyrics is not a great way of doing linguistics, there are in fact many alternatives in Spanish for expressing emotions about love, whether you are aware of them or not, or whether song writers over use certain words. English lyrics repeat an awful lot of "love" "heart" and "baby".

[anthk]

Any record from Triana or Medina Azahara would make any argument void because the deepness it's almost unmatched.

[ctoa]

Or any love poetry by Lorca, Neruda, Benedetti. The idea that Spanish has to resort to "corazon" and "amor" because it... has fewer words than other languages?? People believe some really crazy stuff.

[anthk]

You know very little about Spanish them. The thesaurus grew in a huge way over more than 1000 years of dialects, subdialects, borrowings from:

- Galician (easy mode, a Romance)

- Basque (they lived nearby the Castillans influenced Latin enough for Spanish, so that's a given)

- Catalan (another Romance)

- maybe Iberian, I'm not sure, through Basque

- Celtic, a common word like perro (dog) it's Celtic

- Gothic -yes, Goths, such as sala (living room), casa, (house) guardia...

- Arabic (most words with al- )

- French (carnét/garage...)

- Italian (most of the artsy stuff from the Enlightenment, such as piano)

and whatnot.

If you just pick up with the huge lyrics set from Spain you will find tons of different poetic registers. Just listen to Triana and Medina Azahara and any folk-rock English composer pales against these, because Triana and Medina Azahara it's the American progressive folk-rock from the 60s/70s mixed with Flamenco, and Flamenco itself it's a remix of music genres from several backgrounds. So the amount of feelings spoken and written in lyrics from that really complex tunes (from Triana more than Mediana Azahara) can't be subpar at all.

[elnatro]

Do you think that Latin-American music is the pinnacle of the Spanish language? Have you read Borges, Cortázar, or Cervantes? I suppose you don’t even know who are they.

[guille_]

This is the sort of thing you should run through an LLM. I'm surprised people can read that and not have their bs radar go off.

The only way to get to a million English words is to start counting things that nobody considers separate, or even real words. Even if you were to use a real dictionary word count (a quick search tells me Merriam-Webster unabridged more than cuts your number in half), I'd wonder if they're counting eg "see" and "seen" as one or two words.

(Similarly, 93k comes from RAE, which is intentionally conservative. Just pulling in regional words gets you a few more tens of thousands.

Anyway, just a wild thing to read.

[mpeg]

Spanish is certainly an easy language to learn, but it’s a very hard language to master.

I’m a native Spanish speaker and I find English poetry much easier to understand, English is more rigid and while technically it might have a larger vocabulary you can do less with it, while the flexibility of Spanish in terms of word order and suffixes makes it possible to craft some really labyrinthine verses

[elnatro]

You are counting only the words that have been accepted in the RAE dictionary. A word is only accepted when there is a noticeable usage. So there is a lot of words that have not reached the category of “word” officially, but they exist.

Apart from that, the dictionary only list root words, not derivatives.

[vondur]

Yes, but I have an outrageous American English accent which ruins my attempt to speak it!

[pessimizer]

> Overall, it's one of the easiest languages to master.

I'm with you on almost everything else, but the fact that it is such an unwieldy, awkward language means that a ton of communication is by idiom (that just has to be memorized, that's where a lot of the "vocabulary" is), and an enormous amount is allowed to be assumed and left unsaid (aggressively "pro-drop.") Also, the fact that sentence word order is just conventional in Spanish as opposed to strict like Germanic languages or French means that you can do whatever you want with it with the same literal meaning but giving a different connotative impression. Spanish is a great language for poetry but a bad language for communication. Extremely expressive, but not as expressive through the means of vocabulary choices.

The fact that in English you can't just move the words around for emphasis or association means that we need more words, but the fact that our words aren't mutating a fraction as much in order to indicate their function, instead using position, means that any sound put into a particular position will serve that position's function. You can just quack like a duck for the verb, and let people figure out what that noise means the subject is doing. If ducks used the Roman alphabet, English would also just accept the duck spelling without changing it, and use the fact that you don't know how duck words are pronounced as a class marker.

But I think (native English-speaking) people vastly underestimate how difficult English is to read and write. Spanish is easy to read, and almost as easy to write. If you spell a word wrong in Spanish, it probably means that you're also saying it wrong. If Spanish is a 2 in reading difficulty and Chinese characters are an 8, English is probably a 6.

I think the people here denying that Spanish is a small language and that English is an absurdly large language are being guided by the "Law of Averages." Languages being smaller or larger isn't an indication of virtue or grace. It makes literacy a nightmare and is used to discriminate by class and region. English has an excessive number of words that duplicate each other, and as a result (and as a German) so many (and a variable number of by region) vowels that a phonetic written English is a pipedream.

English and Spanish have different grammatical and sound characteristics that allow English to take on new vocabulary casually, and allow Spanish to have a vocabulary largely circumscribed by the RAE (w the Mexican supplements [edit: and the unwritten Chilean one.]) Those characteristics also mean that you could teach an adult Spanish illiterate to read well in a month, and for an adult English illiterate it will take years. English (and French, and Portuguese, and Chinese, and Japanese, etc.) are horrible languages for reading and writing.

If say English number bigger than Spanish number, no need get mad.