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Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

>As a Hebrew speaker, I wish the "shibboleth" idiom (which is a good one) was translated, rather than transliterated. laoned idioms are inherently exotic, and this one is worth demystifying

Well, it was neither translated, nor transliterated. It was adopted as an english word, with its own dictionary definition and everything.

The definition happens to coincide with the Hebrew, but it could just as well not (there are loaners that have changed definition).

As far as an English speaking person hears the term, whether they know the meaning or not, it's just any other English word -- they can ask people for its meaning, look it up in the dictionary, etc.

The Hebrew origins don't come into play at all, except when one specifically looks for the history/etymology of the term. But it can totally be used as a black box word too.

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That's (for better or worse) an almost defining characteristic of the English language. We take words from other languages and adopt them as English words. It doesn't matter if the word in English means the same thing as the original word, it doesn't matter what language it came from, it doesn't matter if we're combining two words from different languages to make a new word (television is the Greek word 'tele' combined with the Latin word 'visio').

English is an incredibly dynamic language with very loose rules. If a loanword sounds exotic, well that's half the fun.

Well, that's not a defining characteristic of English but of most (all?) living, dynamic languages. I have seen it with the languages I speak or have tried to learn (Spanish, German, Portuguese, Chinese...).

Most of those languages though change the original words to suit the language (e.g. with gendered nouns, certain suffixes, changing the spelling, etc).

English tends to just copy, at least from other latin-script languages...

Many languages adopt words, but English does so to an unusual degree. As a consequence, it is the language that has most words today, by far.

Is there a citation for that?

No, because it's not scientific. There's no agreed upon definition of what counts as a unique word. Do you count every inflected form, like "dog" and "dogs"? Derivations from other words? Homonyms? Compound words? How do you deal with archaic or obsolete words? And so on...

Yes, it is not trivial to define what a word is (I am well aware of that), but the fact that it is difficult does not make it impossible to make quantitative comparative statements about the number of words a language has. It is also difficult to exactly define and measure GDP, yet nobody raises that facile methodological objection when we say that Singapore has a higher GDP per capita than Swaziland.

Now, one can basically create an infinite number of words in some languages with compound words (eg German) and agglutination (eg Turkic or Uralic languages); it makes sense to exclude those (to avoid counting infinities).

Here's a source (from a collaboration between Dictionary.com and Oxford University Press) that basically concurs that English is the language with most words (excluding the results of agglutination):

https://www.lexico.com/en/explore/does-english-have-most-wor...

EDIT to add language (family) examples and this:

Here is The Economist with the cop-out answer that it's difficult to count:

https://www.economist.com/johnson/2010/06/23/the-biggest-voc...

The "definition" of the word doesn't coincide with the Hebrew meaning at all. In Hebrew the word refers to grain (and in modern Hebrew Oat grain.)

The definition comes from a story in the Tanach where the word is used. I believe Christians have appropriated this book of the Tanach, too. And this appropriation is what's reflected in English

https://www.sefaria.org/Judges.12.6?lang=bi

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